Tag: jeff sessions

Week 94 in Trump

Posted on November 13, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Even without last week’s midterm election, there was a lot going on last week. And the election isn’t even fully decided yet; in some places, the counting is still going on and there are runoff elections coming up. Several races have not yet been called, and a few are already looking like they’ll automatically trigger a recount. I’m sure by the time I post this, some of the election info will be obsolete. There was a lot that was interesting about this election, so I’ll summarize it all in a later blog post after things shake out.

Here’s what else happened last week…

Russia:

  1. The day after the midterm elections, Jeff Sessions tenders his resignation as Attorney General at Trump’s request. Until Trump nominates his permanent replacement, DOJ Chief of Staff Matthew Whitaker will serve as Acting Attorney General. The administration expects additional turnover after the elections, with possible ousters of Rod Rosenstein, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Jim Mattis, Ryan Zinke, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Wilbur Ross.
  2. Whitaker will take over Rod Rosenstein’s responsibilities in overseeing the Russia investigation. Whitaker has been a frequent talk-show guest speaking out strongly against the Russia investigation.
  3. A federal court orders Robert Mueller to explain how all this might influence Andrew Miller’s case. Miller has refused to respond to subpoenas and is challenging the constitutionality of Mueller’s appointment.
  4. Sessions’ firing results in over 900 protests and rallies held across the country in support of protecting Mueller and his investigation.
  5. Paul Manafort isn’t fully cooperating with Mueller’s investigation even though that was part of his agreement.
  6. Mueller’s team has begun writing their final report, though Trump has still not decided whether he’ll answer their questions.
  7. Russia had said Trump would meet with Putin in France at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI. They did not end up meeting.
  8. After taking the House in the midterms, Democrats plan to open several investigations into Russia’s meddling in our elections, into actions taken by the administration around healthcare and education, and into Trump’s finances. Trump says he’ll take a “warlike posture” against Democrats should they decide to investigate him. He likens this to a game, saying Republicans can play the game better. But he also says he’ll make deals with Democrats.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was involved in almost every action in the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to keep them quiet about their affairs with him. The deals were made in the run-up to the 2016 elections, so are likely violations of campaign finance laws.
    • Trump has denied knowing anything about the $130,000 payout to Daniels.
    • David Pecker, CEO of American Media Inc., used the National Enquirer to buy off Karen McDougal.
    • Michael Cohen has admitted they made the payoffs to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Kellyanne Conway’s husband writes an op-ed outlining why he thinks Whitaker’s appointment is unconstitutional. I’m dying to know what their home life is like.
  2. World Patent Marketing, where Matt Whitaker once served on the advisory board, is under FBI investigation for defrauding consumers out of millions of dollars. As part of his work there, he used his previous position as a federal prosecutor to intimidate consumers who attempted to get their money back.
  3. 29 days after Trump is on record saying he knows Matt Whitaker and that he’s a great guy, Trump says he doesn’t know Matt Whitaker. Kellyanne Conway confirms that Trump does, indeed, know Matt Whitaker.
  4. Whitaker says he won’t slash Mueller‘s budget and will allow the probe to continue unhindered.
  5. The harassment and death threats against Christine Blasey Ford continue. She’s had to move four times, she hired private security, and she hasn’t been able to return to her job.
  6. On his way out the door, Jeff Sessions gives us one parting shot by putting restrictions on consent decrees between the DOJ and local police departments. Consent decrees let federal agencies create agreements with local PDs to overhaul departments accused of civil rights violations. The new restrictions include:
    • Top political appointees must approve the agreements.
    • There must be evidence of additional violations beyond unconstitutional behavior.
    • All consent decrees must have an end date.

Healthcare:

  1. Trump issues the final version of new rules allowing employers to deny contraception coverage to employees based on religious grounds. His previous versions of the rules are pending litigation, but he issues the new ones anyway.

International:

  1. 60 business leaders in the UK are pushing for another Brexit vote, hoping to overturn the previous one (which frankly doesn’t seem to be working out well for the UK). They say none of the exit deals in the works are as good as what’s in place now.
  2. Turkey shares the audio recording of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey. Saudi Arabia, the U.S. , Britain, France, and Germany all have a copy.
  3. Trump meets with global leaders in France to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the end of WWI. When he arrives, Trump insults French President Macron in an angry tweet over Macron’s call for an EU army. He actually seems pretty sullen the whole trip.
  4. When a reporter asks Trump and Macron about Trump’s tweet, Macron reassuringly pats Trump’s knee to defuse tensions. Trump didn’t react at all.
  5. On the 243rd birthday of the Marine Corps, Trump forgoes attending a ceremony in France at a military cemetery (Aisne-Marne) where they buried the Marines who fought at Belleau Wood. They say his helicopter can’t operate in the rain (really?) and that he didn’t want to plug up the roads with a motorcade.
  6. And finally, while 60 other world leaders perform a symbolic walk up the Champs-Elysées to a World War I remembrance at the Arc de Triomphe, Trump and Putin both take private cars.
  7. Gun and air fights break out between Hamas and Israeli military in the Gaza Strip after a covert Israeli operation is uncovered. Eight people are dead.
  8. Over a year ago, Saudi intelligence discussed assassinating Iranian enemies. The Saudi official implicated in the death of Jamal Khashoggi had a meeting with businessmen who tried to sell him on a plan to sabotage Iran’s economy.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Wonder why we all think we hate Congress? Here’s part of why. A Washington Post and ProPublica study finds that the legislative branch is weak. Party leaders dictate what goes on and most of our elected officials don’t really get a say. Also, the threat of government shutdowns keeps us at an impasse. House committees met almost twice as often to deliberate legislation in 2005/2006 as they did in 2015/2016. Senate committees met around 3.5 times as often.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Ramping up the fear baiting, Trump floats a plan to deploy up to 15,000 troops to our border with Mexico to stop the migrant caravan. If my math is right, that’ll end up being around 10 soldiers for each migrant who makes it this far. It’s estimated to cost around $220 million. The Pentagon says the caravan poses no threat.
  2. There are an estimated 200 vigilante (and unregulated) armed militia members patrolling the border between the U.S. and Mexico.
    • The troops that Trump sent to the border are have to deal with the militias as well as their regular duties.
    • The militias have a record of stealing military supplies from troops deployed there.
    • The militias think we are under literal attack from people trying to cross the borders illegally and have put out calls to increase their numbers.
  1. Yet another federal appeals court rules that Trump can’t immediately end DACA. Even though there are three cases pending, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to rule on it now.
    • Note: Congress has always had the power to fix this, but has been unable to agree on the most minor immigration reform.
  1. Remember when we found out that Motel 6 was letting ICE know when people with Hispanic sounding names checked in? Well that was illegal, and now Motel 6 will pay out $7.6 million to their Hispanic guests. As part of the settlement, Motel 6 is forbidden from sharing guest information without a subpoena or warrant.
  2. The average number of people in ICE detention each day reaches a record high (44,631 people). This is larger than the number that Congress has approved funding for.
  3. The University of Virginia bans 10 people from their campus for their participation in the Unite the Right rally last year in Charlottesville. The ban is in effect for four years.
  4. Trump changes the rules of asylum so only people who show up at a port of entry can seek asylum. Previously, you had to seek asylum within a year of being physically present in the country. Lawsuits against the move are already filed.
  5. Major TV stations drop or refuse to even air an ad from Trump’s political team that was deemed so racist that even Fox News stopped airing it. The ad’s purpose was to drum up fear of Central American and Latin American immigrants.
  6. A review by ABC News found 17 cases of violent criminal acts or threats of violent acts where Trump’s name was invoked. There were none invoking his name in protest; rather 16 of the 17 cases have direct evidence of the suspect or perpetrator echoing Trump’s rhetoric. The suspects and perpetrators are mostly white men and the victims are mostly minorities. ABC News was unable to find similar cases carried out in Barack Obama’s name nor George W. Bush’s name.

Climate/EPA/Environment:

  1. The Supreme Court denies Trump’s request for a stay in the lawsuit brought by a group of young people against the government for its lack of action on climate change.
  2. Heavy rains and flooding devastate areas in Italy, killing at least 17 people. The rains have also destroyed around 14 million trees, devastating forests.
  3. A federal judge halts construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline saying that the environmental impact studies aren’t complete.
  4. A UN report says that it’s possible that the hole in the ozone layer could be fixed by the 2060s, thanks to the ban on chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons.
  5. Wildfires devastate California once again, burning down almost the entire community of Paradise in the north and threatening suburbs of Los Angeles in the south. The death toll is at least 31.
  6. In a tweet, Trump blames California for the wildfires, saying they mismanage their forest land. But the fires started on federal land, and California didn’t create the drought nor the Santa Ana winds that make the fires so much worse. Trump says there’s no reason for these fires. Firefighters say climate change is to blame.
  7. The International Firefighters Association criticize Trump for putting out a tweet like that at a time when lives and homes are being lost. They call his words reckless and irresponsible; The California Firefighters Association calls him ill-informed.
  8. Trump hasn’t read his own administration‘s National Climate Assessment report, but he says he thinks that climate change will probably reverse itself. Problem solved.
  9. The EPA’s website previously removed over 80 climate change websites, and noted that they were updating the site to reflect the administration’s views. Now they’ve removed the note about updating and any links to the archived climate change website from Obama’s administration.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The price of oil reached a four-year-high in October, and then proceeded to slide 21% to below $70 a barrel. The price rose because of imminent sanctions on Iran, but then dropped when Russian, Saudi, and U.S. oil companies overcompensated to make up the difference.
  2. The Trump administration reimposes all sanctions against Iran that Obama lifted under the joint agreement. The sanctions include an oil ban and are against over 700 Iranian banks, companies, and people.
  3. Trump grants China, India, Italy, Greece, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Turkey waivers; so Iran might not be hit as hard as originally thought.
  4. The Trump administration isn’t watchdogging the big banks and corporations as much as previous administrations. SEC penalties are down 62% under Trump and criminal prosecution by the DOJ is down 72%. Maybe they all just cleaned up their act? Ha! I crack myself up.
  5. U.S. businesses paid 50% more in tariffs this September than last September, paying out $4.4 billion.

Elections:

  1. Despite a lack of evidence of voter fraud, Trump and Sessions both warn that there will be fraud in the midterm elections.
  2. Voter enthusiasm is up! Election day has the highest voter turnout for a midterm election in over 50 years, partly due to a drastic increase in young people voting.
  3. Democrats take back the House after 8 years of Republican control. With several races still too close to call, and some recounts pending, Democrats are predicted to take 35-40 seats. Republicans hold on to the Senate, and are predicted to gain 1-2 seats.
  4. Democrats took 7 additional governorships, including in Colorado (where they elected the first openly gay governor and their first Jewish governor) and in Kansas (where the leader of Trump’s voter fraud commission, Kris Kobach, lost his bid).
  5. At least 111 women win elections. We elect the first Native American women and the first Muslim women to Congress. Maine and South Dakota elect their first female governors.
  6. The people elect a number of open LGBTQ people to Congress.
  7. The North Dakota representative who sponsored the voter ID laws that disproportionately affected Native Americans loses his seat to a Native American woman.
  8. A few “notable” Republicans who won:
    • Representative Chris Collins: Under felony indictment for securities fraud.
    • Representative Duncan Hunter: Under felony indictment on 60 counts of conspiracy, fraud, and campaign finance violations.
    • Dennis Hof: Deceased brothel owner in Nevada.
    • Arthur Jones: Self-proclaimed Nazi.
  1. But Democrats aren’t immune:
    • Keith Ellison: Accused of domestic violence (but is requesting an investigation).
    • Bob Menendez: His corruption trial ended with a hung jury and charges were dismissed.
  1. U.S. intelligence officials say they haven’t seen any evidence of any foreign state interfering in the voting systems.
  2. Some of the races from the midterms are so tight they can’t be called, and some states will be counting votes into December. And everyone is suing in Florida, Arizona and Georgia to stop ballot counts, to make sure all ballots are counted, or to stop ballot counters from discarding ballots.
  3. Georgia, Florida, and Arizona are hotbeds of political gamesmanship after the elections. After observing the vote count for a bit, I say let these people do their jobs. They take their work very seriously.
  4. In California, Harley Rouda and Josh Harder both pull ahead of their Republican opponents in late counting, with Harley’s race being called for him. Two other races in Orange County are tightening and are too close to call, though 538 gives the Democratic candidates the highest probabilities.
  5. Cindy Hyde-Smith is in a special election runoff with Mike Espy. She says that if Trump invited her to a public hanging, she’d be first in line. Racist to begin with, but given that her opponent is black that comment is unconscionable.
  6. North Carolina got a reprieve on redrawing their unconstitutionally gerrymandered district lines for this election, but they must redraw them for 2020.
  7. In a ballot measure, Florida votes to reinstate voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felon Floridians. Previously, Governor Rick Scott decided which ex-felons could get their rights reinstated on a case-by-case basis.

Georgia:

  1. In Georgia and Texas people report that their party-line ballots cast votes for a member of the wrong party. Officials blame old and outdated computer systems. This really highlights the need for an auditable paper trail in all elections.
  2. In fact, earlier this year a federal judge found that continuing to use the Georgia machines disenfranchises voters, but did not force them to replace the machines before the election.
  3. Brian Kemp is Georgia’s Secretary of State and tasked with overseeing elections, including his own election for governor. Just before the elections, he accuses the Democratic Party of trying to hack into the voter system. He says he’s opening an investigation and taking it to the DHS and FBI.
    • It turns out that what really happened is that a man discovered a way to download voter information through a security hole. He reported it to the Democratic voter protection director.
  1. When Kemp tries to vote, his voter card says “invalid.” He has to get a replacement to vote.
  2. There are calls for Kemp to recuse himself from the election process and then from the ballot counting process. Kemp only steps down to start transitioning to the governorship which has still not been called for him.
  3. Democrats accuse Kemp of multiple counts of voter suppression; Kemp accuses Democrats of trying to get people to vote illegally and of hacking into the elections system.
  4. Currently, Kemp’s percentage of the vote sits at 50.3%, just slightly above the required 50% threshold. Stacey Abrams hasn’t yet conceded, and is hoping to get all votes counted and force a runoff.
  5. Kemp, for his part, stepped down from the SoS position to start transitioning to the role of governor, though a runoff is still possible.
  6. Meanwhile, all the lawsuits alleging voter suppression and invalid ballot counts are still going on.

Arizona:

  1. Arizona Republicans sue to challenge how counties count ballots, saying the process should be standard. At issue is the fact that some counties allow fixes to things like missing information or mismatched signatures after election day (which sort of makes sense, since mail-in ballots don’t have to arrive until election day).
  2. Arizona Republicans and Democrats come to an agreement that gives rural counties the same ability to fix errors as in urban counties.
  3. Democrat Kirsten Sinema is projected to win Jeff Flake’s old Senate Seat. The more ballots that are counted in Maricopa County, the bigger her lead gets.
  4. While the NRSC (National Republican Senate Committee) alleges corruption and fraud against Democrats in the ongoing ballot count, both Martha McSally, Sinema’s Republican opponent, and Jeff Flake say there is no evidence to support that. The NRSC files a FOIA request of the Maricopa county recorder to turn over any correspondence he’s had with George Soros and Tom Steyer. Huh? I’m dying to see the results of that request.
  5. Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO), the NRSC chair, tells Face The Nation that the Maricopa County Recorder is “cooking the books” for Sinema.
  6. Cindy McCain also speaks out against the NRSC’s attempts to stop the ballot count.
  7. Speaking of McCain, on Veterans Day, the Wall Street Journal chose to run an op-ed by a defeated Minnesota Republican blaming McCain for the Republican losses in the election. Aside from the misguided premise, who runs an op-ed disparaging a deceased military hero on Veterans Day?

Florida:

  1. In Florida, Governor Rick Scott threatens to send police to seize ballots in Broward County for a race in which he is running. He says there’s rampant fraud because they’re trying to count all the ballots. Scott and his Democratic opponent, Bill Nelson, are likely headed toward a recount.
  2. Trump also makes accusations of fraud. Florida Law Enforcement says there have been no claims of fraud and no evidence of fraud.
  3. Trump sends lawyers down to help Rick Scott’s case.
  4. Bill Nelson files a lawsuit challenging the rejection of certain ballots.
  5. Actually, there are a lot of lawsuits going around. Here’s a recap of the Florida lawsuits.

Miscellaneous:

  1. In a contentious press conference after the midterm elections, Jim Acosta refuses to back down from questioning the president about whether there is any threat posed by the “caravan of migrants.”
  2. Trump suspends Acosta’s press pass.
  3. Sarah Huckabee Sanders retweets a doctored video to support their accusation that Acosta was overly aggressive with the woman handling the microphone. Her video makes it look like Acosta karate chopped the woman’s arm, and also deletes the part where he says “excuse me, ma’am.” Does she think we don’t have access to the real-time videos?
  4. Trump calls reporter April Ryan a “loser” who “doesn’t know what the hell she is doing.” He also responds to reporter Abby Phillips by saying angrily “what a stupid question that is” and “you ask a lot of stupid questions.”
  5. Trump threatens to revoke press passes for more journalists.
  6. An ex-marine kills 12 people at the Borderline Bar and Grill, a country bar in Thousand Oaks, CA. One of the dead is the responding officer. The gunman then kills himself. Some of the victims and people at the bar had also been in the crowds during the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last year.
  7. Just hours before the shooting, the NRA responds to a paper written by a group of physicians calling for a comprehensive approach to gun violence. The NRA tells doctors to stay in their lane, apparently not realizing that doctors are the ones left cleaning up the mess from gun violence. And doctors are the ones who have to tell people that their loved ones didn’t make it.
  8. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is hospitalized with fractured ribs (giving Democrats a collective panic attack), but she’s back a work within a few days.
  9. The Trump administration backs Sudan in a lawsuit brought by the families of military personnel killed in the bombing of the USS Cole. The lawsuit asserts that the bombers were funded by Sudan.
  10. A lawyer in the case of two men on trial for a bomb plot against Muslims in Kansas is pleading for leniency in the case, saying that Trump’s angry rhetoric spurred the plan. He says Trump’s language before the 2016 election fueled hysteria about Muslims and immigrants.

Week 86 in Trump

Posted on September 17, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Hurricane Florence hits the East Coast hard this week. I’m not blaming the victim, but North Carolina probably could’ve been more prepared for the flooding. In 2012, they didn’t like a scientific study outlining the predicted sea level rise for their coasts. So their state legislature passed a law that says “no rule, policy, or planning guideline that defines a rate of sea-level change for regulatory purposes shall be adopted.” Sea levels in some areas of the East Coast have been rising about an inch a year, and climate scientists predict that hurricanes will continue to become stronger with more rain. Coastal areas have no choice but to develop climate change mitigation policies, because even if we completely halt greenhouse gas emissions, the climate will continue to heat up for a while.

Here’s what else happened this week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms ended the city’s ties with ICE. The city will no longer hold detainees in city jails, but will help support families that were separated and then reunited.

