Tag: michael cohen

Week 110 in Trump

Posted on March 5, 2019 in Politics, Trump

By J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post via Getty Images.

It was week full of news and punctuated by Trump hugging the American flag and giving the longest speech ever at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference. It’s hard to fact-check a 20-minute Trump speech, much less one that lasts over two hours. So I’ll summarize. He lies about immigration, the VA, late-term abortions, tax reforms, the Green New Deal, Mueller’s investigative team, healthcare, solar power (actually what he says here is not so much a lie as it is just dumb), tariffs, Russia, crowd sizes, ISIS, and the economy. He brags about his 2016 election, brags about firing Comey, defends his declaration of national emergency, backtracks on his comments about Otto Warmbier, excuses poor cabinet choices, accuses Members of Congress of hating our country (wow), bags on Jim Mattis, claims he doesn’t have white hair (huh?), takes credit for the 2018 elections (Senate) but then says he’s not responsible for the 2018 elections (House), announces a “free speech” executive order for college campuses, and makes fun of a sitting Senator. And of course CPAC wouldn’t be complete if he didn’t berate Democrats as socialists.

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. A county judge in North Carolina ruled that two amendments put forth to the voters last November by the state’s legislature are unconstitutional. The basis for his decision was that NC’s General Assembly was “illegally constituted” due to racial gerrymandering. NC’s government has been caught up in lawsuits for over two years. Dig deeper here.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. A bipartisan group of 58 former national security officials issue a statement saying there is no factual basis for the national emergency over the wall.
  2. A Republican group of 24 former Members of Congress sign a letter urging Republicans in office to pass a joint resolution to end the national emergency.
  3. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers recalls Wisconsin’s National Guard troops from the southern border saying there’s no justification for it. New Mexico has already ordered all troops away from their border, and California has pulled their troops out as well.
  4. Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy says there’s no military threat at our southern border and that we should be focused on risks from Russia and China. O’Shaughnessy is Commander, U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (USNORTHCOM).
  5. The House passes a resolution to end Trump’s declaration of national emergency over the wall. This means the Senate must vote on it. Mitch McConnell says it‘ll pass, but Trump will veto it.
  6. The House Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on the Trump administration’s policy of separating families seeking asylum at our southern border.

Russia:

  1. Adam Schiff, the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, says that if the final report on the Russia and obstruction investigations aren’t released to the public, he’ll subpoena the report and have Robert Mueller testify before the committee.
  2. Paul Manafort’s lawyers argue that he should get a lenient sentence in the D.C. case, because it’s not like he’s a drug dealer or murderer, there’s no evidence of Russia collusion, and he’s only guilty of garden variety crimes. Or rich people‘s crimes, as I call them.
    • Manafort has another sentencing hearing for a separate case on March 8 in Virginia.
    • On top of these, he could get more years for breaking his plea agreement and get additional trials for crimes for which he hasn’t been tried yet.
    • Mueller did amend one of his court statements that supported his claims that Manafort lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, but there’s still enough evidence to show Manafort lied.
  1. A federal judge rejects Andrew Miller’s claim that Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional. Now Miller has to testify to the grand jury or go to jail.
  2. It doesn’t take Roger Stone long to violate his gag order and in multiple ways.
    • The day the judge issues the gag order, Stone violates the order with a tweet which he then deletes.
    • Next he responds to an email from VICE News saying that Cohen’s statement is entirely untrue.
    • Next he gets called back into court to explain the imminent release of a book that will likely violate the gag order and that neither he nor his defense team mentioned to the judge.
    • And THEN, Stone posts on Instagram that Mueller framed him. Seriously, this guy can’t help himself.
  1. Some of Stone’s actions flat-out violate the gag order, but others are a little ambiguous. Here are the judge’s parameters:
    • Stone cannot speak publicly or to the media about the investigation, the case, or any of the participants.
    • Stone can speak publicly about raising funds for his defense.
    • Stone can say that he is innocent of charges against him.
  1. Russia’s state-sponsored news announces that Russia is developing hypersonic missiles that can reach the U.S. targets, like the Pentagon and Camp David, in under five minutes.
  2. U.S. Cyber Command says they blocked internet access for the Internet Research Agency (a Russian troll farm) during the 2018 elections.

Legal Fallout:

  1. During Sean Hannity’s interview with Trump, he claims to have information that contradicts Michael Cohen’s testimony about the Stormy Daniel’s hush money payments. If he does, Hannity could be called before Congress himself to testify.
  2. Michael Cohen begins three days of Congressional hearings. Two are behind closed doors and one, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is public. Here are a few things Cohen alleges (remember these are allegations):
    • Trump knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans to release the DNC’s hacked emails, and he found out through Roger Stone. Roger Stone disputes this.
    • Trump was completely involved in the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. Cohen provided Congress with a check signed by Trump and another signed by both Donald Trump, Jr., and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg.
    • Eric Trump was also involved the hush money payments.
    • Ivanka and Don, Jr., were both involved in the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, which continued throughout the campaign.
    • Cohen threatened Trump’s schools so they wouldn’t release his grades or SAT scores after Trump told him he didn’t want those records released. Fordham University confirms that they received a threatening letter.
    • Trump inflated his net worth in order to secure loans and to get on Forbes’ lists, but he deflated the worth of his assets for tax purposes.
    • Trump‘s taxes are likely not under audit.
    • Weisselberg knew about all the things—hush money, Trump Tower Moscow, bank fraud, insurance fraud, and tax fraud.
    • BuzzFeed’s reporting that Trump directly told Cohen to lie to Congress isn’t accurate. Cohen says Trump implied he should lie. BuzzFeed continues to stand by their story, so now I’m super curious about their source.
    • The rumors about mistreatment of Melania, a love child, and the existence of a sex tape are likely not true.
    • Cohen’s never been to Prague, disputing one point in the Steele Dossier.
    • Cohen and Corey Lewandowski discussed a Trump trip to Russia during the campaign.
    • There are other illegal acts and wrongdoing that weren’t discussed during his testimony. Some of those are currently under investigation in New York state.
    • Cohen didn’t want a White House position, so he’s not doing this out of vengeance for that. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) later files a complaint alleging that Cohen is lying about this.
    • Trump purchased a third portrait of himself through the Trump Foundation (we already knew about the first two).
    • Jay Sekulow, Trump’s lawyer, edited Cohen’s previous testimony to Congress, causing it to be false.
    • Trump doesn’t email or text. That’s so old-school, but could be his saving grace.
  1. Cohen provides a list of Trump associates who can corroborate these allegations or who have additional information. The questioning also gave the committee the basis to subpoena Trump’s tax returns.
  2. During Cohen’s testimony, Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) calls him a liar, Mark Meadows (R-NC) uses a black woman as a prop to prove Trump isn’t racist, and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) puts up a poster that says, “Liar Liar Pants On Fire.”
  3. During and after the hearing, committee chair Elijah Cummings worked hard to make sure both sides of the aisle felt heard and he concludes with a call for healing.
  4. Describing the destruction of our civility toward each other, Cohen says, “I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same things that you’re doing now. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years.”
  5. Just before Michael Cohen is to testify before Congress, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweets a thinly veiled threat. As a lawyer, he should know better. Here’s what he tweets:

“Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

    • So then legal experts and fellow Representatives call this a violation of House ethics rules and potential witness tampering.
    • And then the Florida Bar opens an investigation into whether Gaetz violated their regulations.
    • And then, Gaetz apologizes for the tweet and deletes it.
    • But then Gaetz continues to tweet and retweet disparaging comments and articles about Cohen throughout the hearings.
  1. The House Oversight Committee wants to interview Ivanka and Don, Jr. The House Intelligence Committee will interview Cohen, Weisselberg, and Felix Sater.
  2. The House Judiciary Committee opens an inquiry into alleged abuses of power by Trump, based on his attacks against the press, the courts, the FBI, and the DOJ. Presidents actually have wide leeway here.
  3. The House Ways and Means Committee announces they’ll demand Trump’s tax returns. Cohen’s testimony pretty much forced their hand on this.
  4. D.C.’s attorney general subpoenas documents from the Trump inaugural committee. This is the third active investigation into the committee’s finances.
  5. The House Financial Services Committee announces an investigation into Trump’s personal finances, specifically why Deutsche Bank was willing to loan him money at a time when nobody else would.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A federal court upholds the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks, but the plaintiffs in the case say they’ll appeal.
  2. Former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker abruptly leaves the DOJ.

Healthcare:

  1. The Senate votes against allowing the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” to proceed. A few things:
    • This bill appears to be intended to protect babies born alive after a botched abortion (this is a rare and extreme circumstance).
    • Late-term abortions can only be performed when the mother’s health or life is threatened, or when the fetus has a fatal condition. Less than 1% of abortions occur after fetal viability.
    • Infanticide is already illegal in the U.S., plus the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was already signed into law in 2002. The current bill mostly adds criminal penalties against doctors.
    • Typically the procedure in which the baby survives is not actually an abortion but natural or induced early labor.
    • All this is to say, doctors aren’t out there killing live babies willy-nilly.

International:

  1. Mike Pence joins the self-proclaimed interim President of Venezuela Juan Guaido in Bogota, Colombia to express U.S. support for Venezuela and opposition to Nicolas Maduro.
  2. At the same time, Trump travels to Vietnam for another summit with Kim Jong Un. Kim travels the 2,700 miles across China by private train, a 48-hour trip.
    • The summit is supposed to end with a signing ceremony, but Trump (probably rightly) walks out early when they can’t agree on demands.
    • Depending on the version you believe, one sticking point is that North Korea wants sanction relief for giving up just one of their nuclear facilities.
    • Ahead of the summit, the U.S. already dropped the requirement that North Korea disclose all of their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
    • Trump ends our large-scale military drills with South Korea in the interest of diplomacy with North Korea. Small-scale drills will continue.
    • There are no current plans for continuing the conversation.
    • Trump says he believes Kim when he says he didn’t know about how Otto Warmbier was being treated. The next day, Warmbier’s parents clarify that they blame Kim for the death.
    • This is rich coming from a dictatorship. North Korea says the Trump administration is a billionaire’s club that holds policies of racism, exacerbates social inequality, suppresses freedom of the press, and denies health coverage to U.S. citizens.
    • Trump blames Michael Cohen’s testimony for the talks falling apart.
    • Throughout the summit, North Korean hackers continue to target the U.S.
    • While the GOP pushes the narrative that Democrats=Socialists, Trump says this about socialist dictator Kim Jong Un: He’s “very sharp” and “a real leader.” “I like him.”
    • The White House bans several reporters from a joint dinner likely based on shouted questions about denuclearization and Michael Cohen during an earlier press event.
  1. Britain’s Labour Party supports another Brexit voter referendum in case voters have changed their minds. The deadline for Brexit is the end of March.
  2. I don’t know if you can indict a president, but it looks like you can indict a prime minister. The Israeli Attorney General announces he’ll move forward on indicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges.
    • Netanyahu faces an election in April, and says he won’t step down if he is re-elected and also indicted.
  1. Jared Kushner meets with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. They don’t talk about Khashoggi’s murder.
  2. Pakistan shoots down an Indian fighter pilot, who then parachutes down and gets beaten by a mob before being rescued by the Pakistani military. Air fights and shelling along the border by Kashmir escalates as a result.
    • This all started with a suicide bombing of Indian troops a few weeks ago.
    • Pakistan releases the pilot by week’s end.
    • The last thing we need right now (or ever) is escalating tensions between two nuclear powers.
  1. Justin Trudeau faces unrest in his government after former attorney general Jodi Wison-Raybould testifies that she was pressured to ignore bribery charges against a Canadian engineering company. Et tu, Justin? Say it isn’t so.
  2. After negotiating with the Taliban, the Pentagon issues a proposal to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan within five years.
  3. We learn that Saudi Arabia detained and then tortured a U.S. citizen with dual citizenship with Saudi Arabia.
  4. An American who’d been held in Yemen for 18 months is finally freed.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The House passes two background check bills:
    • The first fixes a loophole that currently allows gun dealers to transfer some guns before a background check is complete. Dylan Roof obtained his gun through this loophole.
    • The second bill requires a background check on ALL firearm sales. This is the first major gun control bill to pass the House in nearly 25 years.
  1. Republicans in the Senate say they don’t plan on dealing with any gun control bills, so these are both likely DOA.
  2. Trump says he’ll veto both bills if they make it to his desk.