Russia:

  1. Trump is expected to declassify documents around the FISA warrant against Carter Page and around Bruce Ohr’s contact with Christopher Steele. He thinks doing this will taint Mueller’s investigation, but he should tread cautiously. When they’ve leaked supporting documents in the past, it’s only bolstered Mueller’s case.
  2. The lawyers for the DNC lawsuit against Russian operatives say that Joseph Mifsud has gone missing. Mifsud is the Maltese professor who told George Papadopoulos that Russians had dirt on Hillary.
  3. After being found guilty on eight counts in his first trial, Paul Manafort agrees to a plea deal with Mueller in his second court case. He pleads guilty to cheating the IRS out of $15 million and to lying to cover it up.
  4. Manafort had been charged with six additional crimes, which could still be brought up later at the state level. He did admit in his plea deal to committing every crime he was charged of, including those that resulted in a hung jury in the first trial.
  5. The plea agreement also describes Manafort’s lobbying activities for the Ukraine. In the process of trying to sway government and public support for specific Ukraine politicians, he planted “some stink” on political opponents, smeared Obama cabinet members, and got a foreign official to deliver a message directly to Obama.
  6. Manafort admits to manipulating the American government and media to make millions for himself.
  7. As part of the plea deal, the government will confiscate $47 million in real estate, financial accounts, and insurance policies.
  8. Manafort is now a cooperating witness in Mueller’s investigation and has already been talking.
  9. A Russian activist and member of the punk protest group Pussy Riot is hospitalized and appears to have been poisoned.
  10. Every Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee votes down Democrats’ request for all documents and recordings related to Trump’s summit with Putin. Even our top intelligence official Dan Coates says he doesn’t know what was said in that summit.
  11. A batch of newly released text message between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page show them discussing how to shape media perception with all the leaks that were going on during their investigations. The texts also show they used authorized means (the FBI National Press Office) to correct misinformation.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A federal court rules that Betsy DeVos must implement Obama-era student loan forgiveness rules. The rules protect students who’ve been defrauded by colleges that don’t deliver on their promises. DeVos has delayed putting those rules into effect with the hope that she could eliminate the rules.
  2. The hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh hits another snag when Dianne Feinstein refers an allegation of sexual abuse against Kavanaugh to the FBI. The alleged abuse happened when he was in high school.
    • The victim wanted to remain anonymous, but comes forward once rumors start to spread. Members of the political right mock and threaten her, including Donald Trump Jr.
    • Notes from the victim’s therapist back up her allegation, and she’s taken a polygraph test.
  1. In response, Republicans release a letter signed by 65 women Kavanaugh knew in high school saying that he always treated them with the utmost respect. That was pretty quick work to find all those women, so we can only assume they saw this coming.
  2. The Senate Judiciary Committee delays their vote on Kavanaugh for a week.
  3. The Government Accountability Office releases a report saying that the DOJ isn’t prosecuting people who lie on their background checks in order to illegally buy guns. In the same period that the DOJ prosecuted 12 cases, Pennsylvania alone prosecuted 472.

Healthcare:

  1. Lawyers begin their arguments in a lawsuit brought by 20 mostly conservative states to completely scrap the ACA. The lawsuit was brought after Congress ended the individual mandate, and would put an end to protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
  2. The Urban Institute estimates that 17 million people will lose their insurance if the lawsuit succeeds. Almost half of all non-elderly Americans have a pre-existing condition.
  3. Patient groups sue the Trump administration over it’s expansion of short-term insurance policies. These insurance policies do not have to comply with the ACA’s protections for pre-existing conditions, preventive care, out-of-pocket limits, and so on.
  4. From 2010 to 2016, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by about half. It’s remained steady since then, with slight rises.

International:

  1. The Trump administration closes the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s mission office in DC. They say it’s because Palestine isn’t negotiating peace with Israel right now.
  2. John Bolton threatens that the U.S. will retaliate if the ICC acts on threats to prosecute Americans in Afghanistan for war crimes.
  3. Remember those weird brain injuries suffered by U.S. diplomats and personnel in Cuba and China? Intelligence officials now suspect that Russia is behind them.
  4. Trump cancels a planned visit to Ireland due to “scheduling conflicts.” But the announcement was made after there were mass protests against Trump‘s climate policies.
  5. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has begun rebuilding the State Department, which was decimated under Rex Tillerson. Pompeo is trying to bring back ex-diplomats and build up his ranks again.

Family Separation:

  1. Jeff Sessions defends his zero-tolerance policy toward asylum seekers as not only legitimate, but also moral and decent. Over 400 children separated at the border are still without their parents. And I wonder if he’s seen any of the videos of the children and parents describing their harrowing experience.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Sessions blames the number of asylum seekers at our southern border on Obama-era policies, ignoring the growing violence in the countries of origin.
  2. We learn that the Trump administration diverted $200 million from other DHS agencies to ICE to support ICE’s cost overruns due to housing and transporting such a high number of immigrant detainees. This includes $10 million from FEMA just before Hurricane Florence hit the East Coast. The cost of separating families isn’t just emotional; it’s hitting us all in the pocketbook.
  3. Congress has repeatedly warned Trump about ICE’s overspending and lack of financial discipline.
  4. And then ICE asks Congress for an extra $1 billion in funding so they can ramp up deportations.
  5. The U.S. is now detaining the highest number of immigrant children ever recorded, with a total of 12,800 children. This is 10,000 more than May 2017. (Note that these are mostly minors who crossed the border alone and were not separated from the parents.)
  6. Christian refugees are getting caught up in Trump’s efforts to stifle immigration to the U.S. The number of Christian refugees allowed into the U.S. is down 40% from last year.
  7. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) tells a group of students that it might be better to be raised in an orphanage than by LGBTQ parents.
  8. The Department of Education vacates a 2014 decision under Obama and reopens a seven-year-old investigation into whether Rutgers University allowed a hostile environment for Jewish students.
  9. The cartoon “Thomas & Friends” introduces two new female characters, one of whom is African. So NRA’s Dana Loesch thinks that’s ridiculous, and shows images of the Thomas trains dressed up in KKK robes. IDK why she’s getting so worked up over a kids’ show.

Climate/EPA:

  1. After an independent study finds that there were over 3,000 deaths in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, Trump says those numbers are a lie and that Democrats are just trying to make him look bad.
  2. Hurricane Florence leaves 23 dead (so far) in North Carolina. Florence drops record rainfalls, up to 40 inches in some areas. At the same time, a typhoon leaves 100s dead in southeast Asia.
  3. Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit founded by a 24-year-old, deploys a 2000-foot floating boom designed to round up plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean. This is a test run to see if the boom performs as expected. Their aim is to clean up half of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch in five years. That means collecting around 44,000 tons of debris while minimizing the accidental trapping of marine life.
  4. The EPA proposes weakening Obama-era requirements for monitoring and fixing methane leaks. This is on top of the Department of the Interior working to repeal Obama’s limits on methane emissions for oil drilling.
  5. The previous head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is in talks with Alliance Resource Partners CEO Joseph W. Craft about becoming a consultant. Alliance Resource Partners is a coal mining company.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Ford cancels production of the Focus Active in China due to Trump’s tariffs, and then defies Trump when he urges them to move production to the U.S. They say it’s not cost-effective enough.
  2. Trump’s task force on analyzing the USPS delivers their report, but sources say Trump won’t make it public until after the election. I don’t know why.
  3. The GOP is creating their second tax cut bill, which would make some of the cuts from the last tax bill permanent. The CBO says that change alone will add $1.9 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. The Tax Policy Center says that the bill will add an additional $3.15 trillion in the decade after that.
  4. Marco Rubio says the latest GOP tax plan would necessitate cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
  5. The Tax Policy Center finds that the tax law gives far larger tax breaks to the richest among us (averaging $40,000 per year) instead of the middle class (averaging $980 per year).
  6. The plan is not likely to pass the Senate with the required 60 votes.
  7. Trump decides to impose his threatened tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods. More than 1,000 products will be affected, including appliances, furniture, toys, and more. The effects should hit just in time for holiday shopping.
  8. This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Great Recession. We are inundated with analyses of what happened and how we handled it.
    • Most analysts seem to think it won’t happen again thanks to financial reforms that were put in place, like Dodd-Frank and Base III.
    • The biggest risks are the rollbacks of parts of Dodd-Frank, debt levels in emerging markets, and cyber threats.
  1. House and Senate negotiators come to a funding agreement that should avoid a shutdown at the end of the month. The agreement includes restrictions on Trump’s plans for reorganizing the government (his 32 proposals issued in June). This is the first time Congress has formally blocked those changes.
  2. The amount of money that companies have repatriated to the U.S. as a result of the tax cuts is a mere fraction of what Trump predicted. He said companies would bring back over $4 trillion, and close to $5 trillion. But so far they’ve only brought back $143 billion with $37 billion more planned. Two-thirds of the returned money came from Cisco and Gilead Sciences.
  3. Median household income grew for the third straight year, with most of the benefit going to white Americans and men.

Elections:

  1. Obama is back on the campaign trail, and Trump reacts by tweeting out a bunch of misstatements about the economy and jobs. He then has his chief economic advisor, Kevin Hassett, do a press conference to defend him. Hassett uses some misleading charts to back up Trump’s assertions. You can easily chart economic data using the Federal Reserve Economic Data site. (Note: This is not to say that Trump doesn’t deserve any credit for the economy; just pointing out that Obama deserves it, too).
  2. George W. Bush is out on the campaign trail too, stumping for Republican candidates. This has to be the first time two former presidents are out campaigning.
  3. Florida Representative Ron DeSantis resigns from Congress to campaign full time in his run for Governor.
  4. Trump signs an executive order authorizing sanctions against any foreign country, business, or person who tries to interfere in our elections.
  5. An audio recording surfaces that shows the NRA might have violated campaign laws by giving Montana Senator Jon Tester’s opponent advance notice of their funding efforts to defeat Tester. The NRA cannot coordinate ad buys with a federal campaign.
  6. A judge rules that the Americans for Prosperity Foundation must release the names of their donors to the California Secretary of State per California law.
  7. 75% of the dark money spent in recent U.S. elections came from just 15 companies, and those same 15 companies are funding the 2018 elections as well. This is a direct result of the Citizens United decision. The two largest funders by far are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS. Here they are, along with their political leanings and funding, where available.
    • 45Committee: right, largely funded by Sheldon Adelson
    • 60 Plus Association: right, partly funded by the Kochs
    • American Action Network: right
    • Americans for Job Security: right
    • Americans for Prosperity: right, Charles and David Koch
    • Americans for Tax Reform: right, run by Grover Norquist
    • American Future Fund: right, once part of the Koch network but got kicked out
    • Crossroads GPS: right, founded by Karl Rove with large contributions from Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson
    • National Rifle Association: mostly right, funded by gun owners and manufacturers
    • U.S. Chamber of Commerce: typically right, funded by businesses
    • National Association of Realtors: mix of right and left, funded by realtors
    • League of Conservation Voters: typically left, focused on environment
    • Planned Parenthood Action Fund: typically left, focused on family planning and reproductive health issues
    • VoteVets Action Fund: left, funded by multiple sources
    • Patriot Majority USA: left

Miscellaneous:

  1. The DHS inspector general is investigating whether FEMA administrator Brock Long misused government vehicles. On the scandal scale, this seems pretty minor.
  2. Facebook allows a right-wing magazine, the Weekly Standard, to fact check articles (along with non-partisan organizations like Snopes and Politifact, but no left-learning ones). The first thing the Weekly Standard did was censor a negative story about Brett Kavanaugh and redirect readers to their own site.
  3. Trump achieves the dubious honor of telling over 5,000 lies or misleading statements since taking office.
  4. Retired Admiral Bill McRaven resigns from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. McRaven has criticized Trump for revoking John Brennan’s security clearance.
  5. It looks like Facebook’s efforts to crack down on trolls, bots, and false news stories is working. They’re reporting lower user engagement with such posts. The downside is that they all seem to be moving over to Twitter, where engagement is higher.
  6. FEMA says it will test a new “Presidential Alert” system that would let Trump send personal text alerts to most U.S. cell phones.
  7. The president’s first tweet on the morning of the 18th anniversary of 9/11 is him defending himself in the Russia investigation and attacking the FBI. But a few hours later he tweets, “17 years since September 11th!” Getting off Air Force One on his way to honor the victims of Flight 93, he pumps his fists in the air.

Week 84 in Trump

Posted on September 10, 2018 in Politics, Trump

This week was all about saying goodbye to Senator John McCain. I don’t remember politics without him being in the thick of it. In planning his services, he gave Trump some parting shots, excluding him from the memorials and final funeral and enlisting politicians from all sides in a final show of working both sides of the aisle.

Here’s what else happened this week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. 16 states filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to rule that the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn’t cover rights for the LGBTQ community and therefore you can fire someone based on their sexual orientation or their gender identity. Or deny them housing. Or refuse to serve them. Or…

Russia:

  1. The judge grants a brief delay in Paul Manafort’s second trial because his lawyers haven’t had time to recover from his first trial. Remember, they could have done this all in one trial, but Manafort chose to have two trials instead.
  2. Manafort’s legal team was in negotiations with Mueller to avoid a second trial, but those negotiations fell apart.
  3. Earlier this month, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes travelled to the UK to dig up dirt on Christopher Steele. Nunes tried to meet with leaders of British intelligence agencies, but they were wary of Nunes’ intentions; so he ended up meeting with the deputy national security advisor, Madeline Alessandri.
  4. Trump tweets that China hacked Clinton’s emails and that they got classified info. That was just little false info he picked up from the Daily Caller.
  5. Trump accuses NBC of editing interviews with him. He’s specifically pointing at his interview with Lester Holt when he admitted that he had the Russia investigation in mind when he fired Comey. If there were any merit to the accusation, you’d think he would’ve brought it up when the interview aired.
  6. Now we know why Trump is working so hard to discredit DOJ lawyer Bruce Ohr. Ohr told lawmakers that two years ago, he met with Christopher Steele who told him that he thought Russia had leverage over Trump (or in his words, Russia had him over a barrel).
  7. Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, is backing down from his claim that Cohen knows that Trump Sr. knew ahead of time about Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyers in 2016.
  8. George Papadopoulos accepts his plea deal and pleads guilty to lying to the FBI. He had previously been considering backing out of the deal.
  9. Sam Patten, a former associate of Paul Manafort and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, agrees to a plea deal and to cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. He pleads guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent and lying to a Senate committee.
  10. Trump says that the Supreme Court Chief Justice should tell the FISA court to investigate the DOJ and FBI over their FISA requests during the 2016 campaign.
  11. Trump says he should get personally involved if the FBI and DOJ don’t do their job, accusing them of being biased against Republicans. Even though many of them are themselves Republicans.
  12. We’re coming up to 60 days before the election, so Rudy Giuliani says Mueller has to stop investigating. Which isn’t true since this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Even if it were a hard rule, Mueller could continue his investigation behind closed doors right up through the election as long as he doesn’t publicize information.
  13. Mueller says he’ll accept some answers from Trump in writing. Giuliani says they won’t be providing any answers to questions about obstruction of justice.

Legal Fallout:

  1. GOP Members of Congress circulate a spreadsheet itemizing the things they think Democrats might investigate if they win the House in November. Those things include:
    • Trump’s tax returns
    • Trump Organization, specifically around the emoluments clause.
    • Trump’s dealings with Russia and his preparation for the meeting with Putin
    • The Stormy Daniels payment
    • Trump’s firings of James Comey and of U.S. attorneys
    • The transgender ban in the military
    • Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
    • The use of personal email by White House staff
    • Abused perks, mostly by cabinet members like Scott Pruitt, Ben Carson, and Ryan Zinke
    • That time he discussed classified information at a public dinner at Mar-a-Lago
    • Whether Jared Kushner is in compliance with ethics laws
    • Firing the EPA board of scientific counselors
    • The Muslim ban
    • The family separation policy and the failure to reunite separated families
    • The response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico
    • Election security and hacking attempts
    • Security clearances
  1. New York City fines Jared Kushner’s family business once again. This time, the fine is $210,000 for falsifying building permits. This brings the total the company’s been fined over the past few years to over $500,000.
  2. The above leads to the DCCC issuing warnings to other Democratic candidates about being doxxed.
  3. Lawyers for GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter accuse federal prosecutors of rushing to indict his client. Interesting tact, since they’ve been accusing prosecutors of dragging out this investigation over two years.
  4. Trump blames the DOJ for allowing the indictment of both Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, two “very popular Republican Congressman” (according to Trump). He complained that these would’ve been two easy GOP wins. I guess it doesn’t matter if they might be criminals.
  5. An inspector general reports that Trump participated in a decision to cancel a 10-year effort to develop a new FBI headquarters in the suburbs of Maryland or Virginia. The plan now is to develop the headquarters right across the street from Trump’s hotel in DC, which turns out to be more expensive. Government employees were told not to talk about anything Trump said about this.
  6. According to a recorded conversation, Michael Cohen and Trump tried to buy up all the damaging information the National Enquirer had on him and was storing in their vaults.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Chuck Schumer makes a deal with Mitch McConnell to fast-track 15 of Trump’s lower court judicial nominees. We don’t know yet what he got in return, if anything. Unless he did it just so his Senators could have some time to campaign.
  2. A judge in Texas allows a defamation lawsuit against Infowars’ Alex Jones to move forward. The suit was brought by parents of Sandy Hook victims who’ve been harassed and further victimized by Jones’ supporters.
  3. Trump refuses to release over 100,000 pages of Brett Kavanaugh’s records during the time he worked in the White House under George W. Bush. Trump cites executive privilege as a reason.
  4. Marches and protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court continue this week. 7 in 10 Americans are pro-choice, and don’t want him confirmed.
  5. Trump reconsiders firing Jeff Sessions. Again.

Healthcare:

  1. An appeals court rules that Alabama can’t ban “dilation & evacuation” abortions after 15 weeks. Note that over 90% of abortions do occur before 15 weeks so don’t use that method.
  2. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduces legislation with 13 other Democrats aimed at reducing the racial disparities in maternity care and deaths in the U.S. Currently there are about 40 deaths out of 100,000 live births for black women versus 12 for white women.

International:

  1. The Trump administration announces plans to cut all U.S. funding for the UN program that provides aid to Palestinian refugees. It’s pretty amazing that there have been Palestinian refugees for over 50 years now.
  2. We learn that Trump’s last meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe turned sour when Trump said he remembers Pearl Harbor and then criticized Japan’s economy and our trade deficit with them. Up to now, the two seemed to have a good working relationship.
  3. Trump blames China for the lack of progress in the negotiations with North Korea. He says China is applying pressure on North Korea.
  4. Trump announces that joint U.S. – South Korea military exercises will be temporarily suspended as a gesture of goodwill toward North Korea.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. California’s legislature passes a bill raising the age for buying assault weapons from 18 to 21. The bill also limits gun purchases to one per month per person.
  2. California passes net neutrality laws. The bill brings back the FCC guidelines put in place under Obama, but only for California.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Will the ways in which we can push Hispanics out of the country never end? Now the U.S. is denying passports to people with U.S. birth certificates, or even revoking them for people who already have them. The problem arises from cases in the 1990’s where some midwives admitted to falsifying birth documents, and now anyone born to a midwife is suspect. Some have been detained and some are in deportation proceedings. Even though there is no proof that they were NOT born here.
  2. Some passports were denied under Bush and Obama for the same reason, but a lawsuit ended the practice in Obama’s first year as president.
  3. California signs a bill into law overhauling its money bail system. The bill mostly gets rid of money bail and instead would use a system of probation departments to analyze flight risk and risks to the community. Opponents of money bail say this still won’t fix the problem.
  4. We’re on day 14 of the 19-day prison strike. Prisoners have stopped eating and working to protest unsafe and unjust conditions. Some immigrant detainees have joined in on the strike.
  5. The mother of a toddler who died after being separated and then reunited files a lawsuit against the city where her daughter was detained. Allegedly, the child became ill at the detention center, wasn’t given adequate medial care, and was released with a clean bill of health by a nurse who didn’t have the authority. Once reunited, the mother tried to see a doctor but was turned away several times.
  6. And finally some justice. A jury convicts a police officer in Texas of killing Jordan Edwards, an unarmed, 15-year-old black teen. The officer gets a 15-year sentence.
  7. A judge rules against Texas and other states trying to end DACA, saying they waited too long to file suit. The ruling doesn’t protect DACA long term, though, and the judge leaves an opening for the states to file again, saying that DACA is likely illegal.
  8. The backlog is growing for immigrants who have applied for citizenship and are still being processed. Part of the slowdown is a longer questionnaire created under Obama, and part is longer delays for getting interview appointments. Part of it could also be an increase in the number people trying to get their citizenship.
  9. The family of Mollie Tibbetts, who was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant, asks people to stop politicizing her death. Specifically, they say Mollie would be against using this as an excuse to hate undocumented immigrants.
  10. Ron DeSantis, who is the Republican nominee for governor of Florida, was an administrator of a Facebook page that features conspiracy theories as well as racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The page also attacks Parkland shooting survivors. Remember, this is the guy who said “we don’t want to monkey this up” by electing a black governor.
  11. 16 states have introduced legislation to restrict the use of non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases.

Climate/EPA

  1. The California legislature passes a bill that would require the state to get its energy from 100% carbon-free sources by 2045. Several other states are considering the same, and Hawaii has already passed it into law. Orlando, FL, has the same goal for 2050.
  2. The BLM publishes a notice of intent to open 1.6 million acres of publicly held land in California to fracking and oil drilling. There’s been a moratorium on leasing federal land in California to oil companies.
  3. Despite the governor of Puerto Rico recently raising the official Hurricane Maria death toll to 2,975 (up from the previous 64), Trump says the administration’s response to the disaster was fantastic.
  4. The EPA considers reversing Obama-era limits on mercury emissions from coal power plants. The health effects of mercury exposure can include tremors, neurological damage, emotional changes, headaches, impaired mental performance, and muscle weakness, among others.
  5. According to a new study, hotter temperatures caused by climate change will make insects hungrier, causing diseases to spread faster and ruining crops.
  6. Over 100 schools in Detroit don’t have drinking water after tests find elevated levels of lead.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The U.S. and Mexico reach a preliminary agreement to update NAFTA, possibly without Canada. Trump wants to drop the name NAFTA because he calls it the worst trade deal in history and says it has a bad connotation.
  2. The TPP, the Obama trade pact that Trump disbanded, was basically a renegotiation of NAFTA but with nine additional countries. TPP and Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA are very similar with the exception of the North American auto industry. The updated NAFTA has tighter restrictions and better worker protections than TPP.
  3. Trump says the deal will be good for farmers and for manufacturers. (Note: I haven’t found a good analysis to verify this yet.)
  4. Stocks jump on Trump’s announcement that we’ve reached a trade deal with Mexico, calming down some of the uncertainty over trade. The NASDAQ hits an all-time high on the news.
  5. Mexico is a little more subdued about the agreement, saying that we’re continuing to make progress.
  6. Canada misses Trump’s Friday deadline to agree to the new terms of NAFTA. Both sides say negotiations are ongoing, though. Trump says he won’t give in to any of Canada’s requests and that this will all be on our terms.
  7. Seth Frotman, the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, resigns in protest. He says that the bureau has lost sight of its mission to protect consumers, and specifically that they no longer protect students’ financial futures and are openly hostile to protecting student borrowers.
  8. The USDA announces it’s ready to accept applications from farmers who’ve been hurt by the tariffs. They play to make payments totaling $4.7 billion, their first installment of the $12 billion bailout.
  9. Trump cancels a planned cost-of-living pay raise for federal employees citing budget constraints. This is not something you do during a booming economy. Unless, of course, you already created a $1 trillion deficit by giving out big tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy.
  10. Trump also wants to get rid of locality adjustments for federal worker wages. These are cost-of-living adjustments based on the standard of living in the city in which a worker resides. Most large companies adjust wages this way.
  11. The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) blocks the Trump administration’s tariff on newsprint. They say there’s no sign of any unfair competition from Canadian imports.
  12. Trump wants to impose the additional $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods next week.
  13. Trump also threatens to pull out of the World Trade Organization, saying they’ve treated the U.S. very badly and that it’s all very unfair. How did the biggest economy in the world get such a persecution complex?
  14. Did you know that many restaurant chains have policies where they don’t allow employees to try for higher-paying jobs at other locations of the same chain? Now 15 chains have ended that policy. But that businesses continue to do things like this is why we still need unions.

Elections:

  1. The DNC voted to limit the powers of their superdelegates for the 2020 primaries.
  2. For a second time, a North Carolina court rules that the state’s congressional districts are unconstitutionally gerrymandered. The first time, the lines were deemed to be racially motivated; this time they were seen as politically motivated to benefit Republicans. They might have to redraw the lines, just 9 weeks before the midterm elections.
  3. The lawmaker responsible for the congressional districts lines said they were designed to maintain Republican dominance because “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats.”
  4. The USPS accidentally releases security clearance paperwork for an ex-CIA operative who is now running as a Democratic candidate for Congress (Abigail Spanberger). The Congressional Leadership Fund, a GOP PAC closely linked to Paul Ryan, then uses some of the sensitive information in those papers against Spanberger’s campaign.
  5. I’m not sure whether this should go under elections or discrimination, but Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was pardoned by Trump last year, lost bigly in the Republican primary for Senate in Arizona. Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt of court for refusing to stop racially profiling Arizona residents.
  6. Trump meets with evangelical leaders and urges them to campaign for Republicans from the pulpit. He also says that if Democrats take over, there will be violence. Though he seems to be saying the Democrats will be violent. I’m not sure why the winner would be violent.
    • Just for the record, Trump did not overturn the Johnson Amendment as he’s claimed, and religious organizations still can’t endorse a political candidate.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Last week, Trump refused to sign off on the full White House statement commemorating John McCain. This week, he raises the flags back up to full mast. After blowback from that, Trump places the flag back at half mast and issues a full statement on McCain.
  2. Even the American Legion felt they had to write a letter to Trump urging him to follow protocol and to honor McCain.
  3. As the Senate reconvenes, Senators each take some time to honor McCain on the Senate floor. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda until his interment.
  4. There are a number of memorials for McCain, including one in Arizona, one in the Capitol Rotunda, and the final one at the Washington National Cathedral.
    • Joe Biden is among the speakers at the service in Arizona.
    • Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence speak in the Capitol Rotunda.
    • McCain had requested former presidents Bush (Jr.) and Obama to deliver eulogies, as well as Joe Lieberman. A Republican, a Democrat, and an Independent. A quaint throwback to bipartisanship.
    • McCain’s daughter Meghan gives an emotional eulogy, crediting her father for making her tough and criticizing the divisive politics of today.
    • Many of the speakers at the events take the opportunity to support reaching across the aisle and to take jabs at the current administration.
  1. McCain is buried at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD.
  2. Republicans bury Chuck Schumer’s proposal to rename the Russell Senate Building after John McCain.
  3. Senator James Inhofe says McCain is partly to blame for Trump bungling how McCain was honored because McCain was too outspoken and criticized Trump. That’s not how this works.
  4. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral, but Ivanka and Jared Kushner did attend at Lindsey Graham’s invitation.
  5. Trump claims that Google’s search results are rigged against him to only show bad news about him. Looks like he got this from a PJ Media article that was covered by Lou Dobbs on Fox.
  6. Larry Kudlow says the administration is looking at whether the government should regulate Google search results (can you say ‘state run media’?). This largely came about because of social media’s efforts to stop the spread of fake stories and lies, which often come from sources Trump relies on.
  7. Don’t mess with Google. After Trump’s accusations, Google adds his picture next to the definition of imbecile.
  8. Trump announces that White House Counsel Don McGahn will leave in the fall. It’s not clear if it’s by choice or if he was fired.
  9. Robert Chain calls the Boston Globe to tell them they are the enemy of the people and says “we’re going to kill every fucking one of you.” The FBI arrests Chain, who owns several guns and a recently purchased rifle.
  10. A judge sentences two Reuters journalists in Myanmar to seven years each for possessing confidential documents. The two were investigating the killings of Rohingya Muslims in the country.

Polls:

  1. Trump’s approval rating dips back down below 40%.

Week 83 in Trump

Posted on August 27, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Duncan Hunter, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort

This is a big week for legal trouble for Trump‘s associates. Paul Manafort: convicted on eight counts. Michael Cohen: guilty plea on eight counts. Duncan Hunter: indicted on I-lost-count-of-how-many counts. Hunter was the second member of Congress to endorse Trump in 2016; Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, suspended his campaign for Congress when he, too, was indicted. And even though legal minds think he inadvertently incriminated himself by admitting to campaign finance violations, Trump isn’t likely to be indicted and I don’t think he’ll be impeached. At least not in the Senate. Not unless it turns out he’s done something extremely egregious.

And so it goes on. Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. Trump signed legislation updating rules for how the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) vets investments from foreigners in U.S. assets. CFIUS specifically addresses national security issues around foreign investment, and this legislation gives them more specific control, especially in investments that involve critical technology, infrastructure, and personal data management.

Russia:

  1. Russian hackers start to target conservative think tanks that have broken ranks with Trump. Microsoft announces that it discovered Russian hackers use imitation websites to attack groups that continue to push for sanctions against Russia or that push for examining human rights violations.
  2. A jury convicts Paul Manafort on eight out of 18 counts, with one lone juror holding out on the remaining 10 counts. Those 10 counts result in a mistrial, so prosecution can bring them up again at a later date.
  3. Manafort is convicted on counts of bank fraud, tax fraud, and concealing a foreign bank account. The maximum sentence for all this is around 80 years.

  4. Manafort is the first person in the Mueller investigation to be tried, and he faces a second trial next month on a second set of charges. The second set of charges center more around his work with Ukraine instead of around his shady financial activity.
  5. The reason there are two trials is that Manafort had the right to stand trial in the state where he lives for some of the charges. Mueller gave him the option of being tried just in Washington, or being tried in Virginia for some and in Washington for the rest.
  6. For the record: Manafort’s charges aren’t related to the Trump campaign, but to his work with Ukrainian leaders. Also, Manafort really was Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman for about half of his campaign, despite claims that he was barely involved.
  7. A juror in the Manafort trial (who identifies as a Trump supporter) says there was one lone juror holding out on convicting Manafort on all counts. The juror also said that she, herself, didn’t want Manafort to be guilty and that she thought prosecutor’s final aim was to get dirt on Trump.
  8. The juror says the evidence against Manafort was overwhelming, but that she and her fellow jurors had to lay out the evidence trail over and over again for the lone holdout.
  9. Rudy Giuliani tells reporters that Trump has asked him about pardoning Manafort.
  10. A judge throws out a defamation suit brought by three Russian oligarchs against Christopher Steele (yes, of the infamous Steele dossier).
  11. Mueller requests another delay in Michael Flynn’s sentencing, indicating that they are still in talks.
  12. Many of our CIA informants close to the Kremlin have gone silent since the expulsion of American diplomats from Russia, the outing of an FBI informant, and the poisoning of Russian dissidents.
  13. Reality Winner, who leaked a top-secret report on Russian hacking efforts to The Intercept, is sentenced to 63 months in prison.

Legal Fallout:

It’s getting a little hard to discern what’s related to Russia, what’s related to Trump’s campaign, and what’s just politicians being corrupt. So I created a new category for related legal mischief.

  1. While I was making a note that Michael Cohen is in talks for a plea deal, but that it could fall apart, Cohen did indeed plead guilty on eight counts. The counts include:
    • Tax fraud
    • Bank fraud
    • Campaign contribution violations
  1. Cohen says he took out a home equity loan, which he obtained fraudulently, to cover the payment. He then invoiced the Trump Organization for reimbursement.
  2. Interestingly, his plea agreement doesn’t say he has to cooperate with federal prosecutors, but he could still cooperate with Mueller.
  3. Cohen told the court that an unnamed candidate who is now president told him to pay $130,000 in hush money right before the election to keep Trump’s affairs out of the media. They both knew this wasn’t legal, as evidenced by the shell companies they set up to take care of the payment.
  4. Also, as we’ve heard, Cohen has tapes to back up his statements.
  5. After Cohen pleads guilty, Trump tweets that Obama’s campaign did the same thing. Only it wasn’t the same thing, and Trump’s campaign even had the same issues as Obama’s, just with the added fraud on top.
  6. Cohen deletes this tweet from 2015: “@HillaryClinton when you go to prison for defrauding America and perjury, your room and board will be free!” Ironic, right?
  7. Trump, who has denied paying any hush money, now says that he did it but it wasn’t wrong.
  8. The publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, gets immunity in exchange for his testimony about the hush money payments, among other things (including keeping negative stories about Trump out of the news).
  9. Pecker and Cohen worked together to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal so they would keep quiet about their affairs with Trump. Pecker corroborates Cohen’s account.
  10. It’s reported that the National Enquirer had a safe where they kept information about both the hush money and the stories it killed in the run up to the election that were damaging to Trump. They don’t know if those documents were destroyed or just moved. People who work for the company say they kept information like this on many celebrities to use it as leverage over them.
  11. The CFO of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, gets immunity in exchange for his testimony about $420,000 in payments to Michael Cohen for him taking care of Stormy Daniels. Weisselberg has worked at the organization for decades.
  12. Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and his wife are indicted on $250,000 in campaign finance violations. They used those campaign donations for personal use. Some of the things they spent the money on?
    • Dental work
    • Private schools
    • Theater tickets
    • Trips to Hawaii and Italy
    • An airplane seat for a pet rabbit
  1. But the most damning thing is the documentation of how they worked to conceal their expenditures.
  2. New financial filings show that Eric Trump lied about how certain funds were spent by the Eric Trump Foundation. Specifically, he lied about payments to Trump Organization businesses for fundraising events.
  3. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance subpoenas Michael Cohen as part of their investigation into the Trump Foundation. Note that this is separate from the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the foundation, though if the tax department finds anything, they would refer it to the AG.
  4. After all the convicting, pleading, indicting, and flipping by his associates, Trump does a one-on-one interview with Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt. Which showed us all why it’s really not in his best interest to sit down with Mueller.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Amid all that came out this week around Russia and fraud investigations. Trump criticizes Jeff Session for never taking charge of the DOJ. Sessions, for once, fights back saying he did. Sessions also says he would never let the DOJ be improperly influenced by politics.
  2. And just like that, the Twitter wars are on. Between a sitting president and his Attorney General. For real. Trump challenges Sessions to look into the “corruption on the other side” like the emails, and “Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr…” and “FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump Campaign, Russian collusion by Dems.”
  3. This leads Republican leadership in the Senate to signal their OK for Trump to fire Sessions, saying they could confirm a new attorney general after the midterms. A new AG opens the door to firing Mueller and ending the Russia investigation. Though I’m not sure it would since several state laws seem to have been broken as well.
  4. A federal judge orders experts to review a private prison in Mississippi where inmates are claiming that their constitutional rights are being violated. There’s also a nationwide prison strike and rallies across the country to bring attention to justice system reform.
  5. In a 1998 memo that Kavanaugh wrote during the Clinton investigation, we learn than Kavanaugh wanted to question Clinton on the seedy details of his sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky.
  6. A federal judge turns down Trump’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed against him by people who were attacked by Trump’s guards during a protest. The point of the lawsuit is to determine the extent to which Trump authorized or condoned the attacks.
  7. Demonstrators hold marches and rallies across the country to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Healthcare:

  1. Last week I mentioned a measles outbreak in the U.S. Across Europe, there have been more than 41,000 people infected, 37 of whom have died. That’s up from around 24,000 the year before and 5,237 the year before that. Health experts say it’s because fewer people are vaccinating their kids.
  2. Nebraska is working to put Medicaid expansion on the November ballot.
  3. Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court rules that the governor must expand Medicaid, which the state’s residents voted for in 2017. Governor LePage has sworn he’ll never do it.
  4. Ohio releases a report of their first five years of having expanded Medicaid with no work requirement. Here are some findings:
    • The uninsured fell by more than half (from 32.4% to 12.8%).
    • Before the ACA 1 in 3 people at or near poverty were uninsured; after the ACA that dropped to 1 in 8.
    • Around 60% of people covered by the expansion transfer out, usually getting a job or a better paying job. Some were able to get coverage outside of Medicaid.
    • People said having Medicaid made it easier for them to either look for work or to keep working.
    • People with continuous Medicaid coverage had less medical debt (no brainer there).

International:

  1. ICE deports Jakiw Palij, who we’ve been trying to deport for decades but no country would take him. He was a Nazi SS camp guard in Poland during WWII. He’s now 95.
  2. Trump tweets about the non-existent seizing of land from and large-scale killing of white farmers in South Africa, prompting a bunch of confused responses from South African citizens who don’t know WTF he’s talking about.
  3. South African officials say Trump is just trying to sow division in South Africa. There has been ongoing redistribution of land, because blacks weren’t allowed to own land under apartheid. Even though apartheid fell in the early 90s, black South Africans still only own 1% of the land. They make up more than 75% of the population.
  4. Australia moves on to its fifth leader in five years. Malcom Turnball steps down despite winning a vote of confidence. Elections are coming up soon, though, so there will probably be a sixth leader soon.
  5. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee request the translator notes from Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki.
  6. Trump cancels Mike Pompeo’s trip to North Korea, saying they aren’t making any progress and blaming China for it.
  7. We learn that Trump told Italy’s prime minister that we’d help fund Italy’s debt by buying up Italian government bonds.

Family Separation:

  1. Nearly 700 children who were separated from their parents at the border have still not been reunited with their families. 40 of them are less than five years old.The ACLU continues to work for their reunification, since the government is failing at it.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Los Angeles sues the administration again to stop them from forcing immigration conditions on the city as a condition for receiving $1 million for fighting gang activity.
  2. A White House speech writer was fired when it was revealed that he joined white nationalist Peter Brimelow in a 2016 panel. The day after that firing, Peter Brimelow attended a birthday party for Trump’s economic advisor, Larry Kudlow at Kudlow’s house.

Climate/EPA:

  1. A U.S. district court in South Carolina reinstates WOTUS, Obama’s Waters of the United States expansion of the Clean Water Act, which defines environmental protection regulations for our waterways. Two courts have already blocked WOTUS in 24 states, leaving 26 states where it now must be implemented.
  2. The Trump administration announces its Affordable Clean Energy rule, which is intended to replace Obama’s Clean Power Plan. This is despite the administration’s own findings that the new plan would result in 1,400 premature deaths each year.
  3. Let the water wars begin. Chinatown anyone? The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation notifies officials in California that they want to renegotiate the statewide water agreements, specifically the ones governing how water moves through the Delta to Southern California. The federal bureau wants to save more water for farmers, meaning there would be less water for state projects. Maybe that’s why Nunes is buddying up to Trump.
  4. The Trump administration is reversing course on their plans to sell off federal land that fell within the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument before Trump reduced the size of the monument. They’ve scrapped the plans to sell 1,600 acres of that land for now.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Additional tariffs on $16 billion in Chinese goods kick in, and China responds by instituting their own tariffs of 25% on the same amount of American goods. So far, both sides have implemented tariffs on $50 billion worth of goods.
  2. A federal judges strikes down several parts of three of Trump’s executive orders that were designed to curtail the power of unions for government workers.
  3. Mick Mulvaney is trying to get protection from Trump’s tariffs for Element Electronics, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. It’s a South Carolina company that plans to close its doors due to tariffs. Mulvaney used to be a congressman in SC.

Elections:

  1. Trump plans on having 40 days of campaign-related travel between now and the midterms, which are around 70 days away. So it looks like he’ll be spending most of the next 2 1/2 months focused on winning elections and not so much on presidenting. He’s starting with Senate races.
  2. The Senate has bipartisan agreement on a bill to help protect our upcoming elections from cyber threats, but Trump says he won’t sign it so they tabled the bill. The bill would’ve given state election officials security clearance so that states and the DHS could all share information with each other. The bill also would’ve created a standard auditing system.
  3. Last week I reported on a proposal to shut down 7 out of 9 polling places in a largely black district in Georgia. It took the elections board less than a minute to vote that proposal down at their last meeting. The guy who proposed the closure had been recommended to the board by current Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is running for governor against a black female candidate.
  4. After McCain’s family announces that he was ending his treatment, Arizona Senatorial candidate Kelli Ward accuses them of using the timing to derail her campaign. Please do not vote for this loon in the upcoming elections.
  5. Now Texas thinks they should close 87 driver’s license offices, largely in rural and poor areas. Why is this in the Elections category? Because Texas has voter ID laws, and closing these offices could prevent some people from getting the IDs they need to vote in time for the midterms.
  6. The DNC alerts the FBI of a hacking attempt, but it turns out to be an unauthorized test from a third party.
  7. The DNC votes to limit the powers of the superdelegates in presidential primaries.

Miscellaneous:

  1. After reports came out that H.R. McMaster had talked Trump out of restricting Obama’s access to intelligence briefings, Trump denies that he had even considered it.
  2. Trump holds another election rally, this one in West Virginia. I’m not sure if it’s worth it to debunk his rally lies, because he just keeps repeating them rally after rally.
  3. Ahead of Hurricane Lane in Hawaii, Trump declares a state of emergency so FEMA can prepare and plan.
  4. The family of Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) announces he’ll end his treatment for cancer, and then within a day of that announcement he passes away after a long fight against glioblastoma.
  5. Trump declines to release the White House statement honoring John McCain and instead issues a short tweet. He flies the flags at half mast over the weekend.
  6. McCain‘s body will lie in state at both the U.S. and Arizona Sate Capitols, and he’ll be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis.
  7. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Senator Jeff Flake will deliver eulogies. AFAIK, Trump won’t attend. There are several reports that McCain’s family asked that Trump not attend.
  8. Senator Chuck Schumer proposes that the Russell Senate building be renamed in honor of McCain.
  9. After losing at a Madden gaming tournament in Jacksonville, FL, a gamer opens fire on his fellow gamers and then shoots himself. Two people are dead and 11 are injured.