Family Separation:

  1. Through a system of relief workers and immigration lawyers, 29 parents who were separated from the children last year make the trip back up to the border to demand asylum hearings and hopefully be reunited with their children. After 12 hours of negotiations, they’re all allowed into the U.S.
  2. At least 200 children are still separated from their parents.
  3. Because we’ve kept these children from their parents, those parents are now paying smugglers to come back to the U.S. illegally just to be with their kids. This isn’t working.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. West Virginia’s legislature got violent after the state Republican party set up a display in the statehouse linking Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to the 9/11 attacks.
    • Omar has been criticized repeatedly for what some call anti-Israel statements and what others call anti-Semitic statements.
    • Allegedly, the sergeant-at-arms for the state House said, “All Muslims are terrorists.”
  1. The Trump administration wants to expand their program to send Central American asylum seekers back to Mexico. Currently, this is only done at the Tijuana-San Diego ports of entry; the administration wants to do it in more border cities.
    • This is already endangering refugees in Tijuana, which doesn’t have the resources to handle the influx. Relief agencies are taking the brunt of this.
  1. Because of the barriers to legal immigration put in place by the Trump administration, more people are crossing the border illegally. Again, this isn’t working.
  2. Relief agencies claim that nine infants under one-year-old are being held in migrant detention centers without the required level of care.
  3. The U.S. government has received nearly 6,000 complaints of sexual abuse of detained migrant minors over the past four years.
  4. All four anti-transgender bills introduced in the South Dakota state legislature this year are now dead with the failure to pass the fourth one this week.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Following on the Senate’s passage of the bill last week, the House passes a public lands conservation bill that protects over a million acres of wilderness and reauthorizes conservation funding.
  2. A group of youth climate activists protest at Mitch McConnell’s Senate office to demand he take the Green New Deal seriously. Police arrest 42 of them.
  3. The Senate confirms fossil-fuel lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to run the EPA, and immediately Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) files an ethics complaint against him. Apparently he’s been participating in meetings on issues he previously lobbied for and he’s been holding meetings with his lobbying clients, both in violation of his signed ethics pledge.
  4. A court rules that Trump has to pay the legal costs for the Scottish government in a case where Trump tried to get them to halt a wind turbine project in Scotland.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The White House trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, corrects Trump about memorandums of understanding (MOUs) in the middle of a trade talk. Trump says they don’t mean anything, but Lighthizer explains to the press that an MOU is actually a binding contract. Trump says he doesn’t agree, at which point Chinese vice premier Liu He cracks up.
  2. It’s the retail apocalypse. So far, companies have announced 4,300 retail store closings slated for this year.
  3. Even though we’ve implemented steep tariffs, the U.S. trade deficit is now 16% larger than when Trump took office, with imports exceeding exports by a record high of $914 billion in 2018.
    • Part of the problem is that countries retaliated with their own tariffs, which caused U.S. exports decline starting in May of 2018.
    • According to economists, macroeconomic factors, like tax cuts and increased federal spending, overwhelmed Trump’s attempts to target specific trade deficits.
    • This all pretty much supports Janet Yellen’s statement earlier this week that Trump doesn’t understand macroeconomic policies (which would explain the scattershot combination of tax, trade, healthcare, immigration, spending, and foreign policies).
  1. A report shows that the caps on state and local tax deductions will hit around 11 million people this year. What was redacted from the report, though, was a description of the efforts by the Treasury to block state workarounds for the cap.
  2. Over 1,000 TSA employees still haven’t received back pay from the shutdown. I guess they better hold more bake sales.

Elections:

  1. Mitch McConnell blames Democrats for the election fraud in North Carolina that likely threw the election to the Republican candidate.
    • He conflates election fraud (where a third party tries to interfere in the votes of legitimate voters) with voter fraud (where someone tries to vote illegally). Republican voter policies, which Democrats tend to disagree with, target voter fraud not election fraud.
    • For comparison, this single case of election fraud in NC affected more ballots than did all of the proven cases of voter fraud over the past 70 years (even according to the Heritage Foundation’s inflated numbers which also include cases of election fraud).
  1. Mark Harris, the Republican at the heart of the fraud case, will not run again for health reasons. He suffered a stroke earlier this year.
  2. A grand jury charges Leslie Dowless with seven felonies in connection with election fraud. More charges could follow.
  3. And speaking of voter fraud, remember how Trump pointed to the attempted Texas voter role purge as evidence of voter fraud? Well, a judge just blocked that effort calling it ham-handed and threatening.
    • Just an FYI, this purging effort is a direct result of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, where the Supreme Court decided we are a post-discrimination society so we no longer need to monitor those states with a history of voter discrimination.

Miscellaneous:

  1. We learn that Trump ordered John Kelly to grant top-secret clearance to Jared Kushner, overruling the red flags brought up by security staff and officials. Kelly documented the request at the time.
  2. New defense rules change the way troops are reported on the census. Now they’ll be counted where they’re usually stationed instead of where they typically live, which could cut funding to their local communities.
  3. Wynn Resorts gets hit with a record $20 million fine for failing to investigate claims of sexual misconduct against Steve Wynn. Wynn left the company last year.

Polls:

  1. 68% of Americans want Mueller’s report to be released to the public.

Week 105 in Trump

Posted on January 28, 2019 in Politics, Trump

The shutdown has finally come to an end, at least for now; but furloughed workers and the companies they owe will take some time to recover. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this past month cost us $11 billion, $3 billion of which we won’t make back. A complete waste of time and energy. Let’s get back to the business of governing and fixing the problems of the world.

Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. The new Democratic governor of Maine makes good on her promise to expand Medicaid by signing an executive order that should give healthcare coverage to around 70,000 Mainers. Even though voters approved Medicaid expansion over a year ago, former governor Paul LePage refused to implement it.
  2. Also, missed from last year: The DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women changed its definition of domestic violence. The definition was expanded under Obama and vetted by domestic violence experts. The new definition excludes psychological, mental, and emotional abuse; only felony acts can now be considered domestic violence.

Border Wall/Shutdown:

  1. Nancy Pelosi sends Trump a letter saying she’s postponing his State of the Union address due to security concerns from the government shutdown. Trump says he’ll do it anyway… until someone tells him that Pelosi has to invite him and she can uninvited him.
    • Trump says he’ll find another venue for it, possibly the Senate or maybe a rally. And then he says he’ll postpone it until after the shutdown.
  1. Meanwhile, both sides in both chambers of Congress work on deals to end the shutdown.
  2. The House Ways and Means Committee cancels a hearing on how the shutdown is affecting American taxpayers because Steve Mnuchin refuses to appear.
  3. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross says he doesn’t understand why furloughed and unpaid federal workers are using food banks. I guess when you have over $700 million, something like this can be hard to understand.
    • Ross says “There’s no reason why some institution wouldn’t be willing to lend.” His own department’s credit union charges federal workers 9% interest on emergency loans, while other lending institutions and cities begin offering them interest-free loans.
    • Because the Trump administration rescinded Obama’s payday lending regulations, the annual interest rate for payday loans in Missouri averages over 400%.
  1. Trump says you can just talk to your grocer if you’re a furloughed worker who can’t pay their bills. And that grocer will float you until you get paid. Sure.
  2. Nancy Pelosi defends the federal workers, saying they can’t just call their fathers for money.
  3. The House has passed bills at least 11 times to reopen the government. Meanwhile, the Senate fails to pass any bills to reopen the government, even those that were introduced by majority GOP members.
  4. The White House prepares a draft declaration of national emergency for the southern border as a possible means to end the shutdown.
  5. The FAA briefly halts flights into New York’s La Guardia airport over safety concerns due to lack of air traffic control personnel. This causes flight delays across the country and especially in New Jersey, Philadelphia, Orlando, and Atlanta.
  6. 14,000 unpaid IRS employees don’t show up to work. IT staffers at the IRS are finding work elsewhere.
  7. Irony alert 1: The State Department delays its upcoming conference on border security because of the shutdown.
  8. Irony alert 2: A lack of funding because of the shutdown hampers the FBI’s ability to fight child trafficking, violent crime, and terrorism according to the FBI Agents Association.
  9. Five former Homeland Security secretaries sign a letter to Trump asking him to end the shutdown for national security reasons. The signers are John Kelly, Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, and Jeh Johnson.
  10. The most under-covered story of this shutdown seems to be the protests in DC over the shutdown. Hundreds of federal workers and supporters have been protesting in government offices for more than a week.
  11. All nine Representatives for the southern border districts say a wall isn’t the right solution. Trump’s demeaning rhetoric about migrants is pushing the area toward Democrats—only one district there is represented by a Republican.
    • Interesting side note: Trump’s rhetoric about immigration and the wall worked best for elections in states that are furthest from the wall, like Montana and North Dakota. Closer to the border, residents resent the implications.
  1. Trump and Congress reach a deal to end the shutdown for three weeks (that’s until February 15). They create a committee to negotiate a deal for DHS funding, including border security.
  2. The deal is basically the same deal that House Democrats offered all along—reopen for three weeks and negotiate border security in the interim.
  3. In his speech announcing an end to the shutdown, Trump continues to call it a wall. He doesn’t seem to understand the optics he’s created around that terminology. But he also says we don’t need 2,000 miles of concrete wall and says some can be steel slats.
    • Trump says he’d shut the government down again if needed, or declare a state of emergency.
    • He repeats the false claims that drug smugglers turn right and then make a left turn into the U.S. and that women are all taped up and trafficked over the border.
    • He claims that in the history of the WORLD it’s never been this bad.
    • He repeats false claims about gang members removed by ICE and about the number of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. He just can’t help himself from lying about this.
  1. Republicans in the Senate face much pressure from constituents. Their meetings get heated, with a bit of finger pointing (mostly at McConnell) and a lot of yelling. IMO, it’s because they aren’t leading with what they know is right on this issue.
  2. Trump promises federal workers they’ll receive their back pay very fast (the government still hasn’t completed the back pay from the 2013 shutdown).
  3. By the end of the week, the government will owe unpaid federal workers $6 billion in back pay.
  4. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the shutdown cost the U.S. taxpayers $11 billion.