Polls:

  1. Now 59% of registered voters approve of Mueller’s investigation; an increase of 11 percentage points from last month.

Week 82 in Trump

Posted on August 20, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Rudy Giuliani makes Chuck Todd crack up on air when he says (true quote) “truth isn’t truth.” This is just an example of why hundreds of newspapers across the country issue op-eds this week in support of a free press. The op-eds defend the role of the press while denouncing attacks on the press, specifically the “fake news” attacks. Upon the release of the editorials, Trump accuses the papers of collusion (collusion to defend a free press, I guess?). So the senate unanimously votes to “reaffirm the vital and indispensable role the free press serves.” You can’t make this Orwellian shit up.

Anyway, here’s what happened last week in politics…

Missed From Last Week:

  1. At DEFCON, an 11-year-old hacked into a replica of Florida’s election website and changed the voting results. In less than 10 minutes. Yep, we’re safe.

Russia:

  1. Here are some highlights from the Manafort Trial:
    • After delays from the previous week, the prosecution produces email evidence that Manafort participated in the alleged bank and tax fraud that Rick Gates admitted to being party to.
    • One email implicates Jared Kushner in bribing a bank CEO with the promise of a cabinet position.
    • The prosecution rests.
    • The defense requests that Manafort be acquitted, which the judge denies (duh).
    • The defense rests its case without calling a single witness to refute the prosecution’s case.
    • Manafort’s defense is basically that it doesn’t matter that he lied on his loan applications because the bank was going to give him the money anyway because he was bribing the CEO of said bank with a cabinet position in return for the loans. So we’re all good, right?
    • Trump says Manafort is a very good man and that his trial is a sad day for our country. Which hopefully won’t influence the non-sequestered jury. The judge himself is under U.S. Marshall protection due to death threats.
    • Just a heads up for the next Manafort trial, Mueller reportedly has three times the evidence against Manafort for that trial.
  1. White House counsel Don McGahn has had at least three interviews with investigators in Mueller’s Russia probe, and is reportedly being very forthcoming.
  2. A federal judge once again upholds the constitutionality of Mueller’s investigation, this time as part of an effort by Russian company Concord Management to invalidate the investigation. This is the fourth time a federal judge has ruled for the legitimacy of the investigation.
  3. Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly said that Mueller has to wrap things up by September in order to avoid violations of a Justice Department rule regarding elections. Both current and former officials disagree, however, and say Mueller can still continue his closed-door investigation and issue subpoenas. Trump wasn’t singing this tune when Comey openly announced an investigation into his opponent 11 days before the 2016 election.
  4. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich fires Peter Strzok, despite the office that handles disciplinary actions recommending a demotion and suspension. Trump takes credit for firing him in a tweet.
  5. So far, the following notable intelligence or law enforcement agency members have been fired under Trump: Sally Yates, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, H.R. McMaster, Michael Anton, Tom Bossert, Derek Harvey, and Nadia Schadlow. Trump has also repeatedly threatened Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and Robert Mueller. That pretty much covers most of the senior officials involved in the Russia investigation.
  6. In a move that seems more petty than strategic, Trump revokes John Brennan’s security clearance, likely because Brennan has been very outspoken about the dangers of Russian interference and critical of the administration’s lack of handling it. Trump is also looking at revoking security clearance for James Clapper, James Comey, Michael Hayden, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr. This is highly irregular since intelligence agencies rely on consultations with previous employees who require clearance in order to consult, and sometimes they need to review their old work for testimony.
  7. Just a few weeks before Trump announced Brennan’s clearance being revoked, Russian Artem Klyushin tweeted: “Ex-CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, ex-FBI director James Komi and his deputy Andrew McCabe, ex-director of the National Intelligence Service James Clapper, ex-national security adviser Susan Rice say goodbye to access to classified materials.” Who told him whose security clearance Trump is reviewing? Or did Russia tell Trump who’s clearance to revoke? So sketchy.
  8. In a scathing op-ed, retired Navy admiral William McRaven, who led the raid on Osama bin Laden, asks Trump to revoke his security clearance, too.
  9. The Treasury hasn’t been forthcoming with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s requests for information that would allow them to follow the money trail in the Russia investigation.
  10. Thirteen former U.S. intelligence heads write a letter in support of Brennan, rebuking Trump for revoking his security clearance. They call it inappropriate and deeply regrettable. By the end of the week, 70 former intelligence officers sign on.
    UPDATE: By Monday, over 175 members of the intelligence community have signed on.
  11. And in case you’re wondering why all this security clearance info is in the “Russia” category, it’s because Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders both connect revoking the security clearance to the Russia investigation. Trump said it in a quick Q&A on the way to his helicopter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it in her White House press briefing, Trump again said it in a Wall Street Journal interview, and then he implied it in a tweet. He also said he’s doing it because they’re “bad people.”
  12. Mueller recommends a jail sentence of 0-6 months for George Papadopoulos.
  13. Rand Paul plans to ask Trump to lift sanctions against certain Russian officials so they can come visit the U.S. later this year.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Jeff Sessions says the Justice Department will “vigorously enforce” the law against creating 3D-printed guns “to the fullest extent.”
  2. The West Virginia GOP takes over the state’s Supreme Court by impeaching four justices just after a deadline that would’ve required the justices to be replaced by election in November. Waiting until after that deadline lets the GOP governor appoint all new (presumably GOP) justices. One judge resigned before the deadline, to be replaced by a judge to be elected in November. Not that the judges were behaving, though; they are accused of lavish spending on their offices.
  3. Brett Kavanaugh has the lowest public support of nearly any nominee from the last four administrations. Only 37% support him, while 40% don’t think he should be confirmed.

Healthcare:

  1. Three Arkansas residents file a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the new work requirements for Medicaid in Arkansas.
  2. The CDC is monitoring a measles outbreak across 21 states. With 107 cases reported so far this year, it’s on track to be the worst measles outbreak in a decade. Vaccinate your kids and help save those who are can’t be vaccinated (like infants, the elderly, and people with cancer).
  3. One in six hospital patients is now treated at a Catholic-run hospital, where certain procedures might be limited or prohibited based on religious beliefs. So one in six patients isn’t getting complete care, and I’m not just talking abortions here either.

International:

  1. ISIS is rebounding in Syria and Iraq, with more than 30,000 fighters in those areas.
  2. A 29-year-old Sudanese immigrant in the UK hits pedestrians with his vehicle before ramming it into the barriers at the Palace of Westminster. He didn’t kill anyone, but they’re looking at it as a terrorist incident.
  3. After a bridge collapses in Genoa, Italy, killing at over 40 people, Italy’s deputy prime minister blames the European Union’s budget rules for the lack of maintenance. Even so, Italy’s European allies offer assistance.
  4. Blackwater founder Erik Prince has long been proposing that we privatize military operations in Afghanistan, which both Trump and John Bolton are now considering. Military contractors would report directly to Trump. So we’re looking at a group of mercenaries accountable only to Trump. What could go wrong?
    Background: You might remember Blackwater from the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq where their mercenaries killed innocent civilians and then lied about being fired on first. Even one of their own allegedly pointed his gun at his fellow mercenaries in an attempt to get them to stop shooting. Five of these operatives have since been convicted or pleaded guilty, and just recently got their charges reduced.
  5. The White House is trying to use an obscure budget rule to cancel $3 billion in foreign aid.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The DHS Inspector General opens an investigation into the department’s Quiet Skies program. Under this 2010 TSA program, DHS surveils travelers in airports whether or not they’re suspected of a crime or on a watch list.
  2. A class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU reveals that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been conspiring with ICE in bait-and-switch stings. At least 17 people thought they were going to routine green-card interviews at CIS, but were instead greeted by, and subsequently arrested by, ICE.
  3. Los Angeles turns down hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the Department of Homeland Security that would’ve helped target extremism. The problem with the money is that DHS wants the funds to go toward fighting Muslim extremism, which isn’t a problem in Los Angeles. Los Angeles wants to target white supremacist extremism, which actually is a problem.
  4. The White House fires Darren Beattie, a speech writer, for his connections with white supremacists and his writings in support of white supremacy.
  5. Steven Miller’s uncle writes an op-ed denouncing Miller’s views on race and immigration, calling him a hypocrite because their family came to the U.S. using family-based immigration. Miller is the architect behind some of Trump’s most restrictive and cruel immigration policies.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Trump plans to further weaken Obama’s Clean Power Plan by allowing states to set their own standards for coal-burning power plants. More to come on this next week.
  2. A federal court orders a full environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline project before the project can continue across Nebraska. Nebraskan landowners and tribal members have joined together to fight the pipeline.
  3. Despite scientific evidence otherwise, Ryan Zinke says that the role of humans in climate change is unknown. In a separate interview, Zinke blames California’s wildfires on environmental terrorist groups and says climate change isn’t to blame.
  4. And speaking of Zinke, he’s hired one of his high-school football teammates, Steve Howke, to oversee the review process for climate change research funding. Howke has been holding up funding, forcing these projects to undergo unprecedented review processes. He also has no background in science or climate issues, and holds only a degree in business administration.
  5. The Fish and Wildlife Service adds the once-common rusty patched bumblebee to the endangered species list. It’s the first bumblebee species to officially be endangered.
  6. A judge orders the Trump administration to immediately implement the Obama-era Chemical Disaster Rule, which was created in response to an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas.
  7. Newly released documents show that the EPA ignored its own scientific research when the agency claimed that freezing fuel efficiency standards in automobiles would save lives. Their reasoning was based on flawed models, which will help states when they fight back against freezing standards.

Budget/Economy:

  1. After making a BFD of his signing of the defense authorization bill this week, Trump signs a statement saying several (around 50) of the statutes in the bill are unconstitutional limits on his presidential powers. One of those statutes bans military funding for anything supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
  2. Turkey raises tariffs on U.S. imports.
  3. Trump asks the SEC to look into reducing companies’ required reporting from quarterly to half-yearly. He says business leaders told him that would reduce pressure on them and give them more flexibility. Economists say maybe, but less transparency into business operations is not good for consumers or investors.
  4. Over the past 40 years, CEO compensation for major corporations has grown 1070%. Average worker compensation, by comparison, has grown 11%.
  5. The U.S. and Mexico are reportedly close to an agreement on NAFTA. Maybe.
  6. The U.S. and China plan to come back to the negotiating table after walking away amid trade wars. However, the U.S. delegation doesn’t have a unified message or goal, and there’s doubt that Trump has a specific goal in mind. There is no one point person who has the authorization to speak for Trump even if he did have a goal.
    Background: Trump fixates on trade deficits, which he doesn’t seem to fully grasp. Trade deficits are a reflection of countries’ growth rates, currency values, and investments, among other things. It’s not a straight-up win/lose equation, but sometimes a trade deficit means you’re winning.
  7. Sarah Huckabee Sanders apologizes for saying that Trump has created three times as many jobs for African Americans in 20 months as Obama did in eight years. She said 195,000 black workers found employment under Obama when it was actually 3 million. 700,000 black workers found work in the first 20 months under Trump.

Elections:

  1. Bobby Goodlatte, the son of House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), is working to get a Democrat elected to his father’s seat. Bobby tweets, “I’m deeply embarrassed that Peter Strzok’s career was ruined by my father’s political grandstanding. That committee hearing was a low point for Congress.”
  2. Kansas Governor Jeff Colyer concedes the GOP gubernatorial primary to Kris Kobach. Kobach has instituted several voter ID laws that were struck down by the court. In fact, his court showing is so poor that a judge ordered him to go back to lawyer school.
  3. Voting rights organizations sue Arizona’s secretary of state over violations of the National Voter Registration Act. The secretary hasn’t been updating addresses in accordance with the federal “motor voter” requirements, which say each state must update a voter’s address information whenever their address on their driver’s license changes. This has resulted in thousands of votes being discarded.
  4. Whoopsies! The Treasury accidentally violates federal campaign laws by retweeting Trump’s tweet predicting a “red wave” for November’s midterms. It’s a violation of the Hatch Act, which says federal employees can’t engage in political activity while serving in an official capacity. I’m not clear, then, why it’s OK for Trump to tweet about it.
  5. A Georgia county plans to close 3/4 of their polling locations, mostly in black communities. The same thing happened in Alabama just before last year’s Senate elections, and it took a huge effort to make sure black voters were able get to the polls.
  6. Dr. Hans Keirstead, one of the democratic candidates running against Dana Rohrabacher for Congress, was hacked during the primaries. Keirstead lost out on the second position in the top-two primary to another democratic candidate by 125 votes. Law enforcement doesn’t know where the hacks came from.
  7. And the political ads are back. GOP super PACs are gearing up for the November midterms by unleashing a series of ads against several Democrats in tight districts. I’m sure it won’t be long before Democratic PACs do the same, so now’s a good time for my reminder that ALL POLITICAL ADS ARE LIES DESIGNED TO MANIPULATE YOU. DO NOT BASE YOUR VOTE ON ADS.
  8. And speaking of ads, Google posts a searchable library of political ads along with information about who funded the ads and who the ads target. They’ll update this weekly so you’ll have ready information about who is saying what.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Omarosa Manigault-Newman releases another taped conversation about her firing, this one with Trump where he professes to not know she was being fired and where he sounds perplexed that she might be leaving.
  2. Omarosa releases a taped conversation where Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, offered her hush money after she left the White House. Lara told her the money would come from political donations.
  3. Trump sues Omarosa for violating her nondisclosure agreement, which many legal experts say isn’t enforceable in this case anyway. Oh. And he also calls her a dog.
  4. Omarosa claims to have over 200 recorded conversations, and she’s trickling them out one at a time (to sell her book of course).
  5. Trump has forced several of his White House staff into signing non-disclosure agreements, but most legal experts say they can’t be enforced.
  6. Trump signs a defense bill named in honor of John McCain and refuses to mention McCain’s name during the signing. But he criticizes McCain just hours later at a fundraiser.
  7. This isn’t political, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. Over 300 Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania are accused of molesting over 1,000 child victims. The church has been involved in a massive coverup of the whole thing for 70 years. There’s another scandal like this bubbling up in Chile as well.
  8. Twitter still won’t go all in with a ban on Alex Jones, but it did suspend him for a week over a recent post.
  9. The FCC shuts down Alex Jones‘ radio station and fines it $15,000. I wish they could shut him down for being a liar, conspiracy nut, and provoker of violence, but they shut him down for operating without a license.
  10. In their first execution in over 20 years, Nebraska becomes the first state to use fentanyl for a death penalty lethal injection.
  11. Trump cancels his military parade due to the high costs. Even though local officials have been trying to explain the costs to him, he blames them for inflating costs.
  12. The National Park Service, under Ryan Zinke’s direction, wants to charge protestors for demonstrating in our capital. AFAIK, cities don’t charge demonstrators because it’s a violation of their first amendment rights. If you have an opinion on this, you can comment here: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=NPS-2018-0007

Week 80 in Trump

Posted on August 7, 2018 in Politics, Trump

The big story in the news this week has been the trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign manager. Though Trump says Manafort barely worked with the campaign, Manafort was there for four months, nearly a third of the campaign. Manafort’s associate, Rick Gates, worked with the campaign much longer and through the transition. Rick Gates was testifying in Manafort’s case as I was writing this, and his testimony was pretty juicy. I’ll round that up in next week’s recap.

Here’s what happened in week 80…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. I’m not sure how I missed this story from April, but Wisconsin officials admit that their strong voter ID laws gave Republicans a boost in the 2016 elections.
  2. Trump criticized China for being a currency manipulator and then criticized the Fed for raising interest rates. The value of the dollar dropped shortly thereafter.

Russia:

  1. Paul Manafort’s trial gets off to a fast start, with the jury picked and opening statements delivered all on the first day. Here are the highlights:
    • Accountants and vendors for Manafort testify about his lavish spending and faked invoices, though it’s not clear what those invoices mean.
    • Accountants testify about falsified profit and loss statements for Manafort’s company, that Manafort was broke in 2016, and that he was falsifying his worth and income on bank documents to obtain loans.
    • In addition to bank fraud, accountants testify about alleged tax fraud.
    • Vendors testify that Manafort paid them with wire transfers from an account in Cyprus, a method few, if any, of their other clients used.
  1. Trump’s lawyers brief him on the latest developments in the Mueller investigation, which appears to include evidence of obstruction of justice along with testimony that contradicts Trump’s claims around Michael Flynn’s firing.
  2. Hours later, Trump tells Jeff Sessions in a tweet to shut down the Mueller investigation. Notably, Trump is in the middle of an investigation where Mueller is looking at his tweets for evidence of obstruction.
  3. White House staff say he was just stating his opinion, though staff has previously said we should take Trump’s tweets as his official word.
  4. Trump’s story line has evolved from “there was no collusion” to “collusion is not a crime” to “fire Mueller.”
  5. The Spanish police give the FBI recordings of their wiretaps on Alexander Torshin. Torshin was one of the Russians present at the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower before the 2016 elections.
  6. Trump tweets that the purpose of the Trump Tower meeting between Trump Jr., campaign staff, and Russian lawyers was to get information on an opponent. This is something they’ve been denying since news of the meeting came out.
  7. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has previously denied Russian meddling in our elections, now says that democracy is “in the cross hairs.” She and several other officials say they’ll defend our elections from Russian threats.
  8. We learn that the day after Trump interviewed Mueller for the FBI Director role to replace James Comey, Mueller took the job as special counsel in the Russia probe. The move took both Trump and Jeff Sessions by surprise.
  9. A federal judge rules that Andrew Miller, a former aide to Roger Stone, must testify to Mueller’s grand jury.
  10. Facebook has already detected political interference campaigns for the midterm elections, and has remove several accounts as a result. While they say the methods are similar to those used by Russia in 2016, they have not definitively linked those accounts to Russia.
  11. The Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approves releasing documents related to Russian agent Maria Butina.
  12. Mueller refers three investigations related to Manafort to New York prosecutors. The cases all involve foreign lobbying from Manafort’s work with Ukraine, and include both Democrat and Republican lobbyists.
  13. Russia has long tried to use Red Notices (kind of an international arrest warrant) against Russian dissidents. The U.S. typically ignores these notices because Russia is notorious for abusing dissidents, but under Trump, both the DOJ and DHS have been facilitating extraditions based on these notices.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that Trump’s executive order to punish sanctuary cities by withholding federal funds is unconstitutional. However, they also ruled that the original court went too far in issuing a nationwide block on the order.
  2. The Justice Department concedes that Trump was lying when he told Congress that the majority of people convicted of terrorism or terrorist-related activities since 9/11 came from abroad. The DOJ says they have no records to support that.
  3. The National Archives can’t deliver all the requested documents related to Brett Kavanaugh until October, but Republicans still think they’ll start confirmation hearings in September. Note that these are the same types of documents requested for Justice Kagan, who (like Kavanaugh) once worked in the White House.
  4. Mitch McConnell tells Democrats to back off their document requests on Kavanaugh or he’ll let the confirmation slip until right before the elections, which would interfere with their re-election campaigns.

Healthcare:

  1. A Koch-backed study from the Mercatus Center found that while Bernie Sander’s Medicare for All plan would cost the federal government an additional $32 trillion over 10 years, it would also save the U.S. overall $2 trillion in healthcare costs over the same period.
  2. The Trump administration continues to kill the ACA with death by a thousand cuts. They issue rules reinstating short-term skimpy insurance policies that don’t cover all the conditions required by the ACA, that can cap how much they pay each year, and that can deny consumers with pre-existing conditions. This is expected to push premiums up for other policy holders.

International:

  1. U.S. officials have been quietly talking to the Taliban since November to find ways to bring the 17-year war in Afghanistan to a peaceful end.
  2. Spy satellites show increased activity at the factory in North Korea where they produced their first ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). The country also continues developing nuclear fuel.
  3. Mike Pompeo warned Russia not to help North Korea get around the UN sanctions that even Russia voted for.
  4. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong says North Korea is still committed to the summit agreement from June, but he also criticizes the White House for maintaining sanctions.
  5. The Treasury Department sanctions two Turkish officials over a U.S. pastor who has been detained there since October 2016. The pastor is accused of being a spy and trying to overthrow the government.

Family Separation:

  1. After a lawyer tweets about it, there are rumors that a child died in ICE custody. It was later corrected to say the child died after being released, but there is still no verification of this.
  2. A U.S. health official testifies that Trump’s administration was warned ahead of time about the harmful and long-term effects on children’s wellbeing caused by separating families at the border. The administration knew the effects. The official’s exact words:
    “Separation of children from their parents entails significant harm to children…. there’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,”
  3. In an interview, Ivanka calls the family separation at the border a low point in the White House, and says that she is vehemently against it.
  4. The Trump administration tries to put the responsibility for finding and reuniting immigrant families on the ACLU and other organizations helping immigrant families. A federal judge isn’t letting them abdicate responsibility though, saying that the government bears the full responsibility to fix this.
  5. The same judge calls the administration’s reunification plan disappointing.
  6. The judge will also order the administration to appoint a single person to oversee the entire reunification process. He reminds us that every parent who isn’t found means a permanently orphaned child who is 100% the responsibility of Trump’s administration.
  7. A judge finds that the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas violated the laws around detention of minors and orders the transfer of all but the most troubled immigrant children to other facilities. Allegedly, the center was giving children psychotropic drugs.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. At a time when Trump has ended Temporary Protected Status for 5,300 Nicaraguans here in the U.S., the UN asks nations to take in the thousands of refugees fleeing Nicaragua after five months of government crackdowns on people protesting changes to their social security system. So tens of thousands are fleeing Nicaragua while Trump is working to deport people who live in the U.S. back to Nicaragua.
  2. A federal judge upholds his order to fully restore DACA. He had set a deadline for the administration to argue against his previous ruling, but their arguments apparently don’t satisfy the judge. Again.
  3. Jeff Sessions announces a new Religious Liberty Task Force to enforce his 2017 order to interpret religious liberty very broadly when enforcing federal law. For example, that memo states that the IRS can’t threaten an organization’s tax-exempt status even if they actively lobby for a political candidate, a violation of the Johnson Amendment. I wonder how well this will hold up the first time they’re forced to defend a mosque?
  4. In the announcement, Sessions says that this is needed in order to fight the growing dangers of secularism (which, by the way, is also protected under freedom of religion).
  5. After his speech, Sessions turns the floor over to Catholic Archbishop Joseph Kurtz. Kurtz is known for advocating against same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws for the LGBTQ community.
  6. Trump is thinking about drastically reducing the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. down to 25,000. This would be the smallest number we’ve admitted since the refugee program started in 1980.

Climate/EPA:

  1. In another attempt to undermine Obama’s climate change regulations, the administration freezes federal fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. The proposal also rolls back California’s long-standing waiver, which is more than the automobile industry wants. Expect lawsuits from environmentalists, consumer groups, states, and automakers, all of whom oppose this proposal.
  2. Members of regulated industries have warned Trump to slow down his deregulation, saying that narrow regulations are better than no regulation. But Trump isn’t taking that advice, which has resulted in several lawsuits and business uncertainty around regulations.
  3. We’re having a global heat wave, with the Arctic Circle reaching 90 degrees, and fires hitting the Arctic Circle in parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia.
  4. 2017 was either the second or third hottest year on record (depending on the data set you use), and it was the hottest non-El Niño year on record. 2017’s La Niña didn’t regulate the temperature as much is normal for a La Niña year.
  5. Warmer oceans caused the sea level to rise for the sixth straight year (it’s risen for 22 of the last 24 years). Warmer oceans also caused sea ice at both poles to hit record lows.
  6. The Trump administration rescinds an Obama regulation barring the use of certain pesticides linked to the problem of declining bee populations.
  7. Conservationists sue the Trump administration over the pro-hunting international council established by Ryan Zinke last fall (I don’t know how I missed that one!). By law, the council, named the International Wildlife Conservation Council, must be made up of a balanced mix of advisors, but most members are pro-hunting industry reps or recreational hunters. The week the council was created, Trump reversed the ban on importing hunting trophies ( a decision that was reversed and then reversed again).
  8. Levi Strauss & Co. commits to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90% in all their facilities and by 40% throughout their supply chain.
  9. Trump tweets baseless claims against California governor Jerry Brown and bad environmental laws, blaming the wildfires on California. He doesn’t seem to understand water policies nor the effects of climate change and drought.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The Trump administration is considering another tax reduction, this time for people who get a lot of income from capital gains on investments. They’re looking into whether it would require congressional approval.
  2. Trump said earlier this year that he would work on major cuts for the middle class, but the wealthy would benefit most from a cut to capital gains taxes (the top 5% of households owns about 67% of stocks and mutual funds). We’re also looking at record deficits in the coming years, and this would make those worse.
  3. Even though we added fewer jobs than expected last month (157,000), the unemployment rate still edged down to 3.9%.
  4. Wage gains reach their highest level since before the great recession, rising 2.7% over a year ago. The cost of living rose 2.9% over the same period.
  5. The minimum wage for retail workers is rising, but pay for more experienced retail workers is not.
  6. Companies continue to buy back stocks with their tax breaks instead of investing in their employees.
  7. American auto makers are speeding up their plans to invest in R&D and factories in China due to the trade wars. This could give China the edge in the future when it comes to new automotive technologies.
  8. A recent UBS Wealth Management poll gives some interesting insight into tariffs:
    • 71% of business owners want more tariffs. Even though most think there could be negative effects on the economy, many think it would be good for their business. Most business owners focus on U.S. markets, so they likely think tariffs on foreign goods would be a boon for them.
    • Just over half of high net worth investors support more tariffs on China, while less than half support tariffs on other countries.
    • Americans in general see tariffs as harmful to the economy.
  1. Taxes and tax withholding payments are about $1.75 trillion so far this year, only down about 1% from last year but also below the predicted tax revenue.
  2. The Treasury says they’ll borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, a big increase from last year’s $519 billion. This is the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and is largely because of the expected decrease in tax revenue from last year’s GOP tax reform.
  3. The Treasury will increase the amount of bond auctions to help fund the government. The budget deficit is growing rapidly, and the Economic Outlook Group doesn’t see an end to trillion-dollar deficits.
  4. The government isn’t alone in their borrowing; corporations have also taken on record debt because of the low cost of borrowing
  5. Under Trump, governmental watchdog agencies have drastically reduced enforcement of penalties imposed on corporations caught violating rules and regulations. The only agency to increase fines in 2017 was the Office of Foreign Assets Control.”
  6. China and the U.S. no longer seem to be negotiating an end to the trade war and both countries are threatening new tariffs.
  7. Two of the biggest steel manufacturers in America, Nucor and United States Steel, have blocked requests from 100s of American companies to exempt them from Trump’s steel tariffs and let them buy foreign steel.
  8. DHS takes away $750 million in funding for Coast Guard ice breakers for the Arctic and directs it to Trump’s border wall instead. Meanwhile, Russia is investing heavily in ice breakers for the Arctic, which is rich in national resources. Russia is also expanding its military there.
  9. The Senate increases the 2019 military budget by $82 billion, the second largest increase in modern history. The largest was the increase during the buildup to the Iraq war.

Elections:

  1. Even though U.S. intelligence agencies are raising red flags about election interference from Russia, Senate Republicans filibuster a Democratic proposal to help states upgrade their voting systems.
  2. After receiving documents produced by Trump’s voter fraud commission (per a court order), commission member Matthew Dunlap says there was no fraud found. Dunlap had to go through the court system to get the docs because Kris Kobach wouldn’t share them with Democrats on the commission. Dunlap says that after reviewing around 8,000 documents, the purpose of the commission actually seemed to be to validate Trump’s claims of voter fraud after the election. He also says this was one of the most bizarre things he’s ever been a part of.
  3. In a small hit against Citizens United, a federal judge invalidates an FEC regulation that allows donors to certain non-profits to remain anonymous. This regulation has contributed to a massive increase in so-called dark-money contributions to PACs.
  4. Trump tweets support for a Republican candidate for Congress who is no longer on the ballot.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Downloading the schematics for 3D printable guns is legal. And then it isn’t. After speaking with NRA leaders, Trump says these guns don’t make sense.
  2. After the Koch network says it won’t support North Dakota Senate candidate Kevin Cramer over his Democratic opponent Heidi Heitkamp, Trump calls the Kochs a joke in Republican circles. Even though they prop up pretty much all the Republican circles.
  3. Jim Acosta once again gets harassed by Trump supporters at a rally in Tampa, FL, during a live shot. Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Trump doesn’t support violence against anyone… forgetting almost every previous rally.
  4. In her press briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders refuses to say whether she thinks the press is really the enemy of the people.
  5. The conspiracy group QAnon shows up en force at the Tampa rally. QAnon might seem fringe and somewhat harmless, but they’ve moved from the web to real life, sometimes showing up at places that the anonymous “Q” has mentioned in his baseless conspiracy theories.
  6. The TSA is thinking about getting rid of security screenings at over 150 small to medium airports around the U.S.
  7. Trump Jr. says the Democratic platform is similar to the Nazi Party platform and that history classes are biased against conservatives. Actual source documents from the time show that Hitler hijacked the National Socialist German Workers Party in its infancy and then based their platform on racism and the idea of Aryan superiority. The Democratic platform is closer to the Social Democratic platform, as you can see here and here.
  8. In a lawsuit the NRA is fighting with the state of New York, the NRA claims it’s running out of money because insurers and lenders won’t work with them. They say they might not be able to exist much longer.
  9. Meanwhile, proponents of common-sense gun reform rally and march on Saturday in the March on the NRA.
  10. Franklin Haney, who donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, had agreed to pay Michael Cohen $10 million if he could get help Haney get governmental approval on a $5 billion loan for a nuclear power plant in Alabama. The loan is still pending, but the agreement is off. Obviously.
  11. After Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify removed some Alex Jones content from their sites, Apple removed almost the entire Alex Jones and InfoWars library from iTunes. Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube have all now removed most of their Alex Jones content or suspended the accounts due to violations of their rules about hate speech.
  12. Antifa and the far right clash in Portland during a Patriot Prayer “Freedom March” in support of Joey Gibson, who is their founder and is running for U.S. Senate. I’m still not clear if the march had any purpose other than to promote Gibson’s run for Senate.
  13. After the Parkland shootings, Florida passed a red-flag gun law, which means that courts can remove guns from people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others. So far, Florida has ordered over 450 people to surrender their weapons.
  14. After LeBron James opens a public school that will serve around 240 at-risk students and their parents, Trump criticizes James’ intellect on Twitter. And then Melania’s office praises James. Trump’s tweet was triggered when James said that Trump uses sports to divide us. On top of opening this school, James will also cover local college tuition for its graduates.
  15. Pope Francis breaks with tradition and calls for the entire world to abolish the death penalty.
  16. Hope Hicks is back in the picture, seen boarding Air Force One near the Trump Bedminster resort where Trump was staying.
  17. During an on-air call with C-SPAN, a Trump supporter threatens to shoot journalists Don Lemon and Brian Stelter.

Polls:

  1. There’s a 77 percentage-point gap between Democratic and Republican approval of Trump, the most polarized gap since Eisenhower.

Week 75 in Trump

Posted on July 2, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Families Belong Together Rallies.

Jeff Sessions says that the outrage over family separation at the border is “radicalized” and calls the people who are outraged a “lunatic fringe.” He goes on to claim that immigration rights activists enjoy an “opulence” that is inaccessible to everyday people. Well let me tell you, the people I marched with, myself included, do not enjoy an opulence that is out of reach. If he was out there listening to us, he would see the diversity represented. 750 marches. Look at the map. It isn’t radical to expect that children, especially those under five, should not be separated from their parents whose only crime is trying to seek asylum in America. Caring for children is not a radical idea.

Here’s what else happened last week…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. According to a federal indictment, three people bombed a mosque and a women’s health clinic in 2017, tried to set up a local militia, sold phony local currency, and then held a stretch of railroad track for ransom.

Russia:

  1. Blackwater founder (and Betsy DeVos’s brother) Erik Prince gives Mueller’s team complete access to his phone and computer.
  2. Mueller is working to have George Papadopoulos sentenced in September. He plans to produce conclusions and more indictments this fall.
  3. Tensions are still high between House GOP members and the DOJ, as the FBI turns over thousands of documents to Congress about the Russia investigation.
  4. And after that, Devin Nunes gives Rod Rosenstein a deadline to inform Congress whether the FBI used informants against the Trump campaign, even though they’ve already answered that. The answer is “no” in case you were wondering.
  5. And after that, the DOJ wrote back to Nunes saying, essentially, you already have all you’re going to get.
  6. Michael Cohen wants to prevent prosecutors from seeing 12,000 of the 4 million files seized in the raid on his home and office.
  7. A federal judge rejects Paul Manafort’s challenge to Mueller’s authority. Manafort’s team was trying to convince the judge that Mueller was only prosecuting him to get to Trump.
  8. According to a newly unsealed warrant, Manafort and his wife owed Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, $10 million. Deripaska gave Manafort a $26 million loan, bringing their business dealings to around $60 million over ten years.
  9. Mueller indicts Russian Konstantin Kilimnik, an intermediary between Manafort and Deripaska.
  10. FBI agent Peter Strzok testifies to Congress behind closed doors about his investigation into Clinton’s emails. He wants his testimony to be public. House Democrats want it to be public. House Republicans refuse to make it public.
  11. The House passes a resolution demanding documents from the DOJ around the Russia investigation, potentially setting Rod Rosenstein up for impeachment if he fails to deliver.
  12. Rosenstein and Chris Wray testify before the House Judiciary Committee in a very testy exchange. Republican Jim Jordan and Trey Gowdy were literally spitting mad, with Gowdy telling them to “finish the hell up.” Rosenstein, on the other hand, maintained his composure and schooled them a bit in the law.
  13. Trump again says that Russia didn’t interfere in our 2016 elections because Putin says so. And then Putin and Trump announce they’ll meet in July.
  14. And then Mike Pompeo says he’s certain Trump will warn Putin against interfering in our election because it’s clearly unacceptable.
  15. Even Justice Kennedy circles back to the Russia story, and I have no idea where this one will end up.
    • The day after Kennedy announces his retirement, stories break that his son Justin worked at Deutsche Bank as head of global real estate capital markets.
    • Deutsche Bank helped Trump obtain real estate loans at a time when no other banks would touch him because of his bankruptcies. They kept loaning him money even after he defaulted on a loan from them, with loans totaling over $1 billion.
    • Deutsche Bank has been under investigation and fined over the years for laundering money for Russians.
    • Trump dismissed some of those fines after Mueller began investigating and subpoenaing Deutsche Bank.
    • Deutsche Bank is very large, and it’s possible Kennedy had nothing to do with Trump’s loans. Also, it appears that much of the money laundering was done after Kennedy left the bank.
    • The White House has been courting Kennedy, and let him know that they’d uphold his legacy. They wanted him to be comfortable leaving the bench before the 2018 elections.
    • Remember The Big Short? Justin Kennedy also predicted the market crash in 2008 and capitalized on it for Deutsche Bank, shorting mortgages as early as 2006. He left the bank when regulations made it too hard to work these complex kinds of transactions. In 2009, he moved on to co-found a company that took advantage of commercial properties that had fallen victim to the real estate crash.
  1. Tech companies meet with the DHS to work on ways to stop Russia from interfering in our elections again. However, neither the FBI nor DHS provide the companies with any specific threat information, leaving them feeling unprepared.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Supreme courts makes a series of rulings against progressive issues.
    • The court upholds Trump’s Muslim ban, with the majority ruling saying that they have to look at Trump’s proclamation in isolation and apart from his anti-Muslim rhetoric. Even though their last ruling was pretty much the opposite.
    • Non-medical pregnancy centers can mislead about their medical capabilities and don’t have to provide abortion options.
    • Unions can no longer collect fees from non-members, even though they bargain with companies for all employees’ benefits and wages.
    • In a blow to antitrust laws, the court upholds American Express’s rules that merchants can’t talk to customers about other credit cards, which allows Amex to continue charging exorbitant fees to merchants (which are then passed on to the customer).
  1. In its Muslim ban decision, the court overturns Korematsu v. United States, the decision that endorsed Japanese internment camps in the U.S.
  2. Justice Sotomayor excoriates the majority decision on the Muslim ban, comparing it to Korematsu v. United States. She also called out many of Trump’s anti-Muslim statements, entering them into the court record.
  3. Justice Kennedy announces his retirement at the end of July, giving Republicans the ability to turn the court hard right. This is a gut punch for civil rights and reproductive rights activists.
  4. And then Mitch McConnell promptly forgets the McConnell rule and promises a swift vote on his replacement. The McConnell rule came to be in 2016 when he said it wouldn’t be right to confirm a judge in an election year. Let the people have their voice heard first, he said in 2016.
  5. Trump says he’ll have a nominee to replace Kennedy within a few weeks.
  6. Susan Collins comes forward saying she won’t support any nominee who threatens to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Healthcare:

  1. The Iowa Supreme Court rules that a law requiring a 72-hour waiting period to have an abortion is unconstitutional.
  2. A healthcare fraud sweep results in the arrest of more than 600 people in an opioid scheme. 76 doctors and 86 other healthcare workers are charged for prescribing and distributing opioids.
  3. A federal judge blocks the Trump administration’s approval of Kentucky’s work requirements for Medicaid. The judge says the administration acted arbitrarily and capriciously. This is a blow to Kentucky’s governor, who wants to take away people’s healthcare by rolling back protections under the ACA.
  4. Trump proposes cutting the number of health professionals who are deployed during national disasters and disease outbreaks by 40%. This team also provides health care in our most rural and poor areas.

International:

  1. Even after the historic meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un, U.S. intelligence says North Korea is moving forward with its nuclear program. Satellite Images show that North Korea continues to make upgrades to its Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center.
  2. There’s another NATO summit coming up in July, at a time when tensions between Europe and the U.S. are higher than ever. At the G7, Trump said that NATO is as bad as NAFTA.
  3. Apparently Trump once tried to bribe France to leave the EU by promising Emmanuel Macron a favorable free trade agreement. He made the same attempt with Germany.
  4. While tensions grow between Trump and German Chancellor Merkel, Trump expresses interest in pulling troops out of Germany and orders the Pentagon to analyze the costs.
  5. Far left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador wins Mexico’s presidential elections.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The House shoots down its most recent major immigration reform bill despite Trump’s last ditch efforts to save it. Trump’s criticism basically killed it in the first place last week, along with a more bipartisan version. This bill would increase border security, help Dreamers become citizens, and allow families showing up at the border to be detained indefinitely.
  2. Congress puts forth a bipartisan bill to give Puerto Rico full statehood.