Russia:

  1. Here’s a simple breakdown of where the Russia investigation stands right now—who’s been charged, who’s guilty, and how they’re related.
  2. The New York Times also has a clear breakdown of the over 100 contacts between Trump associates (including Trump himself) and Russia.
  3. Rudy Giuliani tries to walk back his previous claims that the discussions for Trump Tower Moscow were still going on into November 2016.
  4. Donald Trump Jr. states again that “we” (and by that I assume he means the Trumps) didn’t know anything about Trump Tower Moscow. He blames Michael Cohen for the whole thing. I give you exhibits a and b. There are also allegedly hundreds of pages of documents and plans.
    1. A 2013 tweet
    2. A letter of intent
  5. Michael Cohen delays his public testimony before Congress indefinitely after Trump makes vague comments that could be construed as threats of retaliation against Cohen’s family.
    • The Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas him to appear before them in a closed-door hearing.
  1. Armed FBI agents raid Roger Stone’s home before dawn and arrest him on seven counts, including obstruction, lying, and witness tampering. Here are some claims in the indictment:
    • Stone communicated with the Trump campaign about the hacked emails in WikiLeaks’ possession.
    • Senior Trump campaign officials told Stone to find out more about WikiLeaks plans (WikiLeaks is “Organization 1” in the indictment).
    • Stone lied about having evidence to support these accusations, and he tried to get other witnesses to lie and withhold evidence.
    • Stone has always said (even on TV) that he had a middleman who actually contacted WikiLeaks. From this indictment it looks like there were two middlemen: “Person 1” is believed to be Jerome Corsi (confirmed by Corsi), and “Person 2” is believed to be Randy Credico.
    • After a release of hacked documents, a senior member of the Trump campaign was instructed to contact Stone to find out about any more planned releases. Stone kept this person informed of his progress. The senior member is assumed to be Steve Bannon, but this is only according to one source so far.
    • Emails and texts indicate that Stone was in frequent communication with the Trump campaign, Person 1, and Person 2 about the schedule for dumping the hacked emails as well as the content of those emails. (WaPo has a pretty thorough timeline of the messages.)
    • It was Corsi’s idea to start the rumors that Hillary is old, her memory’s bad, and she had a stroke.
    • There was a reporter who was aware of what was going on. Instead of covering it as the news it was, he or she was rooting for the emails to uncover something to destroy Hillary’s campaign.
    • After the dump of John Podesta’s emails, an associate of an unnamed senior campaign official sent Assange a message: “Well done.”
  1. Jerome Corsi says the indictment is accurate.
  2. The indictment quotes a bunch of documentary evidence supporting their charges, including emails and text messages between Stone and Person 1 and between Stone and Person 2.
  3. Stone pleads not guilty and is released on $250,000 bond. He says he’ll never make up lies against Trump, but he would be willing to testify to Mueller. Update: Whoops! He doesn’t plead not guilty until the following week.
  4. Stone is a decades-long advisor to Trump. He started his misinformation techniques on the Nixon campaign and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back.
  5. A Kiev court rules that the pro-Russian politician that Paul Manafort lobbied for, former President Viktor Yanukovych, committed treason. Yanukovych invited Russia to invade Ukraine, and has been accused of working for Russia, not Ukraine, while in office. He gets a 13-year prison sentence.
  6. Manafort has a court hearing over his alleged breach of his plea deal. The judge says she needs more information, and schedules a closed-door hearing for the first week of February.
  7. The Trump administration officially lifts the sanctions against Oleg Deripaska’s companies.
  8. It’s been three months since we determined that Russia violated the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act, but the Trump administration still hasn’t imposed the required sanctions as punishment for it.

Healthcare:

  1. The Department of Health and Human Services releases their changes to health insurance guidelines for 2020. If enacted, these changes are expected to increase premiums for ACA and employer plans, cut subsidies, and raise prescription costs.
    • The HHS says this will drop hundred of thousands of people off their insurance.
    • And I quote: “The savings to the Treasury are consistent with the idea that consumers would have to pay more.”
  1. The Massachusetts attorney general sues Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family who own it. The lawsuit alleges that they’re responsible for deceptive sales tactics for OxyContin. The AG accuses the family of engineering the opioid crisis.
  2. New York passes a bill to update their outdated abortion laws to protect and expand abortion rights in the state. It expands allowances for abortions after 24 weeks to include cases where the fetus is no longer viable and where the woman’s health is at risk (previously it only included when her life is at risk.) The bills also remove abortion from the criminal code and move it to the health code.
    • Pro-choice activists cheer the changes to the law law. Pro-life activists say the law allows abortion right up to birth. (It doesn’t. Also, just 1.4% of abortions occur after 21 weeks.)
  1. A state judge rules that Iowa’s fetal heartbeat abortion law is unconstitutional. It’s one of the country’s most restrictive abortion bans, as the heartbeat can be detected as early as 6 weeks in some cases.
  2. Washington state declares a state of emergency due to a measles outbreak. There are 35 confirmed cases, and measles can be fatal in young children and older people with lowered immunity. Measles was considered to be eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, but has seen a resurgence after some people stopped vaccinating their kids.

International:

  1. In the middle of U.S. trade negotiations with China, China grants Ivanka’s company preliminary approval for five new patents.
  2. The Taliban attacks a military base, killing dozens of Afghanistan intelligence agents. Taliban insurgents control over half of Afghanistan, but American, Afghan, and Taliban negotiators say they’re closing in on a truce.
  3. The U.S. officially quits UNESCO. Trump made the announcement last year, just as UNESCO was cleaning up most of the issues the U.S. had with the organization.
  4. After Nicolas Maduro announces he’s won the country’s presidential election, opposition leader Juan Guaidó says he won and even has his own swearing in.
    • The U.S. and most Latin American countries recognize Guaidó as the interim president and urge Maduro to give up power.
    • Maduro, in turn, gives U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave. They refuse to leave.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Senate Republicans are working to shorten the length of time the Senate can spend debating a presidential nomination.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The Supreme Court decides not to take up Trump’s DACA case for now, so Dreamers get another reprieve while the DACA program remains in place.
  2. But then…in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court allows Trump’s ban on transgender troops serving in the military to go into effect while the lower courts figure it out.
  3. The U.S. denies one of the stars of Roma, a 10-time Oscar nominated film, the visas needed to travel to the U.S. for the Oscars. Jorge Guerrero is a Mexican actor who’s been denied visas three times, despite letters from producers confirming his invitations. This isn’t the first time artists have been denied visas. Several South by Southwest artists were denied visas in 2017 after the initial Muslim ban.
  4. U.S. officials begin sending asylum seekers at the southern border back to Mexico to await the processing of their cases.
  5. The federal government issues a waiver that allows federally funded foster care agencies in South Carolina to deny services to same-sex or non-Christian couples.
  6. New York passes legislation to support Dreamers by allowing undocumented students to apply for assistance for college and by letting undocumented families take advantage of college savings programs. The bill also creates a college scholarship fund.
  7. The Trump Organization starts firing undocumented workers at its country clubs in New York. This is likely a reaction to a New York Times article that exposed them for not only hiring undocumented workers, but for also assisting these workers in obtaining false documents.
  8. Japan’s Supreme Court upholds a law that says if someone wants to change their gender on official documents, they must have their reproductive organs removed.
  9. Court records show that the police officer who led an investigation into a violent clash between anti-fascists and neo-Nazis in California focused his investigation on the anti-fascists.
    • The officer recommended charges be filed against 100 anti-fascists and against none of the neo-Nazis.
    • The officer researched the political leanings of the anti-fascists and not the neo-Nazis.
    • The officer considered the sticks for the flags carried by anti-fascists to be weapons; but then said that the sticks for the flags carried by the neo-Nazis weren’t weapons.
  1. In addition to the governor of Kansas reinstating protections for LGBTQ government workers, the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan do the same. Florida’s governor, on the other hand, omits LGBTQ people from an executive order on diversity in government.
  2. New York votes to ban conversion therapy for gay minors.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Under the Trump administration, civil penalties against polluters drop to their lowest level since 1994. And that’s not because companies stopped polluting.
  2. A Swedish teenage climate activist inspires youth rallies across Europe to bring attention to the lack of action on climate change. At Davos, she says:
    “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”
  3. 73% of Americans now believe that climate change is real, an increase of 10 percentage points over 2015. But it’s also about the same as 2009. We’ve literally gotten nowhere on this.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Furloughed and unpaid government workers will still be counted in the January jobs report as employed. Contractors who lost work because of the shutdown are considered unemployed for the jobs report.
  2. The Los Angeles teachers strike ends. Here’s what they get:
    • Smaller class sizes.
    • A nurse in every school, plus more counselors and librarians.
    • Steps against charter schools (privatization was a major issue of the strike).
    • Concessions on demands around immigrant rights, racial profiling, and green spaces at schools.
  1. Teachers are reviving the use of the strike as a worker weapon, something that’s been in decline for a while.
  2. More teacher strikes are on the horizon. Denver, Oakland, and Virginia teachers are talking about it.
  3. Union membership is at just 10.5%, down from 20.1% in 1983. The decline of unions is one of the causes for wage stagnation.
  4. The National Association of Business Economics finds that the 2017 tax reform bill hasn’t had a major impact on business investment or hiring plans.
  5. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross says that China and the U.S. are miles and miles away from ending the trade war.

Elections:

  1. Another state lawmaker changes party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. This time it’s San Diego Assemblymen Brian Maienschei, who says it’s partly because of Trump and partly because he’s changed.
  2. A judge in North Carolina denies Republican Mark Harris’s request to certify his election to Congress. His narrowly won election is still under dispute due to accusations of voter fraud and illegal ballot harvesting.
  3. A federal court decides on new district maps for Virginia’s House of Delegates districts. The maps would move the districts in favor of Democrats, which is no surprise since the gerrymandered lines were put in place by GOP legislatures.
  4. Even though ex-felons who’ve served their time can get their voting rights reinstated, several are saddled with incredible debt and owe restitution that they can’t afford. States are arguing right now whether to reinstate voting rights with or without full payment of restitution.

Miscellaneous:

  1. A 21-year-old man shoots and kills five people in a bank in Sebring, FL.
  2. Another 21-year-old man shoots and kills one man in a Pennsylvania bar and injures two others (one of whom later dies from his wounds). The shooter then breaks into a home and kills the homeowner and then himself.
  3. And yet another 21-year-old man shoots and kills five people in Louisiana, including his parents his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s father and brother. He’s later arrested in Virginia.
  4. A new report from the Anti-Defamation League finds that there were at least 50 extremist-related killings in the U.S. last year, and that every one of those was linked to at least one extreme right-wing movement (although one had switched to Islamic extremism). White supremacists were responsible for most killings.
  5. Jared Kushner’s security clearance was rejected by two career security specialists, but their supervisor, Carl Kline, overruled them. Kushner was one of at least 30 people in the administration for whom Kline overrode security clearance rejections.
  6. When Kushner’s security clearance request was bumped up to the CIA for the super-classified “sensitive compartmented information” (SCI) clearance, CIA officers called the White House security division to find out how Kushner ever got his original lower-level clearance.
  7. Trump says that he told Sarah Huckabee Sanders to stop having press briefings. SHS justifies this by saying reporters were just trying to make themselves into stars.
  8. Over the previous weekend, a viral video appeared to show students from an all-boys Catholic school mocking and disrespecting a Native American elder after the March for Life. This week, Twitter suspends the account apparently responsible for making the video go viral, calling it a fake account. (There are many interpretations of the hours and hours of video, and I’m not going to wade into that controversy. We’re all seeing it differently.)

Polls:

  1. Trump’s aggregated approval rating after the shutdown is around 39.4%.
  2. Trump’s losing his fight against the media:
    • Voters trust CBS more than him by 52% to 38%.
    • They trust NBC and the Washington Post more than him by 51% to 38%.
    • They trust ABC and the New York Times more than him by 51% to 39%.
    • They even trust CNN more than him by 49% to 39%.

Things Politicians Say:

“I am afraid it will be on my gravestone. ‘Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump.’”

~Rudy Giuliani, to The New Yorker

Trump has a “revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.”

~Chris Christie, in Let Me Finish

Week 99 in Trump

Posted on December 18, 2018 in Politics, Trump

So much happened last week, but my favorite part of the week was when Trump surprised Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer with a meeting with the press when they thought they were having a closed-door meeting. As far as transparency goes, that was awesome. But things went downhill fast, with a lot of shouting, a lot of misinformation, a bit of man-splaining, and some name-calling; only Nancy Pelosi was trying to talk policy. Pelosi came out of it not only looking like the adult in the room but also firmly pinning any potential government shutdown on Trump. It’s easy to see how she got the votes for Speaker.

Here’s what else happened this week…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx arrived in the orbit of an asteroid named Bennu. OSIRIS-REx launched two years ago and will spend the next year surveying and mapping the asteroid and hopefully bring us back some rock samples. Seriously. We sent a spacecraft to an ASTEROID!
  2. The week had some hate:
    • Jehovah’s Witnesses have been targeted with hate crimes 5 times this year in Washington state. The latest attack destroyed a church in a fire.
    • Again in Washington, eight self-professed neo-Nazis assault a black man, yelling racist slurs as they attack him.
    • Someone spreads anti-Semitic pamphlets throughout Pittsburgh, and a student plasters State University of New York’s Purchase College with Nazi-themed posters.

Russia:

  1. Maria Butina pleads guilty to acting as an illegal foreign agent and agrees to cooperate with federal investigators. She’s the first Russian charged to admit trying to influence the 2016 elections.
  2. Here are some highlights:
    • In 2015, Butina began working with Alexander Torshin to establish “unofficial” lines of communication with political leaders for the benefit of the Russian Federation (because official lines weren’t working).
    • Butina targeted Republicans because she thought a Republican would win the presidency in 2016.
    • She worked with her boyfriend, South Dakotan Paul Erickson, on her plan and also to make the contacts she needed.
    • Butina planned to use the NRA to lay the groundwork because of their influence over the Republican party.
    • She received funding from a Russian billionaire.
    • In the middle of all this, Butina obtained a student visa so she could stay in the U.S.
    • She worked to meet with Trump’s advisors once he was elected. Butina and Erickson also tried to set up meetings between Trump advisors and Russian officials.
  1. As of this week, we know through court filings and guilty pleas that at least 16 Trump business and campaign associates had contact with Russians during the 2016 campaign. And every one of them lied about it.
  2. Newspapers and businesses across the country receive bomb threats, suspected to come from Russian hackers. The hackers ask for bitcoin in order to not detonate the (non-existent) bombs.
  3. Everything was going so well for Michael Flynn, who was probably on track to serve no jail time. And then, his lawyers file a court document claiming that the FBI didn’t let him know he maybe needed a lawyer during the interviews where he lied to investigators (which led to the charges against him). They say that the FBI tricked Flynn into lying but still don’t say why Flynn lied.
  4. Mueller says Flynn is an experienced military man in a high-level government position. He should know better than to lie to U.S. intelligence in any situation, and there was no coercion for him to lie.
  5. Two of Flynn’s associates say he was meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 elections to talk about cooperation between Russia and the U.S. Russia would help end the Syrian conflict and the U.S. would ease sanctions.
    • The talks continued even after U.S. intelligence agencies told Trump’s campaign that Russia was behind the DNC hacks and subsequent leaks.
  1. On judge‘s orders, Mueller turns over their documentation of the interviews with Flynn where he is said to have lied.
  2. Texts and emails show that Paul Manafort was advising the Trump administration on ways to discredit Mueller’s investigations. Manafort recommended attacking the FBI, the DOJ, the Steele Dossier (and the Clinton campaign’s involvement) and any Obama officials involved in getting the FISA warrant. He recommended accusing the DNC of colluding with Ukraine.
  3. Studies commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee find that clearly all of the messaging coming from Russian entities was designed to benefit the Republican party and later Trump specifically.
    • One report finds that Russians used every major social media platform to influence the elections in 2016.
    • The other report analyzed how the Russian company Internet Research Agency targeted specific demographics for political messaging. IRA targeted blacks and other minorities to either discourage them from voting and turn them against Democrats.
    • Russian trolls and bots put a lot of time into dividing us on gun rights and immigration issues. They’d embed themselves in specific circles using authentic content, and then start posting provocative misinformation.
    • Posts on Instagram generated more than twice the user engagement than other major platforms.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Trump says he never told Cohen to break the law, but didn’t dispute that he told Cohen to pay off his mistresses to keep them quiet about their affairs. Trump says Cohen should’ve known what was legal; Cohen says he was under Trump’s sway.
  2. Sources says that Trump was involved in meetings where Cohen and David Pecker (of American Media Inc. (AMI)) talked about the payments.
  3. In his sentencing hearing, Cohen implies that he has more to talk about than just hush money payments. He gets a three-year sentence plus fines.
    • As a reminder, he pled guilty to: tax evasion, campaign finance violations, lying to banks, and lying to Congress. These are not all his known crimes.
    • Sean Hannity deletes all his tweets linking him to Cohen just before Cohen is sentenced.
  1. AMI is also in a cooperation agreement and has agreed to tell prosecutors everything they know about Trump. If you remember, AMI also has a vault of the negative stories about Trump that they killed in the run-up to the 2016 elections.
  2. David Pecker also admits to the hush money payments. AMI says the payments were to influence the elections, giving even more credence to the allegation that these were illegal campaign donations.
  3. Investigators are looking into donations to Trump’s inaugural committee and to a pro-Trump super PAC. They say foreign agents from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE might have disguised donations to buy influence over U.S. policy. Not surprisingly, Manafort it involved in this.
  4. When Trump and his siblings inflated invoices for their shell company decades ago, they also used those invoices as justification to inflate rent increases in their apartment buildings. This has caused the rent in those buildings to be artificially inflated for decades, even though the Trumps no longer own them.
  5. In a defamation lawsuit, Roger Stone admits to telling lies on InfoWars. Stone says he didn’t do his research and took the word of Sam Nunberg about alleged foreign donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Didn’t do his research” is how all this BS gets spread around in the first place so do your research!

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Supreme Court refuses to hear cases about blocking funding for Planned Parenthood. This leaves in place the lower court rulings that say states can’t cancel Medicaid contracts with Planned Parenthood offices.
  2. The Senate confirms Jonathan Kobes to a federal appeals court despite the ABA questioning his knowledge of the law and ability to understand complex legal analysis. This is Trump’s second unqualified but confirmed judicial nominee.
  3. The chief justice of California’s Supreme Court changes her party affiliation from Republican to No Party Preference. She says it’s been coming for a while, but Kavanaugh’s confirmation was the nail in the coffin.

Healthcare:

  1. The Trump administration shuts down an HIV research project in Montana because they use fetal tissue to research a cure for HIV/AIDS. Restrictions on the use of fetal tissue have been shutting down research projects across the country.
  2. The Senate votes against a bill that would extend VA benefits for thousands of vets who were exposed to Agent Orange. The House passed this bill unanimously.
  3. A federal judge in Texas rules that without the mandate, certain parts of the ACA are unconstitutional. Trump says that’s great news, but even legislators who tried to kill the ACA aren’t thrilled with this ruling. Many are even confused by it. The White House assures us that the ACA will remain in place through the appeals process. Oh, and the ruling comes the day before open enrollment ends.