Separating Families:

  1. The immigrant group RAICES has now raised over $20 million. A National Guard member posted on their fundraiser that they’re lucky we aren’t executing undocumented immigrants. He’ll face punishment from the guard. Online calls for violence against immigrants have increased in recent weeks.
  2. The story about children is darker than it first appeared.
    • The Trump administration launched a pilot program last year to start quietly separating families at the border.
    • An additional 1,700 children were separated between October 2016 and February 2018, but DHS won’t break it down by month so we don’t know how many, if any, were separated before Trump took office.
    • The number of children separated is estimated to be around 4,100, but like I said, DHS isn’t being forthcoming with the numbers.
    • Immigrants as young as three-years-old are ordered to appear in court for their own deportation hearings. Children have been put through this process alone before but usually not this young and never in these numbers. Typically families appear together in court.
  1. Seventeen states sue to force the administration to reunite the families it separated.
  2. A federal judge rules that the administration can no longer separate families and must reunite all those that have been separated within 30 days. Kids under 5 must be reunited within two weeks. Yes, I said FIVE.
  3. Clergy members protesting Jeff Sessions’ appearance in Los Angeles are arrested.
  4. As outrage grows over ICE treatment of immigrants, calls arise from the left to abolish ICE. The right mocks this as extremism.
  5. And then ICE officials call to abandon ICE, or at least restructure it.
    • These special ICE agents investigate hard crimes like cartels, drug smuggling, money laundering, and human trafficking.
    • They want to start their own agency because ICE’s everyday actions hamper their ability to investigate and no one wants to cooperate with them.
    • They say the priority has moved from a focus on national security and public safety to more low-level immigration violations. It’s more about discrimination than crime.
  1. The Pentagon says that DHS asked for their help in housing and caring for up to 12,000 undocumented immigrants.
  2. The GAO and the HHS inspector general launch reviews of Trump’s handling of families at the border.
  3. Mexico asks the UN to intervene in this matter, calling the separation cruel and a human rights violation.
  4. Nearly 600 demonstrators, mostly women and including elected officials, are arrested during a non-violent protest in Washington D.C.
  5. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators show up to over 750 marches and rallies around the world to protest the treatment of families at the border. A handful of counter-protestors show up to support Trump’s policies.
  6. The marches are largely peaceful, except one instance in Alabama where a counter-protestor pulls a gun. A far-right Prayer Patriot rally in Portland, on the other hand, turns into a riot when an equal number of Antifa shows up to counter-protest.
  7. The DOJ’s response to this outcry of support for immigrants and criticism of DOJ policies? To try to detain migrant families indefinitely.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. A district judge rejects a motion to dismiss a case against the administration brought by immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Trump’s decision to rescind TPS for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua, and Honduras could deprive hundreds of thousands of immigrants of legal status.
  2. Legal issues aside, rescinding TPS could also send 250,000 people back to the very countries where most of our border crossers come from, causing an even greater border surge in the future.
  3. The Muslim ban goes into effect, blocking certain travelers from Iran, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and North Korea. The ban includes Syrian refugees, those traveling on business or tourist visas, and just government officials in the case of Venezuela. Certain waivers might still be granted for close family members.
  4. The man who drove his car into protestors in Charlottesville, killing one of them, is charged with several hate crimes.
  5. A Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of 550 women’s issues experts ranked the U.S. as the 10th most dangerous country for women in areas of sexual violence, harassment, and being coerced into sex.
  6. A Harvard Business Review study finds that women ask for raises as often as men, but get rejected more often.
  7. In another hardliner approach, the DOJ drafts a rule that says if you’re criminally prosecuted for crossing the border, you can’t be granted asylum. The rule would also increase scrutiny of asylum seekers from Central America. Note that border crossers are only criminally prosecuted because of Sessions’ zero-tolerance policy.
  8. A chief counsel at ICE in Seattle gets four years in prison for identify theft. He stole immigrants identities, opening credit cards and taking out loans in their names.
  9. Former ICE spokesman James Schwab corrects statements he made about Oakland’s mayor when she warned constituents of an upcoming ICE raid. At the time, he gave the party line that she put officers lives in danger and that they lost a lot of the people they were after. In truth, they arrested 16% more than their highest expectations. Schwab resigned when asked to uphold a statement by Jeff Sessions that 800 people got away, which Schwab says is a flat-out lie.
  10. For the first time in almost 70 years, an American won’t be leading the UN International Organization for Migration. Trump’s nominee was voted down, with the agency looking outside of the U.S. because of our current attitudes and actions around migration and refugees.

Climate/EPA:

  1. The EPA is in charge of coal ash disposal because the residue from coal power plants can contaminate drinking water. This week, the EPA gives Oklahoma the right to dispose of its own coal ash, making it the first state to be able to do so.
  2. A train hauling oil derails in Iowa, spilling around 230,000 gallons of crude oil into the surrounding floodwaters.
  3. Ireland bans fracking.
  4. A hand-written thank you note shows that EPA administrator Scott Pruitt attended the American Petroleum Institute’s private board dinner.
  5. Emails show that conservatives lobbied Scott Pruitt to fire a career staffer in order to derail the National Climate Assessment compiled by 13 agencies. Their assessment found that human activity is extremely likely to cause climate change.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Harley-Davidson announces they’ll move some production abroad in order to avoid retaliatory EU tariffs in the ongoing trade wars.
  2. Aaaand then Trump threatens Harley-Davidson, saying that if they move offshore they’ll be taxed like never before.
  3. The DOW drops 405 points on news that Trump plans to stop Chinese companies from investing in U.S. tech firms and in technologies that can be sold to China. This could create two competing global tech markets, one in the U.S. and one in China, with both pushing their own standards. Differing standards just makes it harder on everyday people.
  4. The White House later reverses this decisions and says there won’t be any new restrictions on investments (aside from what Congress already has planned).
  5. The bond market’s yield curve, which has been predictive of all nine recessions since 1955, is predicting another recession. However, the economy under Trump hasn’t necessarily followed traditional patterns.
  6. The UN releases a report that says 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million live in extreme poverty. The administration says no, there are only 250,000 Americans in extreme poverty. I guess it depends on your definition.
  7. Manufacturing dipped in June, but manufacturers are still hiring and raising prices. Some factories begin layoffs, though, as the effects of the tariffs start to be felt.
  8. China and the EU together promise to avoid trade protectionism. They’re worried that U.S. trade policies could trigger another global recession.
  9. Financial experts say the debt is likely to reach 78% of GDP by the end of 2018. This is the highest level since the 1950s. It’s expected to surpass the historical high of 106% within 10 years.
  10. Despite these stats, Trump’s chief financial advisor, Larry Kudlow, says that the federal budget deficit is “coming down rapidly.”
  11. Major auto trade groups warn that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, increase the price of new vehicles, and cut back progress on self-driving cars.
  12. Trump apparently ordered an investigation into whether importing foreign cars poses a national security threat.
  13. Canada announces billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs
  14. Axios reports that Trump wants to take the U.S. out of the World Trade Organization (WTO), but Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says that’s not true. Instead, they just don’t like the WTO.

Elections:

  1. The Supreme Court fails to uphold lower court decisions that would’ve forced Texas and North Carolina to draw fair district lines before the 2018 midterms. They sidestep making a real decision by sending the cases back to the lower courts.
  2. A court orders that Trump’s now-defunct voter fraud commission must hand over documents to Democrats by July 18.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The Red Hen restaurant, which refused service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders (SHS) and her family, doesn’t open on Tuesday due to protests and even having chicken shit dumped on their doorstep. Where’s the civility, right? Trump’s supporters even send death threats to a Red Hen restaurant that isn’t even affiliated with the one in Lexington. Calm down folks. People get 86ed all the damn time.
  2. And then SHS gets temporary Secret Service protection because of the hoopla.
  3. After the restaurant denied service to SHS, Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said we should call out the bigotry of members of this administration where we see them — in restaurants, at the gas station, at the drug store. This week she cancels two appearances because of death threats.
  4. A man fires a shotgun through a newspaper agency’s glass doors, killing five journalists and injuring two. He had a long-running vendetta against the paper, though people on the far-left blame MAGA and people on the far-right celebrate because “fake news.”
  5. Bill Shine, former executive at Fox News, is slated to become the next White House Communications Director.
  6. After several years of calling the media “fake news” and egging his supporters into violent acts against journalists, Trump says the shooting “shocked the conscience of our nation and filled our hearts with grief.” He also says “journalists like all Americans should be free from the fear of being violently attacked” while doing their job.
  7. A few days before the shooting, Milo Yiannopoulos called for “vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” But that’s not what motivated the shooter, as far as we know.
  8. Spicer’s back. Sean Spicer will launch a new talk show in July as a platform for “civil, respectful, and information discussions.” Notice that he left out “honest.”

Polls:

  1. 72% of Americans think it’s important to not charge sick people more for healthcare coverage (an ACA rule).
  2. 76% think it’s important to not be able to deny someone healthcare coverage because of a pre-existing condition (another ACA rule).
  3. Why is this important? Because the administration is trying to get around those two rules.
  4. 92% of Republicans think that the news intentionally publishes false or misleading stories, compared to 52% of Democrats (which is still strangely high).

Week 74 in Trump

Posted on June 25, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Border policy is the big story this week. 538 gives a good wrap up about how family separation is just part of a bigger plan to control and limit immigration. The administration has tried to end DACA; reviewed applications (going back decades) of immigrants who’ve been granted citizenship; deported non-criminal immigrants who’ve made lives here for decades; and tried to curtail refugee admissions, work visas, travel from Muslim countries, and immigration by international entrepreneurs. Now they’re separating children from their parents at the border. Put together, these policies will force some immigrants here to return to their home countries, they’ll make it harder to help relatives come to the country, and they’ll reduce the number of immigrants and refugees coming here in the first place. So the overall goal seems to be to reduce the foreign-born population in the U.S.

And just a reminder of how these policies are based on misleading information: The Trump administration tried to stifle a report they commissioned that shows refugees added $63 billion to US economy over the past decade. The released version was manipulated to only show the costs of refugees and none of the profits. Trump also holds up Germany as example of how bad immigration is, saying crime in Germany is way up. In real life, the crime rate in Germany is at it’s lowest point in 26 years and was down 10% in 2017 from 2016.

But here’s what else happened last week…

Russia:

  1. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, along with the FBI’s Christopher Wray, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his newly released report on the investigation into Hillary’s emails.
  2. Republicans aren’t satisfied with the 580-page report, so they threaten to investigate the investigation into the investigation of Clinton’s emails.
  3. Wray supports Mueller’s investigation and says this is not a witch hunt.
  4. The FBI turns over thousands of documents to congressional committees about its processes and sources for finding information on Russian contacts with Trump campaign members. Wait for the leaks…
  5. In the run-up to the 2016 elections, the National Enquirer got Michael Cohen’s approval before running stories about Trump. This allowed Cohen to limit negative press and is being looked into as a violation of campaign finance laws.
  6. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan subpoena the publisher of the National Enquirer over their payment to Karen McDougal to keep her story of her alleged affair with Trump out of the news.
  7. Even Mueller’s team worries that the Russia investigation is being overexposed in the press and has already biased potential jurors.
  8. A judge denies Paul Manafort’s request to suppress evidence against him and that the money laundering charges won‘t be dismissed.
  9. Mueller tries to thwart further moves for dismissal by filing a request preventing the defense from saying Manafort was targeted because of his proximity to Trump.
  10. Michael Cohen resigns as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee. This makes him the third person to step down from the RNC finance committee over scandals.
  11. Joshua Schulte, a former CIA engineer, is indicted for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks.
  12. House Democrats release thousands of RussiaToday Twitter ads that were used before the 2016 election.
  13. In a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, two former Obama officials say we didn’t do enough to deter Russian meddling in our elections.
  14. We find out from the Kremlin that John Bolton if going to Russia in the coming week. Four Senators are heading there too.
  15. The House Judiciary Committee issues a subpoena to Peter Strzok even though Strzok has already offered to appear voluntarily.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Supreme Court throws out a 1992 ruling that blocked states from collecting taxes from online entities.
  2. The Supreme Court rules that the government can’t track or obtain cellphone location data without a warrant.
  3. A federal judge strikes down Kris Kobach’s voter registration law in Kansas that requires proof of citizenship, saying that it violates constitutional rights, that Kobach failed to prove cases of fraud, and that the burden of proof had disenfranchised thousands of voters. This makes an earlier injunction of the law permanent.
  4. The same judge forces Kobach to attend legal classes because he is too unfamiliar with the law.

Healthcare:

  1. The House passes a bipartisan group of bills aimed at fixing the opioid epidemic. The bills address expanding treatment, looking at alternative treatments, stopping the transfer of illegal opioids, and preventing the use of fentanyl.
  2. Trump issues a rule that allows small businesses to circumvent some of the ACA consumer protections in order to provide cheaper, and possibly substandard, health insurance policies.
  3. Trump creates a commission to look into closing down some VA facilities to save money. He also wants to transfer funding from VA facilities to private facilities.

International:

  1. A UN report on chemical weapons attacks and potential war crimes in Syria omits allegations that chemical weapons attacks were more common than has been reported. The authors say they need more corroboration.
  2. Trump accuses Canadians of coming across the border to buy shoes and smuggle them back into Canada. He says they scuff them up to make them look and sound old. Sneaky Canadians.
  3. Canada becomes the second country to legalize pot (Uruguay is the other one).
  4. Trump calls North Korea destabilizing, repressive, and a continued threat to the U.S. Last week, Kim Jong Un was a great leader who Trump was honored to meet. Last year, Kim was “little rocket man.”
  5. Tens of thousands of people turn out in London to protest Brexit and demand a final vote on the terms of the deal. Hundreds of pro-Brexit protestors turn out as well.
  6. Turkey re-elects Erdogan president and abolishes the position of prime minister. This move increases Erdogan’s authority greatly.
  7. European Union leaders hold a small summit to modify immigration rules, with countries that have been taking on the brunt of refugees asking other countries to do their part.
  8. Saudi Arabia ends their ban on women driving.
  9. Protests break out in Tehran, Iran. It’s not clear who’s leading the protests but the impetus seems related to the economy.
  10. Secretary of Defense James Mattis says he’s not aware of any moves North Korea has made yet to denuclearize.
  11. However, Trump has been ignoring Mattis’s advice on foreign-policy, or just leaving him out of the loop completely.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Paul Ryan delays the House vote on an immigration compromise bill that funds the wall, gives Dreamers a pathway to citizenship, and keeps families together (though detained indefinitely).
  2. And then Trump says GOP lawmakers should wait until after the midterms to deal with immigration, likely scuttling the deal through the end of the year.
  3. Paul Ryan continues his practice of only bringing bills to a vote if he thinks Trump is already for it.
  4. The Senate votes against Trump’s $15 billion cuts to the previously approved spending plan.
  5. Trump threatens to shut down the government in the fall if he doesn’t get his wall. Senators are willing to fund border security at $1.6 billion, though Trump just scuttled the above House bill that would’ve given him $25 billion.

Separating Families:

  1. Every living first lady— from Rosalynn Carter to Melania Trump—speak out against the separation of families.
  2. 55% of Republicans approve of this policy. 66% of Americans in general do not. Republicans are the only listed demographic in the poll to support family separation; they’re also the only other group to support building a wall.
  3. A bipartisan group of over 70 former US attorneys urge Jeff Sessions to reverse the zero-tolerance policy. They say it’s dangerous, expensive, and doesn’t live up to the our values.
  4. Trump continues to blame Democrats, which is provably false since no administration has done this before and Jeff Sessions announced the change in policy on April 6th and then went on to speak about it on May 7.
  5. Cities and states refuse to provide assistance to the DOJ or CBP in the detention of separated families.
  6. Four governors refuse to send National Guard troops to the border, and eleven governors pull their National Guard troops out. Colorado bans the use of state resources for child separations.
  7. Detained parents of separated children get no legal counsel prior to appearing before a judge and are processed in large groups in a single hearing. Prosecutors’ goals are to get through as many as possible and to have them all plead guilty, which many do because they think that’s the only way to find their kids.
  8. The Flores decision of 1997 specifies that immigrant children can only be detained for up to 20 days and after that, they can only be held in licensed facilities. The DOJ asks a judge to waive that limit so they can house immigrant families indefinitely.
  9. After a week of saying only Democrats can fix this, Trump signs an executive order drafted by Kirstjen Nielsen to attempt to fix this crisis of his own making.
    • The EO says Homeland Security will still prosecute border crossers as criminals, but that they’ll detain families together. This requires them to file a brief against the Flores decision.What they’re aiming for is to detain families indefinitely, which is far more costly than releasing them with mandatory check-ins.
      Side note: Releasing families under an Obama-era program costs about $36 per day, and families show up for meetings and hearings around 99% of the time. Detaining families together costs nearly $300 per day, and separating families has cost nearly $800 per day.
    • The EO has no provision to reunite families that Trump has already separated.
    • After the EO, border workers are left to figure out how to implement it on their own with little guidance. We hear mixed eports over whether they’re still enforcing zero tolerance and whether they’re supposed to.
  1. Melania visits a holding center for immigration children and one for immigrant families. In an unfortunate choice, she wears a coat that says “I don’t care. Do u?” Her publicist says it didn’t mean anything, but then Trump negates that in a tweet saying it was about the fake news.
  2. A dozen states plan to sue the administration over the policy of family separation. They say the EO doesn’t fix it.
  3. Health and Human Services asks the Pentagon to house up to 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant minors.
  4. There was a huge drop in illegal border crossings last year over fear of Trump’s hardline policies. But they’re up nearly triple from this time last year now that people see that Trump is having a hard time getting his policies implemented.
  5. On the Christian Broadcasting Network, Sessions says they never intended to separate families. I can’t even with this. Maybe he’s just saying this because his church has condemned his actions.
  6. Both Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen, staunch defenders of family separation policies, get heckled eating out at Mexican restaurants.
  7. And then a restaurant owner tells Sarah Huckabee Sanders that she and her family can’t eat there. She tweets about it on her official account, which turns out to be a violation of the ethics code.
  8. Corey Lewandowski’s speakers bureau drops him after he makes fun of a child with Downs Syndrome being separated from her mother on national TV.
  9. Protestors play the recording of separated children crying for the parents outside a Trump fundraiser and outside Kirstjen Nielsen’s house. Representative Ted Lieu (R-CA) goes against House rules and plays the recording on the floor to get it entered into the congressional record.
  10. Detained children are shipped to centers and foster care across the country.
  11. An army of volunteer attorneys is working to reunite separated families. They’re finding that officials are unable locate all the children. Of 300 parents represented, only 2 children have been located.
  12. The U.S. Attorney’s Office announces they’ll dismiss cases where parents were charged with illegal entry and separated from their kids.
  13. On Friday, a government source said all families would be reunited that day. But by Saturday night, only about 21% has been reunited. The administration says that 500 children have been reunited with their parents so far.
  14. The DNA company 23andMe offers to donate DNA kits to help locate children and reunite families that were separated.
  15. The American Academy of Pediatrics calls the separation of families child abuse.
  16. Protestors hold marches and toy/supply drives children in holding in over 60 cities nationwide. Members of Congress head to detention facilities to protest.
  17. The Methodist Church files a complaint against family separation and 600 members file a complaint against Sessions. He could ousted from the church, but the members say they want a reconciliation process that would bring Sessions back to Christian values.
  18. An online fundraiser goes viral, raising nearly $20 million for RAICES, which helps provide legal aid to immigrant families, children, and refugees.
  19. By the end of the week, the administration says they’ll reunite families when the parents agree to give up their quest for asylum, meaning that the whole family must be deported in order for parents and children to be reunited. Until that agreement is made, parents will only have phone visitation with their children, and that is not guaranteed due to logistics.
  20. Lawsuits are filed, alleging abuse and administering drugs without consent in the detention centers for children.
  21. Notes and interviews show that the administration has been planning this since last spring.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump continues to use exaggerations of criminal behavior and of MS-13 to get people behind his harsh immigration policies.
  2. The zero-tolerance policy was supposed to deter undocumented immigrants, but instead there was a spike in border crossings after the policy was announced.
  3. Steven Miller says it was a simple decision to separate children from their parents at the border. In comparison, when the Obama administration was working on ways to strengthen border security, they talked about this for about five minutes before throwing it away as an incredibly bad idea.
  4. The National Park Service gives their initial approval to “Unite the Right” to hold a “white civil rights” rally at the National Mall. This is the same group that held the infamous Charlottesville rally.
  5. After Trump shoots down the immigration bills currently in the House, he tells Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that he backs the compromise bill. But it’s too little, too late. Representatives who were already lukewarm on the bill already moved to the other side.
  6. The Senate Appropriations Committee approves a spending bill for Homeland Security that doesn’t include full funding for the border wall, nor increased funding for CBP, nor increased funding for detainment beds. It also requires the administration to report monthly on family separations.
  7. Trump calls for deporting undocumented immigrants with no judge or court hearing, saying they should be removed immediately. And without due process apparently.
  8. Trump again quotes bad data, this time numbers he got from the mother of a victim killed by an undocumented immigrant. She said undocumented immigrants have killed 63,000 Americans since 9/11. GAO numbers actually show that immigrants, including undocumented ones, commit crimes at a far lower rate that native-born Americans (about half the rate). The false number seems to come from Steve King (R-Iowa).
  9. At the beginning of the week, Trump derides Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) idea to hire thousands of immigration judges as crazy. By the end of the week, Trump tweets that it’s what we need to do.
  10. The World Health Organization removes transgender from their list of mental disorders. About time.

Climate/EPA:

  1. The Trump Tower in Chicago is the only user of Chicago River water that fails to comply with Chicago’s fish-protecting regulations. They use river water for their cooling systems.
  2. Trump rescinds Obama’s executive order aimed at protecting the Great Lakes and oceans. Trump’s order encourages offshore drilling and more industrial use of these waters. Obama’s order came about because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
  3. A Canadian mining firm prepares to start mining in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
  4. The EPA’s Scott Pruitt shutters three more advisory boards to the agency, further isolating the EPA from expertise in the areas the agency is supposed to protect.
  5. Emails released as part of a lawsuit show that Pruitt considered hiring a friend of the Harts, the family that rented him their condo for $50 a night. The emails also indicate that Pruitt has a closer relationship with the Harts than previously disclosed, and that Mr. Hart lobbied the EPA last year even though both parties had previously denied this.
  6. The special counsel opens a new probe into Pruitt for retaliating against employees who pushed back against his policies. There are around dozen other probes into his activities.
  7. The official EPA paper trail shows that Pruitt only sent one single email to anyone outside the EPA from his government account. Seems sketchy.
  8. Pruitt’s most recent financial disclosure shows he spent over $4.6 million on security. And that included things like “tactical pants” and “tactical polos.”
  9. The Trump administration finally releases a report on unsafe drinking water after working to suppress it for months. The danger in the water comes from nonstick chemicals leaked into drinking water, and affects 126 military bases.
  10. Ryan Zinke and his wife run a foundation that’s working on a real estate deal with the chairman of Halliburton. Halliburton will benefit from Ryan Zinke opening up national monuments to mining and drilling, and the Zinkes will benefit from the real estate deal, which involves building a resort on land that borders a property owned by the Zinkes. The House calls for an investigation.

Budget/Economy:

  1. House Republicans reveal their 2019 budget, which includes $4 billion in cuts to Social Security, around $500 billion in cuts to Medicare, and $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. We all knew that’s how they planned to balance their tax cuts from last year.
  2. The House Republicans pass a farm bill, and in the process cut SNAP benefits. This could affect around 23,000 active duty military families and 1.5 million veterans.
  3. Mick Mulvaney wants to shut down the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau database of consumer complaints against the banking industry.
  4. Trump threatens China with additional tariffs on $200 billion worth of goods, which would bring the total of tariffed goods to $450 billion… and the Dow dropped nearly 300 points on its way to a six-day losing streak.
  5. Via tweet, Trump threatens tariffs on auto imports from Europe in response to Europe placing tariffs on $3.2 billion in U.S. goods.
  6. Ambassador Nikki Haley says that it’s ridiculous for the UN to study poverty in the U.S. The UN’s report says of the developed nations, the U.S. ranks highest in rates of infant mortality, incarceration, youth poverty, income inequality, and obesity. The report also says that our current policies are making these things worse and deepening the wealth divide.
  7. 11,000 AT&T workers strike against unfair labor practices. The issue started to heat up after AT&T announces $1,000 bonuses to many in their workforce, and then laid off a bunch of workers who had received that bonus.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Trump directs the DoD and the Pentagon to create a sixth Armed Forces Branch: the Space Force. Yes. For outer space. For real, and over James Mattis’s objections. Mattis says this isn’t the time to be creating a new branch of the military.
  2. Trump also wants to open space for more commercial development.
  3. Trump releases his proposal for reorganizing the government. Key points:

    • Merge the Department of Labor and the Department of Education.
    • Move the USDA’s food and nutrition programs to the Department of Health and Human Services (which will be renamed to the Department of Health and Public Welfare).
    • Combine the USDA’s Safety and Inspection Service with the Food and Drug Administration (currently under HHS) into a single agency under the USDA. Wait… so the USDA would essentially be its own watchdog.
    • Move the USDA’s programs to assist with rural housing and rent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
    • Move the Army Corps of Engineers from the Department of Defense to Transportation and the Interior.
    • Create a new Office of Energy Innovation under the Department of Energy that would combine all of the current applied energy programs.
  1. Wikileaks publishes a searchable database of ICE agents and their personal information scraped from multiple public sites. DHS blame this on liberals, even though Wikileaks doesn’t have a record of supporting Democrats.
  2. Wilbur Ross shorted a shipping firm stock after learning that reporters were planning a negative story about the firm. Shorting is something you do to profit from a drop in stock price, and doing it based on nonpublic information is called securities fraud.

Polls:

  1. 75% of Americans think immigration is good for the U.S. Approval goes up to 84% when the question specifies “legal immigration.”

Week 70 in Trump

Posted on May 30, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Here’s an interesting fact from last week. Natural disasters in the U.S. target a small group. A recent analysis finds that around 90% of the costs associated with national disasters in the U.S. come from areas where less than 20% of the U.S. population lives.

But I digress… here’s what happened last week in politics.

Russia:

  1. During Trump’s transition, his trade adviser recommended Stefan Halper to ambassador roles in Asia. Halper is thought to be the covert FBI intelligence source who met with Trump officials during the campaign to learn about improper Russia advances.
  2. In yet another concession, Rod Rosenstein and other intelligence agency heads meet with congressional leaders to go over highly classified information in the Mueller investigation that Republicans in the House had been requesting. Though it could be a maneuver to avoid showing all documents and to buy time.
  3. At first, the agreement is to let Republican congressional leaders be briefed. This doesn’t sit with Democrats too well, though; so they arrange a second meeting with the bipartisan Gang of 8 congressional leaders.
  4. If you’ll remember, Devin Nunes has been pushing for this release of information, and most suspect it’s so he can let Trump know where Mueller’s investigation stands.
  5. Paul Ryan supports this review of the FBI and DOJ procedures.
  6. This meeting highlights how Trump is chipping away at DOJ norms bit by bit with each demand that the DOJ compromises on. Legal scholars and former LEOs think these things weaken the DOJ and that the president uses the department as a weapon against its political enemies. FBI agents might think twice about acting on intelligence for fear of retribution from the White House. Here’s what Rosenstein has done:
    • Drafted the memo used to justify Comey’s firing, which led to the special investigation.
    • Released private text messages between two FBI officials.
    • Shared the document that started the Russia investigation.
    • Allowed Representatives to see the classified FISA applications to monitor Carter Page.
    • Opened an investigation at Trump’s [Twitter] command.
  1. John Kelly and Emmet Flood attend at least part of both DOJ briefings, which is a little like putting the fox in the henhouse. The briefings center around possible crimes involving the Trump campaign and associates. Kelly is a Trump associate and Flood is the defense lawyer in the case.
  2. Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Dave Bossie, and Steve Cortes are a few outside advisors who are pushing Trump to go after the DOJ and FBI, and to paint himself as a victim in the Russia investigation. This explains Trump’s ramp-up last weekend that forced Rod Rosenstein to expand the investigation into FBI and DOJ practices and to show Nunes and Gowdy the information they want.
  3. George Nader, who is a subject of Mueller’s investigation for his role in back-channel international meetings during the 2016 campaign, and Elliot Broidy, who used Michael Cohen to pay off a playboy model he allegedly got pregnant, worked together on an anti-Qatar campaign in Washington D.C. last year for personal profit.
    • They wanted to isolate Qatar and diminish the Pentagon’s relationship with Qatar (where we have a military base), likely at the behest of UAE and Saudi princes for whom they were working.
    • They never registered under FARA.
    • Broidy wrote summaries of their meetings that indicate he spoke to Trump about them.
    • In a filing with the courts, Broidy alleges that hackers hired by Qatar targeted him, and that Qatar was helped by a former CIA operative and a former British spy as part of a larger conspiracy to make him stop criticizing Qatar.
  1. Paul Manafort requests an investigation into whether a lawyer on Mueller’s team, Andrew Weissman, leaked information to the AP last year though he doesn’t say what was leaked. Manafort’s filing relies heavily on reporting by a Fox News contributor.
  2. Sentencing begins for George Papadopolous, indicating he’s given Muelller all the information he has.
  3. Michael Cohen’s taxi business partner, Russian Evgeny Freidman, pleads guilty and is cooperating with both state and federal investigators.
  4. Michael Cohen met with American businessman Andrew Intrater and Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg a few days before Trump’s inauguration to talk about Russian-American relations. A few days after the inauguration, Intrater’s company Columbia Nova gave Cohen a $1 million consulting contract.
  5. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen says she’s not aware of any U.S. intelligence conclusion that Putin sought to help Trump win the election. You would think she’d be aware of the 2017 intelligence assessment that said Putin did just that.
  6. Her spokesperson later walks that back and says that of course Nielsen supports the conclusions of the intelligence community.
  7. Michael Cohen arranged a meeting between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Trump for a mere $400,000. Also, Cohen “forgot” to register as a representative of the Ukraine.
  8. Not long after the meeting, the Ukraine ended its corruption investigation into Paul Manafort.
  9. On his tour of the talk shows to sell his book, James Clapper says he is certain that Russia tilted the election toward Trump.
  10. And then Pompeo reluctantly agrees with him during testimony to Congress, saying he backs the 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia meddled to help Trump and hurt Clinton.
  11. A team of investigators led by the Dutch conclude that the missile that shot down the Malaysian Airlines jet in Ukraine in 2014 was Russian military (as most people thought at the time anyway).
  12. Email threads show that Roger Stone did, in fact, try to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton from Wikileaks’ Julian Assange during the 2016 campaign through an intermediary. This contradicts testimony he gave to Congress last year.
  13. A special prosecutor in Spain says that Donald Trump Jr. should be very concerned knowing that Spanish intelligence gave the FBI wiretaps of Russian oligarch Alexander Torshin.
  14. Rudy Giuliani says that Trump’s “Spygate” accusations are just a tactic to influence public opinion so Trump won’t be impeached. And just an FYI, the real Spygate is the outing of Valerie Plame’s identity as a covert operative under Bush.
  15. The FBI gets control of a Russian server involved in the hacking of routers and that is also linked to the hacking of DNC documents in 2016.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A judge rules that Trump is violating the First Amendment by blocking his Twitter followers.

  2. The Supreme Court rules that workers can’t band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws. I’m not sure what this means for unions. The majority decision was based on an arbitration law that is superseded by more modern labor laws.

Healthcare:

  1. This is so not good. Three patients who were in the end stages of Ebola escape their isolation ward in an urban area in the Congo.
  2. California’s assisted suicide is still on hold after an appeals court upholds a ruling that it was improperly passed during a special legislative session.
  3. Health workers in countries affected by Trump’s international gag rule say that they’ve seen a rise in unwanted pregnancies and in back-alley abortions. By cutting funding to these agencies, Trump cut funding to contraceptives and programs to prevent unwanted pregnancy. And also, Trump is working on doing the same in the U.S.
  4. Rudy Giuliani represented pharmaceutical firm Purdue Pharma to stop a federal investigation into the firm’s marketing of Oxycontin.

International:

  1. Mike Pompeo says we’ll crush Iran with sanctions and military pressure if it doesn’t change its ways. Pompeo also gives 12 preconditions to negotiating with Iran, which most experts say are non-starters. He didn’t give specifics.
  2. Iranian Prime Minister Rouhani rejects this, saying countries have their own sovereignty and the U.S. doesn’t have the right to push them around. Israel’s Netanyahu supports the U.S. in this. In fact, Netanyahu gave Trump an excuse to attack with his public presentation on Iranian nuclear development.
  3. Many experts see this as intended to result in regime change, which (if successful) would result in U.S. investment in nation building in Iran.
  4. Tensions between Israel and Iran are heating up. So much so that Netanyahu moves his security cabinet meetings to an underground bunker.
  5. In a show that our representatives are worried about the direction our relations with Iran have turned, the House passes an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act clarifying that neither Trump nor Pompeo has the authority to start a war with Iran.
  6. Let’s compare this week’s statements from the White House on recent elections in Russia and Venezuela:
    • On Russia: “We’re focused on our elections. We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate… What we do know is Putin has been elected in their country… We can only focus on the freeness and the fairness of our elections.”
    • On Venezuela: “Venezuela’s election was a sham—neither free nor fair. The illegitimate result of this fake process is a further blow to the proud democratic tradition of Venezuela. … America stands against dictatorship and with the people of Venezuela.”
  1. Trump meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in to discuss the upcoming summit with South Korea. And then Trump says that the summit might not happen on June 12 as planned.
  2. North Korea makes a show of destroying the site where they conducted their nuclear weapons testing, and while they’re doing that...
  3. …Trump cancels the June 12 meeting with North Korea because of what he calls open hostility and tremendous anger on their side. This was just days after South Korean leader Moon was at the White House meeting with Trump and thinking everything was A-OK. Trump has been dampening expectations for days so the news wouldn’t seem so shocking.
  4. Trump didn’t appreciate North Korea’s criticism of Mike Pence. After Pence compared North Korea to Libya, North Korean officials called him a political dummy. They also said they wouldn’t beg for a meeting and threatened a nuclear showdown, and were reconsidering the planned summit themselves.
    • So basically here’s how it went down: Bolton mentioned the Libya model, Trump said that’s not how it would go down, and then Pence brought up the Libya model again. Voila. No summit.
  1. The military says they’re ready to respond to North Korea if necessary, and Trump holds open the door to future talks.
  2. South Korean officials say they were blindsided, confused, and disappointed by the news. They convened an emergency meeting at midnight to discuss this new development, and to try to figure out Trump.
  3. The new ambassador to South Korea is taking his position at a time of high drama, and will have his work cut out for him in answering to the South Korean government. Luckily both Ambassador Harry Harris and his wife are experts on Asia.
  4. The leaders of North and South Korea hold a surprise meeting to try to keep their talks on track, and to possibly keep the summit between Kim Jong Un and Trump in play.
  5. A group of U.S. officials go to North Korea to continue talks in preparation for a possible summit.
  6. The New York Times reports a senior White House official as saying that if the summit is back on, it would have to be delayed. And then Trump accuses the New York Times of making up the source… even though said source made the statement in a press briefing to a group of around 250 reporters.
  7. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) turns down Trump’s offer to become the U.S. ambassador to Australia. Corker plans to retire at the end of this year.
  8. The Senate Banking Committee overwhelmingly approves an amendment preventing Trump from aiding Chinese company ZTE without first proving that ZTE is in compliance with U.S. law.
  9. A U.S. embassy worker in China reports a strange noise and then suffers a brain injury. This is comparable to the experience of embassy workers in Cuba.
  10. The Pentagon rescinds an invitation to China to participate in naval exercises over China expanding their military into certain areas of the South China Sea. Over two dozen nations are participating.
  11. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect (this is why you’ve been getting so many privacy policy notifications). The GDPR sets a high standard for how our personal data is collated through the web. The U.S. went the other way last year when Trump not only overturned Obama‘s privacy rules, but also specified that no similar rule could be made in the future without an act of Congress.
  12. Two men set off an explosion in an Indian restaurant in Mississauga, Ontario. Fifteen people are injured. Police have suspects, but no arrests and no motive.
  13. Ireland votes overwhelmingly to legalize abortion.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Trump signs a financial reform bill that will weaken Dodd-Frank by exempting “smaller” and “community” banks from the rules. It raises the threshold at which the rules apply from banks bigger than $50 billion to banks bigger than $250 billion.
  2. Trumps signs the Right To Try legislation, which allows terminally ill patients to try experimental and unapproved treatments.
  3. Trump signs a major Veterans Administration reform bill that, among other things, gives vets better access to private doctors.
  4. Trump signs the SECRET Act into law, which aims to expedite clearing the backlog of security clearances. Trump reserves the right to not comply saying that it encroaches on his constitutional authority. It seems he objects to the reporting requirements.
  5. Trump signs three executive orders this week that will make it easier to fire federal workers and to dampen the role of unions for federal workers.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump signs a resolution rolling back protections for minorities getting auto loans. The rule was put in place because auto lenders regularly charge minorities and women more for auto loans or make them harder to get.
  2. In a crackdown on free speech, the NFL says they’ll fine any team whose members kneel for the national anthem. The Jets owner says he’ll pay those fines, even though he voted for them.
  3. Trump approves of the NFL decision, of course, and says that maybe people who don’t stand for the anthem shouldn’t even be in this country (the country with the most free speech in the world).
  4. Betsy DeVos proves she doesn’t know the law when she says schools should decide whether to report undocumented students to ICE. She says Congress needs to clarify the law, but the Supreme Court already clarified it, deciding that schools can’t report these kids.
  5. According to the head of the nation Border Patrol union, deploying the National Guard to the border has so far been a huge waste of resources.
  6. DHS says they lost track of 1,500 migrant children they had placed with sponsors last year. This raised concern of them being lost to traffickers, but could simply be people who don’t want to be found. Once kids are released to sponsors (who are mostly family members), DHS is no longer responsible.
  7. A Border Patrol agent shot a young woman crossing the border in Texas, killing her. After initially saying a group of immigrants attacked him with blunt objects, the security guard changes his story to say that they rushed him.
  8. Gavin Grimm wins a lawsuit against a school in Virginia for discriminating against him by not letting him use the restroom for the gender he identifies with.
  9. Pilots at the IASCO Flight Training School take it upon themselves to kidnap and attempt to deport a Chinese student who they say doesn’t speak English well enough to fly a plane.
  10. Trump calls for major changes to immigration laws, even suggesting immigrants don’t deserve hearings. He says he won’t sign any immigration reform that doesn’t build his wall.
  11. Trump nominates Ronald Mortenson to be assistant secretary of state at the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Mortenson says undocumented immigrants commit felonies to get jobs, that they’re thieves, and that they target children.

Climate/EPA:

  1. The EPA bars the Associated Press, CNN, and E&E (an environmental news organization) from a summit about toxic contaminants in water. Scott Pruitt had previously attempted to block a recent scientific report highlighting the dangers of this contamination.
  2. A wildlife commission in Wyoming unanimously approves the first grizzly bear hunt in Wyoming in over 40 years. Up to 22 bears could be killed, and this is just one year after these bears were taken off the endangered species list.
  3. Internal memos show that White House officials are weighing their options on climate change. Should they have a red-team/blue-team exercise to make people question the science? Just ignore climate change and hope it’ll go away? Give the science a more formal review? They’ve worked to eliminate policies that protect us from global warming, while their own researchers continue prove that global warming is a thing, it’s manmade, and it’s a threat to the U.S.
  4. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers publishes a letter they sent to Trump last month urging him to keep the fuel efficiency requirements that were set under Obama because “climate change is real.”

Budget/Economy:

  1. Goldman Sachs predicts that, after the Republican tax reform last year, our economic outlook isn’t good. The tax reform gave major tax cuts to business and the wealthy, increasing the deficit to over $1 trillion. The expanding deficit and higher debt level could cause interest rates to spike, which would expand the deficit further.
  2. The Congressional Budget Office says that the tax reform will likely stimulate job growth but that it will also cause us to have a deficit that matches our GDP by 2028.
  3. China triples its purchase of soy from Russia and cancels orders from the U.S. amid trade disputes with the U.S.
  4. Mixed messages. Steven Mnuchin says the U.S. will put the trade war with China on hold. A few hours later, the U.S. trade representative tells Beijing that we might still impose tariffs.
  5. China says it’ll cut tariffs on imported cars and automotive parts, as promised.
  6. Federal regulators plan to weaken the Volcker Rule, which was put in place to prevent another financial crisis by preventing financial institutions from making risky bets with our money. Banks have long complained that these rules are too hard in them, apparently forgetting how hard the recession they largely caused was on every American, and many people never fully recovered from it.
  7. As part of their Better Deal economic plan, Democrats announce a $50 billion plan to increase spending on schools, education, and teacher salaries. The money would come from rescinding the tax cuts on the most wealthy.
  8. The GAO approves Trump’s request to freeze $15 billion in funds while waiting for Congress to approve the removal of those funds from budget spending.
  9. As a way to force Canada’s and Mexico’s hands in NAFTA negotiations, Trump says he’s considering a 25% tax on imported cars.
  10. The average price of gas is up 31 cents over the past year.
  11. The House passes a bill that includes approval of Trump’s military parade.
  12. Four months after getting a tax cut from the GOP tax reform plan, Harley-Davidson lays off 800 workers, closes a factory, and increases shareholder profits in a stock buy-back.