International:

  1. Trump rejects the information given by U.S. intelligence agencies in his daily briefings on world events. Specifically, he’s denied that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections, he says North Korea will halt their nuclear weapons program, and he disagrees with them about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, climate change, and the role of the Saudi Crown Prince in Khashoggi’s murder.
  2. Theresa May delays a vote to approve her Brexit deal, and then survives a vote of no confidence. She then returns to Brussels to negotiate once more, but returns empty-handed.
  3. On top of weeks of protests across France, a shooter kills three people and injures 13 at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, putting all Christmas Markets in France on high alert and launching a manhunt. Police later find and shoot the gunman.
  4. A cyber attack on the Marriott earlier this year accessed the personal information of around 500 million guests. Investigators blame the cyber attack on Chinese intelligence.
  5. Trump continues to stand by Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite GOP Senators standing against him on this. Interesting side note: Some members of the Saudi royal family would like to stop MbS from being crowned king, but support from the U.S. and Trump could sway them.
  6. The Senate passes a resolution that declares MbS is not only involved in Khashoggi’s murder but is responsible for it.
  7. The Senate passes a recommendation to end support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
  8. Party members in Hungary that are normally in opposition to one other unite in protest against Prime Minister Viktor Ordan’s authoritarian rule. Rallies and protests have spread across the country, taking the Prime Minister and his Fidesz party by surprise. Ordan has been steadily increasing his power while weakening democratic institutions and processes.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The Senate reverses a Trump policy that helped hide information about donors to political non-profits. With the Senate bill, donors must be disclosed to the IRS.
  2. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signs a series of lame duck bills into law, curtailing the power of the office he is leaving because the person taking his place is a Democrat. From what I can see, the GOP plan seems to be: 1) Gerrymander districts so the other party can’t ever get a majority (even with a majority of votes statewide); and 2) When the populace finally votes your party out, change all the rules of government to make sure they can’t get anything done. Such a bad precedent.
    • Lawsuits against these bills are already in the works. Several of North Carolina’s attempt at passing bills to weaken incoming Democratic officials two years ago are still stuck in the courts.
    • Republicans in Wisconsin’s state legislature started working on these bills months ago just in case there was a shift in parties.
  1. Florida’s governor-elect Ron DeSantis wants to delay implementation of the voter approved ballot initiative that restored voting rights to felons who’ve served their time (excepting certain violent crimes).
  2. The House passes a bill to prevent states from holding children in adult jails and to ban the practice of shackling pregnant girls. The bill also funds tutoring, mental health assistance, and drug and alcohol programs for juvenile offenders.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The number of migrant minors held in U.S. custody is now nearly 15,000. A big reason for the backlog is that sponsors for these children are afraid to come forward for fear of being deported themselves.
  2. Church leaders form an interfaith protest at the U.S.-Mexico border in support of those seeking asylum. Officials arrest 32 faith leaders and activists at the protest.
  3. Officials in Ohio arrest a man who was plotting to kill people in a Jewish synagogue. Hate crimes against Jews have increased more than any other type of hate crime.
  4. Immigration judges for the most part want to make the right choices and not send people back to their home countries to get killed. The Global Migration Project at Columbia University recently found over 60 people who were killed or harmed after being sent home.
  5. The Trump administration starts working once again to deport refugees from the Vietnam war who’ve lived in the U.S. for decades.
  6. Trump says the updated NAFTA deal means that Mexico will pay for his wall. In case you were wondering, it doesn’t.
  7. A seven-year-old migrant girl dies after getting sick eight hours after being taken into custody. Homeland Security says that she didn’t have anything to eat or drink for days before being detained, but her family says that’s not true. The fastest way to get her medical assistance was a 90-minute bus ride, during which she worsened until she was no longer breathing when they arrived. An investigation is underway.
  8. Trump uses the shooting in Strasbourg as a reason we need to shore up our borders, but it turns out the shooter was born in Strasbourg.
  9. Trump claims that the migrants coming in to this country are spreading contagious diseases. There’s no evidence of this.
  10. Trump says a lot of his wall is already built and that it has decreased illegal migration significantly. He seems to be referring to fencing built or fixed between 1992 and 2016.
  11. Trump says says migrants crossing the border illegally are pouring drugs into the country, but according to the DEA most drugs come in through legal ports of entry.
  12. In referring to illegal immigration over the southern border, Trump says: “We caught 10 terrorists over the last very short period of time. Ten.” I’m not sure what he means by ‘the last very short period of time,’ but most terrorists are blocked from entry into the U.S. at airports. And a State Department study found “no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.”
  13. Betsy DeVos moves to rescind Obama-era guidance over school discipline that prevented minority students from receiving harsher punishments than their white classmates.
  14. Miss USA, Miss Columbia and Miss Australia are caught on tape mocking other Miss Universe contestants’ English-speaking skills.

Climate/EPA:

  1. A new study that compares past and future climates suggests that over the past 200 years, human activity has reversed millions of years of cooling. So yes, our climate changes, but generally not as rapidly as now.
  2. At the UN climate talks, Trump’s top climate and energy advisor is greeted with laughter when he gives a talk that includes pitching coal, the fossil fuel largely responsible for climate change. Turns out that most of the audience is there merely to protest; the U.S. couldn’t get enough people who are serious about climate change to attend.
  3. At the same talks, nations discuss the latest IPCC report which calls for dramatic cuts in emissions. Oil producing nations want to keep the report out of the final agreement, and the U.S. backs them. They end up welcoming the “timeliness” of the report as opposed to the content of the report.
  4. Even more interesting, though, is the fact that U.S. officials were working behind the scenes to continue making contributions to the Paris agreement.
  5. The Trump administration wants to reclassify nuclear waste so we don’t have to be so cautious in disposing of it, making disposal cheaper. Though this is the same administration that says a little radiation every day is good for you!
  6. The Trump administration proposes weakening the clean water rules that were created by George H.W. Bush and expanded on under Obama. The changes loosen protections against pollutants, pesticides, and toxic waste in certain waterways.
  7. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke resigns in the middle of more than a dozen ethics investigations into his political activity, travel expenses, and possible conflicts of interest. Zinke used his position roll back environmental protections and to exploit federal lands with the goal of global energy dominance.
  8. Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt will take over for Zinke temporarily. Bernhardt was a fossil fuels and water industry lobbyist before coming to the department (whose mission, by the way, is to be a good steward of our public lands).
  9. The Trump administration auctions off leases that will allow fracking on public lands near Utah’s national parks.
  10. A new study shows that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef might be adapting to the warmer waters caused by climate change. The harm done to the reef this year was less than expected despite warmer waters.

Budget/Economy:

  1. China agrees to cut tariffs on U.S. automobiles to 15%.
  2. Trump says he’ll shut down the government if the spending bill doesn’t fund his border wall. He even says he’ll be proud to shut it down.
  3. Trump signs an executive order to help fund underserved communities known as “opportunity zones.”
  4. Trump wants to get rid of subsidies for electric vehicles, which would give foreign automakers an advantage in EV development.
  5. The budget deficit for the first two months of fiscal year 2019 is double what it was in the first two months of fiscal year 2018. The administration predicts the deficit will be over $1 trillion for three straight years.
  6. In 2010, Wells Fargo incorrectly foreclosed on around 545 homeowners due to a computer glitch. Most of these people lost their homes, their current and future equity, and in some cases their pets because they had to move. To make up for it, Wells Fargo sends the borrowers checks that grossly under-compensated them for their losses.
  7. A few months ago, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau put out a report showing that Wells Fargo was price-gouging student borrowers. The Trump administration has been sitting on that information.
  8. Betsy DeVos loses a court battle and now has to cancel $150 million in federal student loan debt. The loan forgiveness affects 15,000 borrowers who were cheated by for-profit colleges.

Elections:

  1. A federal court in Virginia hands down documents in a case that concluded that 11 of Virginia’s districts are illegally gerrymandered. The case is pending before the Supreme Court, but the legislature must redraw the district lines anyway. One of the documents includes a variety of plans, but none of them redraw less than 21 districts.
  2. Things aren’t looking good for Mark Harris, Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina’s 9th District. It turns out that he sought to hire Leslie Dowless to help win the 2018 race after losing a race in 2016, knowing Dowless’ reputation for using sketchy means to win elections. Dowless illegally harvested ballots according to witnesses.
  3. George Papadopoulos feels like he’s ready to run for Congress. Now that he’s done his jail time for lying about Russian contacts, that is.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Time Magazine names a group of journalist as their Person of the Year. The group, which Time calls The Guardians, include the slain journalists at the Capital Gazette and Jamal Khashoggi, among others. One of the reasons for this choice is that “manipulation and abuse of truth is really the common thread in so many of this year’s major stories.”
  2. The House Judiciary Committee questions a Google executive for over three hours because Republicans think Google searches bring up results that aren’t fair to conservatives. Both parties are concerned about privacy issues.
  3. Stormy Daniels has to pay Trump nearly $300,000 in legal fees because her defamation suit against him was dismissed.
  4. A Kansas state senator switches party affiliations from Republican to Democrat after being ostracized for supporting the Democratic candidate for governor over Kris Kobach.
  5. The Trumps cancel the White House tradition of a holiday press party. Last year, they held the event but declined the tradition of taking pictures with anyone who wanted one.
  6. After Nick Ayers turns down the chief of staff position, Chris Christie takes himself out of the running as well. Jared Kushner’s in the running, but then Trump picks Mick Mulvaney to be acting chief of staff. Mulvaney is already wearing a couple different hats.
  7. The Trumps plan to take a 16-day trip to Mar-a-Lago over the holidays.
  8. Voyager 2 becomes the second human-made object to leave our solar system (Voyager 1 was the first). Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and its equipment still functions.

Polls:

  1. Trump’s approval rating in rural areas is 61% compared to 31% in urban areas and 41% in suburban areas.

Week 97 in Trump

Posted on December 4, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Former President George H.W. Bush lying in state in the Rotunda. (Morry Gash/Pool/Getty Images)

George H.W. Bush passed away at 94 years old; just 7 months after his wife, Barbara, passed away. He’ll lie in state, and December 5 will be a national day of mourning for him. And even over this, we were so fast to divide ourselves. One group is wistful for a president with his grace and character; the other group thinks he was just plain awful. Can’t we just, for a short period, let people eulogize and remember a man who’s long and full life just came to an end? Give the family some time to grieve, and then go ahead and point out his policy flaws. We don’t have to hate at every turn. It makes me tired…

And you know what else makes me tired? Everything else that happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. In his first year, Trump ordered a complete and independent audit of the Pentagon. Now the auditors say the job is impossible to complete. The Pentagon fudges their numbers and documents in order to justify increases to the Pentagon budget (whether or not the money gets used–a common business practice). Their records have irregularities and errors, and lack the needed information. The Pentagon’s defense? “We didn’t expect to pass it.”
  2. A federal judges rules that a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation can proceed. The suit accuses Trump of misusing funds from the charity for political and personal gain. Trump’s legal team says he can’t be sued because he’s president; the judge says he can.

Russia:

  1. Robert Mueller drops Paul Manafort’s plea deal, saying Manafort breached their agreement by continually lying to investigators. On top of that, Manafort’s lawyers were keeping Trump’s legal team abreast of their discussions with Mueller’s team.
    • Mueller considers filing additional charges against Manafort, and will file a report on what Manafort lied about.
    • Since Manafort already pleaded guilty, he’s now on the hook for those crimes… and also probably for conspiring to defraud the U.S. and obstruct justice.
    • According to The Guardian, Manafort met with WikiLeak’s Julian Assange around the same time he joined Trump’s campaign, and the two had met a few times before that. Both deny they ever met and no other media outlet has confirmed this story, so I’m taking this report with a grain of salt.
    • After Mueller pulls Manafort’s plea deal, Trump says Mueller’s gone rogue and is forcing witnesses to lie.
    • Rudy Giuliani brags about the arrangement with Manafort’s lawyers. He says it was a valuable source of information about the investigation of which his client is a subject.
    • Trump doesn’t rule out a pardon for Manafort.
  1. Michael Cohen enters a new plea agreement with Mueller, pleading guilty to lying about when talks with Russia about a Trump property ended. Cohen told Congress that the talks ended in January 2016, but they were still going on until June 2016. We have the texts to prove it. 
Cohen is the 33rd person charged by Mueller in the Russia probe.
  2. Cohen says he spoke with Trump and his family about the Trump Tower negotiations during that time; previously Cohen said they didn’t talk about it.
  3. The new court filings show that:
    • Cohen, Trump, Felix Sater, and Russian officials were in negotiations from January through June of 2016 for Trump to travel to Russia to meet with Putin.
    • They discussed Cohen going to Russia to negotiate the details of the visit before the Republican National Convention, and Trump going to Russia after.
    • In early to mid-June of 2016, Cohen told Sater that the trips were cancelled and that the Trump property deal was also cancelled.
    • Cohen says he lied to Congress to limit the Russia investigation and to support Trump.
    • Trump Organization offered to give Putin a $50 million penthouse in the tower.
    • Trump lied to us all when he said he didn’t have any interests in Russia.
    • Trump Jr.’s testimony to Congress contradicts Michael Cohen’s testimony.
    • Trump was kept abreast of his campaign members who were contacting both Russia and Wikileaks, and they subsequently tried to hide those activities.
  1. Rudy Giuliani first says Cohen is a liar, and then says that Trump’s written answers match Cohen’s version. So either Trump is a liar, or Cohen is telling the truth.
  2. Trump says Cohen is a liar and a weak person who’s just trying to save himself from receiving a prison sentence for unrelated charges.
  3. The revelations about Trump Tower Moscow aren’t necessarily criminal or impeachable. Trump says there was nothing wrong with him continuing to do business as a candidate. Which is technically true. However, the American public have a right to know where a presidential candidate’s financial interests stand.
  4. We now know that the final House committee reports submitted by the majority Republicans include the lies from Cohen’s and Trump Jr.’s original testimony. Committee reports submitted by minority Democrats include snippets of emails that contradict those lies. Democrats want to call Cohen back in to correct the record.
  5. As a results of this plea deal, Senate committees begin reviewing the testimony given to them.
  6. The Trump Tower Moscow deal was dissolved right around the time the Washington Post published the first article detailing the Russian hacking of the DNC servers.
  7. Republican Senator Jeff Flake demands a vote on a bill to protect Mueller, or he’ll stop voting to advance Trump’s judicial nominations to a full Senate vote. Republican Senator Mike Lee blocked a bipartisan effort to force a vote on the bill.
  8. An email trail between Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, who pulled back on his plea deal with Mueller, shows that two months before WikiLeaks dumped Clinton campaign emails, they were discussing details about an October dump that would be damaging to Clinton.
  9. Mueller investigates call logs from the 2016 campaign where Trump made several late-night calls from a blocked number to Roger Stone.
  10. Trump cancels his meeting with Putin at the G-20 summit over Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and then says he’ll meet with Putin one-on-one. They ended up having an informal meeting.
  11. James Comey asks a federal judge to block a request from Republicans in the House that he testify in private. In the end, Comey agrees to testify behind closed doors, but a transcript of his testimony will be made public.
  12. British intelligence say that Putin was likely behind the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on UK soil.
  13. Democrats in the House start making a list of targets to investigate when they take back over the House next year. They’ll likely revisit the 64 subpoenas that Republicans blocked over the past year and a half.

Legal Fallout:

  1. German police raid Deutsche Bank headquarters as part of a money laundering investigation spawned by the Panama Papers. The bank was previously fined for helping to launder Russian money.
  2. The raid has no apparent ties to Trump, but after an internal investigation earlier this year, Deutsche Bank found questionable transactions by Jared Kushner, which they shared with Mueller. They were also one of the few banks willing to loan money to Trump after his financial collapses.
  3. Federal agents raid the Chicago offices of Ed Burke, who previously did tax work for Trump. We don’t know if the raid is related to Trump at all.
  4. It was a mystery to me why Facebook would launch a smear campaign against George Soros when defending themselves over personal data breaches. It turns out that Soros criticized the company at the World Economic Forum, so Sheryl Sandberg asked for information on whether Soros had something to gain from that. This led her staff to hire a GOP opposition research firm.
  5. House Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) says that Ivanka’s use of personal email is OK because it’s just really hard to comply when you’re dealing with so many emails and so many rules. He says it’s nothing like Hillary’s use of a personal email server.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Mike Pence casts the tie-breaking vote when Jeff Flake refuses to advance Trump’s judicial nominee, Thomas Farr, out of committee for a floor vote. Flake didn’t refuse to advance Farr because of Farr’s long and sordid history of working to suppress the Black vote in North Carolina; Flake refused to advance him because he wants McConnell to bring the Mueller bill to the floor for a vote.
  2. Farr might have made it out of committee, but he wasn’t confirmed in the Senate. It turns out that the Black Republican in the Senate isn’t fond of judges who work to disenfranchise Black voters, so he joined Jeff Flake in voting against him.
  3. Christine Blasey Ford announces she’ll donate the remaining money raised from a GoFundMe campaign to organizations that support survivors of sexual assault. Up till now, the money went to securing and relocating her family multiple times due to threats of death and violence.
  4. New reports allege that Acting Attorney General Matt Whittaker continued his support of a patent company that was engaged in fraud while at the same time hindering an FTC investigation into that company.
  5. Whittaker is also under investigation by the Office of the Special Counsel (not to be confused with Robert Mueller) for possible Hatch Act violations for accepting political contributions while employed by the government.
  6. Bill Shine, the White House deputy communications chief, will receive about $15 million from Fox News over the next two years as severance pay and bonus. At the same time, he gets a U.S. government salary and he’s in a position to show favoritism to Fox News.

Healthcare:

  1. New enrollments for health insurance through the ACA is down 13% from last year at this time. The administration isn’t providing marketing or education for help with signing up (again).
  2. Drug overdoses reached a record high of 70,237 in 2017, largely due to fentanyl.
  3. Bloomberg’s foundation plans to donate $50 million to fight the opioid epidemic. They’ll start with a limited number of states and find out which programs are the most effective. Then they’ll put more money towards those programs in other states.
  4. The number of uninsured children increased in 2017 for the first time in a decade. Texas has the largest number of uninsured children, partly because they’re one of the states that refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA.

International:

  1. Just before Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, the Saudi Crown Prince exchanged several messages with the senior aide accused of overseeing the murder. These messages are part of what led our intelligence agencies to conclude that the Crown Prince likely ordered the killing.
  2. Even Mitch McConnell is pushing for a congressional response against Saudi Arabia in the Khashoggi case.
  3. The White House prevents CIA director Gina Haspel from briefing the Senate on Saudi Arabia. Instead, Mike Pompeo and James Mattis handle the briefing.
  4. Not only is the arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia non-binding (meaning either party can back out), but the dollar amount of the deal was inflated at Jared Kushner’s direction from $14.5 billion to $110 billion.
  5. Paris has its worst riots in 50 years. The riots started two weeks ago over a gas tax coupled with anti-Macron sentiment.
  6. Activists call Obama the ‘Drone President,‘ but Trump relaxed requirements for targets of drone strikes and has launched 30% more than Obama did in his first two years (238 drone strikes to Obama’s 186).

Legislation/Congress:

  1. House Democrats nominate Nancy Pelosi to be House Speaker.
  2. The Senate advances a resolution to stop providing military help to Saudi Arabia in the Yemen. Fourteen Republicans vote for the resolution, and 19 switch their votes from their previous vote because of an inadequate briefing by Mattis and Pompeo and because of Khashoggi’s murder.
  3. Congress reaches a deal on a farm bill that does not include work requirements for SNAP recipients. Trump and House Republicans were pushing for those requirements.

Family Separation:

  1. There are still around 60 children in custody who were separated from their (now-deported) parents. Almost all of these children have sponsors they could be released to in the U.S. In total, 140 children who were separated from their parents or guardian are still in custody.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump tweets that Mexico should just send back everyone in the migrant caravan to whatever country they came from and by any means possible. He says again (and without evidence) that many of them are stone cold criminals.
  2. A review of global terrorism shows that violent acts motivated by far right-wing ideologies far outnumber acts of domestic terrorism acts in any other category over the past decade.
  3. A memo from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that the Trump administration said it’s OK to not thoroughly vet staff at detention camps for migrant minors.
  4. Instead of releasing government documents on actual costs/benefits of undocumented immigrants, Trump retweets a false rumor that they receive $3,874 per month in assistance.
  5. The number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2016 hit the lowest number in over a decade, with an estimated 10.7 million.
  6. The head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media apologizes to George Soros after they aired a program smearing Soros and using anti-Semitic tropes. The program called Soros a “non-practicing Jew of flexible morals” and said he was involved in “clandestine operations that led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union.” It also said he architected the 2008 financial collapse. The program got most of it’s information from Judicial Watch, which has long sought to pin some kind of wrongdoing on Soros.
  7. Deteriorating conditions at migrant camps near the border are leading more immigrants to attempt illegal crossings so they can seek asylum. This is what the Trump administration was trying to avoid, but by trapping them at the border, the administration created the conditions that are now worsening the problem.
  8. The ACLU files a lawsuit against a Florida Sheriff’s Office that detained a U.S. citizen on ICE’s request. The man was arrested in the Keys and detained for weeks despite having a U.S. birth certificate. He was finally transported to ICE, who released him once they looked up his birth certificate. In Miami. With no money or transportation to get back to the Keys. Interesting side note: ICE has an agreement with this Sheriff’s Office to pay them $50 per detainee.
  9. The police officer who shot her black neighbor when she mistakenly walked into his apartment thinking it was her own is charged with murder.
  10. One more reason we need #MeToo. Seven hospitals agree to a settlement after they illegally billed sexual assault victims for their own forensic rape exams.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Fox News disciplines employees who were involved in crafting topics and questions with the EPA for an interview with Scott Pruitt. Fox & Friends coordinated the entire interview with Pruitt (or his aides) and Pruitt lied about the number of Superfund sites cleaned up under Obama versus under Trump.
  2. Who knew all you had to do to get out of fraud charges is to quit? The inspector general of the EPA closes two investigations into Scott Pruitt’s conduct during his time as head of the EPA because he doesn’t work there anymore.
  3. At the G20 summit in Brazil, 19 world leaders reaffirm the Paris agreement with one leader abstaining. Trump reiterates our decision to withdraw. Yay us. We affirm our strong commitment to not deal with climate change.
  4. Exxon plans to use renewable energy—wind and solar—to help power up their gas and oil drilling in Texas’s Permian Basin, an area with extensive fracking operations.
  5. Washington, D.C.’s city council votes unanimously to adopt 100% clean electricity by 2032.
  6. Patagonia announces they’ll give $10 million of what they received in corporate tax cuts this year to grassroots organizations supporting the environment.
  7. Andrew Wheeler, the acting head of the EPA, gives Trump the credit for a 2.5% reduction in carbon emissions in 2016… before Trump took office. He also says carbon emissions are down 14% since 2005. This is in no small part due to the Obama regulations this administration has worked to reverse.
  8. Wheeler can’t name three Trump rules that contributed to the decrease in emissions, (unless you include the proposed reversals of Obama emissions-reducing rules that he named).
  9. Trump approves company requests to run seismic tests in the Atlantic Ocean, which could kill tens of thousands of marine animals. Underwater seismic tests are used to locate gas and oil.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The VA has been behind on GI Bill payments to vets because of a computer glitch, and now they’re saying they won’t reimburse vets who weren’t paid the full amount owed them.
  2. Auto companies warned us last summer that the tariffs would have negative economic effects on the industry. This week, GM announces they’ll stop production at five plants and layoff over 14,000 people. They offered buyout packages to 18,000 employees in October.
    • The reasons for the cutbacks include changing their lineup to align with Americans’ changing tastes, the decimation of unions (unions used to train employees on the new skills they need to adapt), and costs related to the trade war and tariffs.
  1. Trump threatens to eliminate GM’s subsidies if they go ahead with the closures. Trump also blames the declining stock market and the Fed for the closures and layoffs.
  2. Over 40% of companies say they’ll raise prices due to the higher costs they’re incurring as a result of the trade war. 10% say the tariffs are pushing them to move jobs offshore.
  3. Even though Paul Ryan oversaw legislation that will add trillions to our debt, he says his biggest regret is that he didn’t address our federal debt.
  4. Just before the start of the G20 summit, Trump, Trudeau, and Peña Nieto sign the updated NAFTA deal. Trump says it’s the biggest trade deal ever. But of course it is.
  5. Also at the G20, Trump and Chinese President Xi come to a verbal agreement on tariffs. They basically agreed that Trump won’t add any new tariffs, China will start buying our stuff again, and the two countries will begin talks.
  6. Qatar announces it’s leaving OPEC next year so they can develop their liquified natural gas.