Elections:

  1. A new economic study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that Twitter bots could have been effective enough to influence the 2016 presidential elections by 3.23 percentage points and the Brexit vote by 1.76 percentage points. This only matters because the margins in both races were so narrow.
  2. Stacy Abrams wins the Democratic primary in Georgia, becoming the first African-American woman to be on a major party ticket for governor of Georgia.
  3. And another first, former Sheriff Lupe Valdez won her Democratic primary, becoming the first gay Latina to be on a major party ticket for governor in Texas.
  4. Students at Florida colleges sue Governor Rick Scott for not allowing early voting at their schools.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The DOJ’s inspector general wraps up his investigation into the Hillary Clinton email investigation (yes, the investigation was being investigated, not Hillary herself). He releases a draft to Congress but doesn’t give a date for the official release.
  2. Trump’s cellphone doesn’t have the required security features because it’s too inconvenient. Obama turned over his devices every 30 days for a security review. But hey. Lock HER up! Right?
  3. Journalist Lesley Stahl says that before an interview last year, Trump told her that he bashes the press in order to “discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” So there you have it.
  4. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump finally both get permanent top secret security clearance.
  5. Six families of children killed at Sandy Hook file a defamation lawsuit against Alex Jones, who calls the attack a “false flag” and the mourning families “crisis actors.” Too bad they can’t sue him for being a vile human being.
  6. Jeff Flake flames Trump in a college commencement speech, saying we might have hit rock bottom.
  7. Trump is known to tell a lie or two, but his rate of lying has escalated from about 4.9 lies a day in his first 100 days in office to 9 lies a day as of March.
  8. A turf war between Jeff Sessions and Jared Kushner over prison reforms leads to the resignation of the federal prisons director, just nine months after Trump appointed him.
  9. Police in Chicago protest Rahm Emanuel over the status of Officer Robert Rialmo’s suspension, possibly without pay. Rialmo shot a teen carrying a baseball bat and an innocent bystander.
  10. Parents of Santa Fe shooting victims sue the parents of the shooter for failing to secure their guns.
  11. The firm of Stormy Daniel’s lawyer, Michael Avanatti, gets fined in bankruptcy court and needs to cough up $10 million.
  12. Another school shooting, in Indiana this time.

Polls:

  1. I’m pretty surprised by this Pew study… Just 25% of white evangelicals think the U.S. has a responsibility to take in refugees. 51% of Americans overall think we do, and 65% of the religiously unaffiliated think we do.
  2. The numbers for Democrats and Republicans are inverse, with 26% of Republicans saying it’s our responsibility compared to 74% of Democrats.
  3. 59% of Americans don’t think Mueller’s uncovered any crimes, even though there are 17 criminal indictments, five guilty pleas, one person involved is serving jail time, and another is about to be sentenced.

Week 67 in Trump

Posted on May 7, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Here’s how fast things change from week to week. From Peter Baker of the New York Times:

“As of last week, the American public had been told that President Trump’s doctor had certified he would be the “the healthiest individual ever elected.” That the president was happy with his legal team and would not hire a new lawyer. That he did not know about the $130,000 payment to a former pornographic film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him.

As of this week, it turns out that the statement about his health was not actually from the doctor but had been dictated by Mr. Trump himself. That the president has split with the leaders of his legal team and hired the same new lawyer he had denied recruiting. And that Mr. Trump himself financed the $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of the actress known as Stormy Daniels.”

Also, ICYMI, you should change your Twitter password.

Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. The New York Time obtains a list of questions that Mueller supposedly wants to ask the president. The questions turn out to be written by Trump’s legal team (specifically Jay Sekulow) after Mueller gave them the topics he wants to talk about.
  2. But still, Trump tries to use the questions as proof that Mueller isn’t looking into collusion… even though several of the questions are about collusion.
  3. The leaked questions apparently came from the Trump team, who is blaming the leak on Mueller, which is unlikely because Mueller’s team has probably never seen this list.
  4. At any rate, the president’s team says this proves that Mueller has overreached the scope of his investigation even though they aren’t Mueller’s questions.
  5. Trump’s lead attorney John Dowd (now resigned) says that Mueller recently brought up the idea of subpoenaing Trump if he refuses to appear. In response, Trump says Mueller is trying to set him up and trap him.
  6. Ty Cobb announces his retirement as White House Counsel, and Emmet Flood will replace him. Flood was an impeachment lawyer for Bill Clinton in the 90s.
  7. No one in Trump’s current legal team has the security clearances needed to discuss sensitive issues should Trump meet with Mueller. John Dowd, who left in March, was the only one on the team who had the needed clearance.
  8. Cambridge Analytica closes its operations after losing clients and facing steep legal fees. The company is accused of misusing Facebook data to influence the 2016 elections in the U.S. and to influence the Brexit vote in the UK.
  9. But then we learn that Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer have already joined a new data company, Emerdata, as directors. The Mercers were the money behind Cambridge Analytica, and Emerdata is owned by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. The CEO and other members of Cambridge Analytica have also moved over to Emerdata. It seems they’re just rebranding Cambridge Analytica as Emerdata.
  10. UK regulators order Cambridge Analytica to release the information they scraped about a U.S. voter along with details on how they obtained the data and what they did with it. The voter requested the information under UK laws, getting around the U.S. system that doesn’t provide the means to obtain this data. It’s possible we could all force Cambridge Analytica to give us this information about our own data.
  11. In a round of media interviews, Rudy Giuliani says:
    • Trump is immune from being subpoenaed in a criminal proceeding (something the Supreme Court has not yet supported—the court tends to reject efforts to protect the president this way).
    • Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein should redeem themselves by ending the special counsel’s investigation.
    • FBI agents are like Nazi stormtroopers.
  1. The judge in Paul Manafort’s trial questions why Mueller’s investigation into Manafort falls under his jurisdiction but the investigation into Michael Cohen doesn’t. He wonders if Mueller is just trying to squeeze Manafort for information about Trump.
  2. None of the above means the judge thinks Manafort isn’t guilty; he just raises the possibility of sending the case down to a state prosecutor.
  3. Mueller puts in a request for 70 blank subpoenas in the Manafort case.
  4. Mueller also requests a 60-day postponement in Michael Flynn’s sentencing.
  5. Devin Nunes didn’t bother to read a document turned over to him by the DOJ after Nunes threatened impeachment against Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The 2-page document contains the evidence used by the DOJ and FBI to open the Russia investigation (not the same as the Steele dossier, BTW).
  6. And now Nunes wants to hold Jeff Sessions in contempt of Congress for not releasing classified documents to Nunes‘ committee, which is investigating FISA abuses.
  7. Rod Rosenstein responds to the articles of impeachment drawn up against him by the House Freedom Caucus by saying that the DOJ won’t be extorted and that threats won’t stop him from doing his job.
  8. We learn that after Trump agreed to sell the Ukraine missiles to help in their fight against Russia last year, the Ukraine stopped cooperating with the Mueller investigation and they halted their own investigation into Paul Manafort.
  9. Demonstrators across Russia rally to protest Vladimir Putin’s inauguration. Nearly 1,600 protesters are arrested, including Putin’s most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny.

Courts/Justice:

Apparently the Justice Department has been too busy fighting congressional subpoenas to get anything done this week.

Healthcare:

  1. Tom Price, former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, says that last year’s tax reform will raise health insurance costs because it repealed the individual mandate. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees, saying average premiums will increase by around 10% per year more than if the mandate remained in place. This will amount to about an 18% increase this year, according to the Urban Institute.
  2. Whoops! Tom Price later walks those statements back, saying repealing the mandate was absolutely the right thing to do.
  3. The Urban Institute also predicts that getting rid of the mandate, along with other changes like allowing substandard policies, will cost the federal government $33 billion per year MORE to insure 6.4 million FEWER people.
  4. Four million fewer people are already uninsured compared to this time in 2016.
  5. Iowa passes the “Fetal Heartbeat” bill, making most abortions illegal after about 6 weeks (or once a heartbeat is detected). Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at this point.
  6. Because it’s not enough that fentanyl added to heroine led to a massive increase in overdoses, dealers are also adding fentanyl to cocaine. Cocaine deaths have been rising as dealers target drug users who are trying to avoid opiates. Many states don’t keep record of this kind of drug combination, but in Connecticut where they do track it, cocaine+fentanyl deaths rose 420% over the past three years.
  7. Trump says he’ll appoint Dr. Mehmet Oz to the Sport, Fitness, and Nutrition council.

International:

  1. In a public presentation to the Israeli Defense Ministry, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Iran has lied about its nuclear weapons program. The information he presents is from 1999-2003, a time when we pretty much knew Iran was lying about their program, but the presentation seems aimed at making us think they’ve broken the Iran deal, which Netanyahu wants Trump to dump.
    My 2 cents? Leaving the agreement frees up Iran to develop whatever nuclear program they want, and we will have given them back $1.7 billion worth of previously frozen assets to do it. What kind of deal is that?
  2. We learn that Trump aides hired Israeli private investigators last year to find dirt on key members of the Obama administration who were responsible for negotiating the Iran deal, including national security advisors Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl. One thing they were trying to find is whether either Rhodes or Kahl had benefited personally or professionally from the deal (which IMO reveals more about Trump than it does about Rhodes or Kahl).
  3. Kahl reveals a mysterious attempt from a UK company last year to contact his wife about a school she volunteers with. The company’s website has since been taken down, and Kahl thinks it was part of the above investigation.
  4. The Israeli investigators hired by Trump’s aides were also hired by Harvey Weinstein to go after his accusers and stop the publicity around his sexual harassment and abuse.
  5. After Netanyahu’s presentation, the White House issues a statement that Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear program that it hides from the world and Iranian citizens. This alarms many people because of its similarities to the accusations that pushed us into the Iraq war. The White House later updates the statement to say Iran HAD not HAS such a program. They blame the error on a typo.
  6. John Kerry has been working behind the scenes to save the Iran deal, meeting with UN and foreign officials to find ways to keep the deal in place.
  7. Trumps says that withdrawing from the Iran deal sends North Korea the right message in the lead up to our negotiations with them. I guess that could be true if the right message is that we don’t hold up our agreements.
  8. If the U.S. pulls out of the Iran deal, it would leave the rest of the world to navigate a very complicated web of sanctions on international businesses.
  9. The Trump administration is working to get three U.S. hostages held in North Korea released. I wish him success, but two things: 1) Rudy Giuliani claims that their release has already been obtained (it hasn’t), and 2) Trump says that the past administration tried to get them released with no success (two of the three were imprisoned last year, so it’s highly doubtful Obama was involved).
  10. North Korea accuses Trump of provoking them with his tough talk on military might. They also warn us not to mistake their willingness to talk for weakness.
  11. Ahead of his meeting with North Korea, Trump orders the Pentagon to prepare for pulling troops out of South Korea.
  12. Trump freezes funding for Syria‘s main humanitarian group, the White Helmets. If you don’t know who they are, check out the short documentary about them.
  13. Suicide bombers in Kabul kill at least 31 people.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The House chaplain, who Paul Ryan forced to resign last week, rescinds his resignation, forcing Ryan to either fire him or keep him on. Ryan decides to keep him, leaving us all wondering what the heck happened there.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Seven states, including Texas, file a lawsuit against the Trump administration to end DACA, even though Trump has already attempted to do this and the courts stopped him.
    • Here are the states involved in the suit, along with the number of people with DACA status: Texas (121,000), South Carolina (6,400), Arkansas (5,100), Alabama (4,300), Nebraska (3,400), Louisiana (2,000), and West Virginia (100).
    • Compare that to California (223,000), Illinois (42,000), New York (42,000), and Florida (33,000). It seems the states least affect by DACA (with the exception of Texas) are the ones that want to end it.
  1. An all-black, all-female team of three was named a finalist in NASA’s high school competition, but NASA had to end public voting early when racists on 4chan launched a racially-based social media campaign against them.
  2. Kirstjen Nielsen, Homeland Security Secretary, ends temporary protected status for the Hondurans who came hear nearly two decades ago as refugees after Hurricane Mitch devastated their country. That’s nearly 86,000 people who have called the U.S. their home for 20 years.
  3. They may not call it a Muslim ban, but actions speak louder than words. So far this fiscal year, Christians refugees admitted into the U.S. outnumber Muslims by more almost four times. 1,800 Muslims have been allowed compared to 6,700 Christians, and the number of Muslims has shrunk by more than any other religious group, right in line with Trump having said he’ll prioritize Christian refugees.
  4. Several U.S. citizens get caught up each year in ICE detainments, some of whom have been detained for over three years. The average time U.S. citizens are detained is 180 days; that’s a half a year these people lose. Citizens have also been deported, and had to have an embassy intervene for their return.
    Side note: It’s illegal for ICE to detain U.S. citizens. Where’s the accountability here?
  5. About 250 members of the caravan of asylum seekers marching across Mexico reach the U.S. border, where most are turned away by border patrol. 49 have been admitted to the U.S. while the rest are living in a tent city south of the border.
  6. Mike Pence calls Joe Arpaio a tireless champion for the rule of law. In case you forgot, Arpaio’s lost countless civil suits for his treatment of prisoners and is also a convict himself, though he was pardoned by Trump.
  7. 2017 saw a 17% drop in international students coming to the U.S. Why is this important? Foreign students contribute about $37 billion to the U.S. economy each year.
  8. In 44 states, a majority of residents support the right for same-sex couples to marry. The states that don’t support it: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Alabama is the only state where a majority oppose that right.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Eighteen states, including California, sue the Trump administration over its attempts to roll back Obama-era fuel efficiency goals.
  2. The sea ice cover in the Bering Sea this winter hit a record low, and a striking low at that. It was just half the cover of the previous record low.
  3. Scott Pruitt’s questionable foreign travel has been facilitated by lobbyists and wealthy donors, including Richard Smotkin, who arranged Pruitt’s trip to Morocco was later awarded a $40,000/month contract to lobby for the Moroccan government. Sheldon Adelson helped him with his trip to Israel. And former lobbyist Matthew Freedman worked to line up a trip to Australia.
  4. Three top-level officials part ways with the EPA after Pruitt testified to Congress the previous week. Pruitt blamed subordinates for his own ethical lapses.
  5. Under Ryan Zinke, the Fish and Wildlife Service removes Yellowstone grizzlies from the endangered species list. At the same time they’re working on solutions to diversify this small group of bears by importing bears from other areas. So they’ll take bears from areas where they’re still considered endangered, and move them to an area where they are not considered endangered?
  6. There are rumors of a power struggle between Pruitt and Zinke, which could be why so many negative stories about both of them are coming out.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The unemployment rate drops to 3.9%, and wages rise slightly, though not as much as economists expect in such a tight labor market. One reason could be increasing inflation or fears of it.
  2. California moves up to fifth in the world economies, behind the U.S., China, Japan, and Germany. The state is 12% of the U.S. population (nearing 40 million) and provides 14.2% of the U.S. economy.
  3. Marco Rubio criticizes the GOP tax reform, saying, “There’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.”
  4. Whoops again! He later walks that statement back (just like Tom Price did on healthcare).
  5. Arizona teachers end their walkout after getting most, but not all, of what they were protesting for.
  6. Here’s a new one for corporations. They’ve started creating response plans just in case Trump targets them or their industry in one of his Twitter rants.
  7. The Purdue University Ag Economy Barometer, which shot up on Trump’s election, falls for the second month in a row. The barometer is an indicator of how the agricultural industry is doing as a whole.

Elections:

  1. All four Federal Election Commission (FEC) commissioners have held their jobs well past their intended terms. They’ve stayed on 11, 9, 7, and 5 years past the end of their terms. Also, there are supposed to be six commissioners, not four. The Senate majority and minority leaders are supposed to recommend replacements, but they haven’t.
  2. The DOJ updates its policy manual, removing a reference to maintaining a free press and expanding their policy on whistleblowers.
  3. Paul Ryan warns that if Democrats win in the November midterms, they could make it impossible to get anything done and would be more aggressive in congressional oversight of the administration. Well if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black…
  4. Since not enough has been done to ensure the security of our midterm elections from foreign interference, Democrats in Congress pledge to NOT exploit any stolen materials in their campaigns. Republicans have so far refused to do the same, leaving us open to continued interference.
  5. Dianne Feinstein is the frontrunner in California’s senate race, but the second place runner is an anti-Semite running on the Republican ticket. The GOP just kicked him out of their convention and plan to vote to kick him out of the party. But how is this guy second?!

Miscellaneous:

  1. Thousands of demonstrators in Puerto Rico protest over austerity measures, which come at a horrible time as they try to rebuild. Police shut the protests down using tear gas.
  2. The Department of Education is sending $600 million in disaster assistance to Puerto Rico.
  3. Trump’s previous personal physician, Harold Bornstein, who before the 2016 election purportedly wrote a glowing letter about Trump’s health in hyperbolic terms, now says that Trump dictated that letter. You’re shocked, I know. I was shocked too.
  4. Bornstein also says that Trump aides, including his personal bodyguard, raided Bornstein’s office and took all of Trump’s medical records. The White House says that was just part of the transition into office.
  5. With both Trump and Pence slated to speak at the NRA convention, parts of the convention have ironically been designated gun-free zones. Good thing the bad guy with a gun didn’t find out there were no good guys with a gun there.
  6. During his NRA speech (and also full of irony), Trump reads an article from “fake news” CNN as proof that Mueller overreached in his investigation (though the article didn’t really say that).
  7. Also in his speech, Trump criticized both France’s and the UK’s gun laws, saying those laws failed to prevent the 2015 terrorist attack in France and the knife violence in the UK. To bring his point home, Trump mimed shooting a gun at one victim at a time in reference to the Paris attacks. France and the UK are both pretty pissed.
  8. At the NRA convention, you can buy pistols that look like cell phones. This come just one month after Sacramento police killed an unarmed man because they mistook his cell phone for a gun.
  9. Rudy Giuliani tries to clear Trump of one crime by insinuating he committed another—and on a Hannity interview no less. He says Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payment, inferring that Trump knew about the hush money despite his claims otherwise.
  10. Giuliani also says it’s possible Trump paid hush money to additional women, but later walks that back.
  11. Trump, or more likely someone more speaking for Trump, tweets an explanation for what Giuliani said, but basically confirms that he reimbursed Cohen.
  12. Trump himself excuses Giuliani saying that he’s the new guy and he’ll get his facts straight. Well then what was he doing touring national TV talk shows?
  13. In another less than helpful moment, Giuliani says it would be OK if Mueller went after Jared Kushner, but not Ivanka. Apparently Kushner is disposable.
  14. Giuliani later says that Trump didn’t realize until just last week that his payments to Michael Cohen were to cover the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels.
  15. Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, tweets the relevant FEC rules, which suggest that no matter how the payment went down, election rules were violated.
  16. Trump signs an executive order to expand grants and partnerships with faith-based groups in an effort to reduce separation of church and state. Every agency is ordered to work on faith-based partnerships.
  17. Even the Nobel prize runs up against #MeToo. There will be no prize in literature awarded this year because of a sex scandal. They’ll name two winners next year instead.
  18. And speaking of the Nobel prize, several House Republicans nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for the work he’s doing with North Korea.
  19. In John McCain’s new book, he says he regrets not picking Joe Lieberman as his 2008 running mate instead of Sarah Palin. Even if they still wouldn’t have been elected, I would argue that picking Lieberman would’ve drastically changed our current political climate.
  20. Gina Haspel offers to withdraw her name from the nomination for CIA director, but the White House says they’ll continue to back her.
  21. Rick Perry supports ending the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) because he thinks applied research belongs in the private sector (I guess so someone can profit off it). ARPA-E advances innovative energy research, often resuscitating research that stalled in the private sector. George W. Bush created ARPA-E, but it was first funded by Obama, so that could be why Trump wants to kill it.
  22. You remember that lobbyist’s condo that Scott Pruitt was paying submarket rents for? Well it turns out that Mike Crapo (R-ID), the Senate Banking Committee chair, held 78 campaign events there.
  23. NASA launches a new mission to Mars. The InSight robotic lander will send a probe into the layers of Mars’ surface and study the structure. It’s scheduled to land on Mars on November 26.
  24. And in nonpolitical news, Mt. Kilauea erupts on Hawaii’s big island, opening multiple fissures in Leilani Estates, causing evacuations, and destroying homes, cars, and structures. The eruption caused several earthquakes, including one 6.9 in magnitude. The smaller island of Kauai had it’s own national disaster a few weeks ago, with severe flooding on the north side after receiving 50 inches of rain in 24 hours.