Elections:

  1. Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith wins the Mississippi Senate race, showing once and for all why Mississippi is so far behind the rest of the country in race relations. But since it was the closest race there in 30 years, maybe that means they’re a little less racist than before. I can hope.
    • With her election, Republicans have picked up a total of three Senate seats in the midterms.
  1. Paul Ryan calls the ballot process in California bizarre and loosey-goosey after seven GOP House seats shifted to Democrats as mail-in and provisional ballots were counted. Ryan says he doesn’t question the validity of the results, though, so I guess he just wanted to be sure he planted that question mark in everyone’ heads.
  2. The Office of Special Counsel (again, not to be confused with Mueller’s office) says six Trump administration officials tweeted support for Republicans or for Trump on their government Twitter accounts. This is a violation of the Hatch Act, but not enough for disciplinary action.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Representative Raul Grijalva wrote an op-ed criticizing Ryan Zinke over his ethical scandals and saying Zinke should resign. Zinke’s response from his official Interior Department Twitter account? “It’s hard for him to think straight from the bottom of the bottle.” This country is being run by children.
  2. Trump threatens House Democrats, saying that if they play tough with him when they become the majority, he’ll declassify documents that will be “devastating” to them. He says he could’ve used those documents against them already, but he’s saving them for when he really needs to use them. A) I think that’s called extortion, and B) he doesn’t have a great track record so far of declassifying information to further his cause.
  3. Making good on a promise he made after the Las Vegas shooting, Trump says he’ll approve a federal rule banning bump stocks. Current owners will either have to destroy their bump stocks or turn them in.
  4. Eric Bauman, the chair of the California Democratic Party, resigns after accusations of sexual misconduct are publicized. An investigation is ongoing.
  5. NASA and JPL land another successful spacecraft on Mars. InSight will investigate the planet’s interior and measure Mars-quakes.
  6. And speaking of quakes, Anchorage experiences a huge earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale (with 1,000 aftershocks). We still don’t know the extent of the damage; there are collapsed roads, buckled bridges, cracked buildings, power outages, and people are still boiling water.

Week 91 in Trump

Posted on October 22, 2018 in Politics, Trump

I heard something interesting on Marketplace. It turns out it doesn’t matter whether we cut funding for food assistance, or SNAP, like some in Congress want. Because of our trade war, many farmers lost the buyers for their crops. So part of the government bailout for farmers is going toward purchasing those crops, which will then be donated to food assistance programs like food banks, shelters, and so on. The charities currently don’t have enough resources to store all that food, and they estimate it’ll cost around $300 million to take care of it all. They say they’ll get it done, but what really just happened is that the U.S. lost all that income from those crops, the government is trying to cut taxpayer payments to SNAP, but the government did pay taxpayer money directly to the farmers who lost their buyers, and then turned around and gave that food right back to the needy. Talk about going around in circles.

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. In the DOJ’s first case around Russian meddling in our elections, federal prosecutors charge a Russian woman, Elena Khusyaynova, with fraud against the U.S. She managed the finances for an operation funded by the Concord group that ran a social media disinformation campaign. This campaign wasn’t tilted toward either political side; it’s aim was to spread disinformation and increase divisiveness.
  2. This campaign spread misinformation about immigration, gun control, the NFL protests, LGBTQ and racial issues, the Confederate flag, and much more.
  3. Putin says that U.S. influence across the globe is almost over, and that he’s been more able to push Russian influence with Trump as president.
  4. Russian trolls have stepped up their spending on disinformation campaigns in 2018.
  5. Mueller will likely issue his findings in the Russia investigation after the midterm elections, specifically around whether Trump’s campaign coordinated in any way with the Russians and whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation.
  6. It’s up to Rod Rosenstein, who’s defended Mueller’s investigation, to decide whether the results will become public.
  7. Remember when we kept hearing about SARs (suspicious activity reports)? A senior employee at the Treasury Department is charged with leaking those reports related to Paul Manafort’s financial activity, along with SARs for other subjects of the Mueller investigation.
  8. A federal judge refuses Paul Manafort’s request to wear a suit to his sentencing hearing. He shows up in a wheelchair.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Michael Cohen has met with both New York state and federal law enforcement about the Trump Organization and their charity.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A federal judge orders the Department of Education to implement regulations to protect students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges. The regulations help them get their federal student loans forgiven. Betsy DeVos has been delaying the regulations while the department rewrote rules around loans, but a different judge already called those rewrites capricious and arbitrary.

Healthcare:

  1. Along party lines, the Senate votes down a repeal of Trump’s expansion of short-term insurance plans that do not have to comply with ACA guidelines. So now we’ll have cheaper plans available for the short-term, but they won’t have to cover anything required by the ACA.
  2. Mitch McConnell suggests that Republicans will try again next year to repeal the ACA, but no word yet what they’d replace it with.

International:

  1. Reports are that the U.S. intelligence community knew that the Saudis planned to kidnap Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and possibly harm him. This information had been spread across all relevant government agencies, yet Trump pretended to know nothing about this for days.
  2. Turkey says they have audio tapes of the killing, and Trump requests the tapes to be released to U.S. intelligence. As far as I know, this hasn’t yet happened.
  3. Early in the week, Trumps says he’ll send Mike Pompeo to meet with Saudi King Salman over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Trump also says the king firmly denies involvement, and he suggests rogue killers could be responsible.
  4. And then Trump tells the Associated Press that blaming Saudi Arabia without evidence is like blaming Kavanaugh without evidence. Just another case of “guilty until proven innocent.”
  5. Pompeo has a friendly meeting with the Saudi prince who says they’ll perform a thorough and transparent investigation into the killing.
  6. The day Pompeo arrives, the Saudi government transfers $100 million to the U.S. to help stabilize things in Syria.
  7. Trump is also concerned about a $110 million arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and he doesn’t want the Khashoggi affair to get in the way of it.
  8. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin joins many other foreign officials in saying they won’t attend what’s been called “Davos in the Desert.” It’s an economic investment conference in Saudi Arabia.
  9. Jared Kushner, who is a close friend of the Saudi prince, is involved with the Trump administration response to the killing.
  10. The ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker (R) and Bob Melendez (D) send a letter to Trump triggering the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The administration must now investigate the killing.
  11. The Saudi government prepares us for their admission that Khashoggi didn’t leave the consulate in Turkey and is indeed dead, but they say it was an interrogation that went wrong. And then they say that a fight broke out (which I guess somehow required the 15-man security team to kill Khashoggi and then dismember him with the bone saw that they conveniently had thought to bring with them ahead of time by the doctor they conveniently had the forethought to invite along).
  12. So the Saudi’s have gone from:
    • Khashoggi left the consulate alive, to
    • He is probably dead but we didn’t kill him, to
    • We’ll investigate this fully, to
    • He was killed by our security team but it was his fault because he started a fistfight (against 15 security guys, uh-huh), but
    • The Saudi prince knew nothing of this plan.
  1. U.S. intelligence says evidence points to the Saudi prince being involved, but it’s circumstantial right now.
  2. This comes at a critical time for the administration because we need Saudi Arabian oil to make the sanctions against Iran work.
  3. Saudi Arabia has apprehended several suspects. Four suspects are linked to the Saudi prince’s security detail.
  4. And is this always going to be their comeback? Republican lawmakers and pundits begin smearing Khashoggi to dampen criticism of Trump’s handling of the situation. They bring up his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and say he’s a friend of terrorists and “not a good guy.”
  5. Trump says we have an investigation on the ground in Turkey, but U.S. officials are unaware of any such effort.
  6. While Trump appears to be defending Saudi Arabia publicly, privately he has doubts they’re telling the truth.
  7. Germany halts all weapons deals with Saudi Arabia until further notice.
  8. The UN warns that Yemen is facing its worst famine in history because Saudi Arabia continues to launch airstrikes against them. We’re looking at over 12 million people facing starvation, which will only add to the global refugee crisis. Yemen is trapped in the middle of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
  9. The Taliban wipes out all of the top leadership in Kandahar Province in an assassination strike.
  10. Trump says the U.S. will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War arms control agreement with Russia. Trump says that Russia is violating the treaty and that it prevents us from developing weapons to combat China’s new weaponry.
  11. Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the treaty’s signers, says this decision is reckless and “not the work of a great mind.”
  12. Trump suspends yet another military exercise with South Korea. It seems they’re trying to further nuclear negotiations with North Korea.

Family Separation:

  1. The U.S. still has 245 children in custody who were separated from their parents. The parents of 175 of them were deported, and, of those, 125 have chosen to remain in the U.S. and request asylum. That leaves 50 kids with deported parents, and another 70 who haven’t been reunited.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump threatens to cancel aid to Honduras if they don’t stop the caravan of migrants headed our way. Because cutting off a lifeline for the country will really make people want to stay there, right?
  2. He also threatens to send the U.S. military to the border to meet the migrants, and then threatens to throw out the renegotiated NAFTA if Mexico let’s them through.
  3. The Trump administration looks at redefining gender so that people can only be defined by their biological sex at birth based on genitalia. I wonder what they think they’ll do for those born intersex? At any rate, it’s pretty easy to make the argument that transgender people are the most targeted group under this administration. Right up there with black and brown asylum seekers.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Trump visits the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Florida and Georgia. The death toll from the storm is up to 36. FEMA is still on the ground helping the hardest hit areas, but certain areas are pulling back on food and water in an effort to get back to a sense of normalcy. Some areas still don’t have electricity, though.
  2. Climate change is expected to dramatically increase the price of beer this century because drought will affect our ability to grow barley.
  3. Trump says at a Cabinet meeting that California better get its act together to fight forest fires, or he’ll stop giving the state federal funding for either fire prevention programs or disaster relief (it’s hard to tell which he’s referring to).
  4. Trump says he has a natural instinct for science, which is how he knows climate change isn’t manmade. Like many who deny manmade climate change, he says the climate goes back and forth, and back and forth. He also says that even scientists are divided on it, which really isn’t true.
  5. Trump claims to be an environmentalist despite rescinding regulations designed to protect the environment.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Another department store bites the dust when Sears declares bankruptcy. Trump says it’s been mismanaged for years; Trump’s Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin was on the company’s board from 2005 to 2016.
  2. Interesting tidbit: Sears CEO Eddie Lampert is an Ayn Rand follower, and has been trying to run the company under the principles she espoused.
  3. The numbers are in for the end of Trump’s first full fiscal year. The federal deficit expanded to $779 billion, which is up 17% from last year when it was $667 billion. (OK. That last digit is actually a 6, but I can’t bring myself to type the devil numbers. Ask me about the sump pump incident.) The deficit as a percent of GDP also rose. Taxes received from businesses dropped by 31% from the previous year, while taxes received from individuals rose 6%.
  4. So the deficit increased by $113 billion, and federal income from corporations went down by about $92 billion.
  5. This is the largest deficit since 2012, when we were still recovering from the Great Recession.
  6. Spending only increased by 3%, but still Mick Mulvaney claims the reason for the large deficit is out-of-control spending.
  7. Mitch McConnell says the increased deficit isn’t because of the Republican tax bill, but it’s because of Medicare, Medicaid, and social security (all of which are supposed to come out of a separate fund, by the way). The tax bill is predicted to add nearly $1 trillion to the debt next year. So basically after passing a $1.5 trillion tax cut and increasing the budget for the DoD, he says the only thing we can do is cut assistance to the needy and senior citizens. Also, since McConnell became majority leader nearly four years ago, the deficit has increased 77%.
  8. In contrast, the Treasury Department says deficit growth is because of the of the tax cuts, bipartisan spending increases, and rising interest payments.
  9. In response to the news, Trump announces he’ll ask each of his cabinet members to cut the budget for their respective agency by 5%.
  10. On the plus side, job openings hit a record high in August.
  11. Looking back over the year, big banks did the best as a result of the GOP tax reform. They saw the most profit of any other industry.
  12. Volvo says it might move some of their current U.S. manufacturing operations to China.
  13. China has been importing around 330,000 barrels per day of U.S. crude oil. Those imports were down to 0 in August.
  14. Mitch McConnell says he won’t bring the renegotiated NAFTA deal to a vote until next year.
  15. China criticizes the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union, especially with the trade wars going on. Trumps says the UPU, which is 144 years old, makes it easier for Chinese nationals to ship illicit drugs to the U.S.

Elections:

  1. DHS reports an increase in the number of cyber attacks attempted on U.S. election databases, and they don’t know who’s behind it. Yay for safe and secure elections.
  2. Georgia uses amateur handwriting analysis to determine the authenticity of voter registrations and ballots.
  3. Officials in Gwinnett County Georgia have rejected around a third of the absentee ballots cast so far. Over half of those thrown out were from African Americans or Asian Americans. On top of that, officials didn’t notify the voters whose ballots were rejected as required by law. Instead, these voters found out from CNN. Gwinnett is the most diverse and populous county in Georgia.
  4. So far Georgia has purged about 8% of the voters on their rolls.
  5. Officials in Jefferson County Georgia make a group of senior citizens get off the bus that was taking them to vote early. The Senior center was worried that it was a partisan event because a Democrat helped organize the event with a non-partisan voting advocacy group.
  6. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement voice concern about ongoing attempts to interfere with our elections by Russia, China, and Iran—both in the midterms and the 2020 presidential race. But still they’ve seen no signs of them being able to interfere with our actual votes.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Elizabeth Warren announces the results of her DNA test, which show she has Native American ancestry going back 6-10 generations. Trump mocks her; Lindsey Graham mocks her; Fox mocks her. WTH? Who even cares? Why is this a thing?
  2. Also, cue the amateur scientists who estimate that this makes her 1/64 to 1/1024 Native American. Except that’s not how genetics works and for some reason it took days for anyone to talk to an actual geneticist and correct the record. She could have far more than 1/64 Native American DNA or far less than 1/1024.
  3. Trump calls her a complete and total fraud. He refuses to give $1 million to a charity of her choice, even though he said he would if she got a DNA test and it showed Native American heritage. Also, donating the million was his idea, not hers.
  4. Even though Warren says she doesn’t claim tribal affiliation, the chairman of the Cherokee Nation criticizes her use of a DNA test to find out if she does have Native American heritage.
  5. A group of free-press advocates sues Trump to block him from using his office to retaliate against the press. They say that Trump’s threats and use of regulations and enforcement powers for this purpose are unconstitutional.
  6. Trump again praises Montana Republican Representative Greg Gianforte for assaulting a Guardian journalist before his special election last year. “Anybody who can do that kind of body slam, he’s my kind of guy.”
  7. The Trump administration abruptly replaces the acting Inspector General for the Department of the Interior. This is the person who will handle all the current investigations into Ryan Zinke’s potential ethical lapses and she has no investigative experience. But that turns out to be OK, because she resigns shortly thereafter.
  8. The previous Inspector General just released findings that Zinke tried to get around or change policies to justify trips with his wife that were paid for by the taxpayers, including a trip to Turkey.
  9. Don McGahn leaves his post as White House Counsel. He was going to leave later in the fall, but Trump already announced his replacement, Patrick Cipollone. Cipollone was a DOJ lawyer under Bush Sr.
  10. Remember the fire in a Trump Tower condo earlier this year where the guy died? The Trump Organization sues his estate for $90,000 in unpaid maintenance fees.

Polls:

  1. Apparently forgetting the uproar over Obama locking Fox out of one press event, 44% of Republicans think Trump should be able to shut down news agencies for “bad behavior.”
  2. 49% of Trump voters think men face a lot of discrimination in American. In fact, they think men face more discrimination than LGBTQ folks (41%), African-Americans (38%), and women (30%). Cray.
  3. Only 25% of Americans think Kavanaugh told the truth in his hearings. 35% approve of his confirmation and 43% disapprove.

Week 85 in Trump

Posted on September 10, 2018 in Politics, Trump

This week we learned that during Trump rallies they fluff up the crowd standing behind Trump before the rally, they make sure that the crowd will be enthusiastic, and they make people wear MAGA hats. And if you don’t comply they kick you out in the middle of the rally. Thank you, plaid shirt guy.

Here’s what else happened this week…

Russia:

  1. Giuliani says that the White House won’t let the final Mueller report be publicized after he is finished with his investigation.
  2. George Papadopoulos takes his plea agreement and gets sentenced to 14 days in jail, a $9,500 fee, and community service. His lawyer says that Trump hindered the investigation far more than Papadopoulos ever did.
  3. Papadopoulos says in a TV interview that members of the Trump campaign not only knew that he was working to set up meetings with Putin, but that they were supportive of those efforts.
  4. Protests break out across Russia over a proposed pension revamping that includes raising the retirement age. The protests are organized by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s supporters.
  5. Trump’s criticism of our law officials now extends to Christopher Wray, director of the FBI.
  6. From recent interviews and subpoenas, it looks like the Mueller investigation is now focussing on Roger Stone.
  7. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has previously denied Russian meddling in our elections, calls out Putin for meddling in our elections.
  8. The U.K formally charges two Russian agents with the poisoning of a former Russian spy in England.
  9. Federal prosecutors say their accusations against Maria Butina of exchanging sex for influence was mistaken and was based on joke texts between her and a friend.
  10. If you’re keeping track, here are the Russia investigation stats:
    • 35 people or organizations indicted
    • 191 criminal counts
    • 1 conviction
    • 6 guilty pleas
    • 2 prison sentences

Legal Fallout:

  1. Pursuant to Michael Cohen’s guilty plea, the New York attorney general opens an investigation into the Trump Organization and whether anyone there violated campaign finance laws. The organization’s CFO is already cooperating with investigations.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court begin, though Democrats on the judiciary committee try to postpone the hearing after receiving a dump of 42,000 documents the night before.
  2. Democrats are also trying to get a delay over questions about Trump’s legal issues. Committee chair Chuck Grassley refuses to hear Democrats’ arguments.
  3. Democrats are also complaining about transparency, since the documents released on Kavanaugh’s time in the White House were redacted by his former deputy, then by the Trump White House, and yet again by Grassley.
  4. Republicans say Democrats are obstructing the confirmation and also say they’ve released more records for Kavanaugh than for any other nominee. It’s reported that only 7% of Kavanaugh’s White House records have been released compared to the 99% that were released for Elena Kagan’s hearing.
  5. The hearings opened with protests and heckling from those opposed to placing Kavanaugh on the bench. Police arrest 22 protestors for being disruptive.
  6. In his opening statement, Kavanaugh calls Merrick Garland superb. He also said this about Garland while the Senate was refusing to even meet with him: Garland is “supremely qualified by the objective characteristics of experience, temperament, writing ability, scholarly ability for the Supreme Court.” This drives home the point that McConnell had no reason other than partisanship and hatred for Obama for not holding hearings for Merrick Garland.
  7. Of note, Kavanaugh has a very low approval rating from the American people for a Supreme Court nominee. It’s only at 37%, lower than Trump‘s.
  8. The Congressional Black Caucus, along with civil rights leaders, say Kavanaugh would threaten human rights if he’s confirmed. They point to the racist voter ID laws he’s voted to uphold. I point to the young immigrant for whom he voted to refuse a legal abortion.
  9. Leaked emails show that Kavanaugh:
    • Has questioned whether Roe v. Wade is settled law;
    • Has been critical of affirmative action and supportive of racial profiling;
    • Appears to have lied in a previous confirmation hearing about whether he knew about Bush’s warrantless surveillance program;
    • Lied multiple times in his confirmation hearings about whether he had received stolen documents outlining Democratic strategy at one point (documents show that not only did he receive the documents, but that he had an actual mole in Democratic circles who was providing them);
    • Lied about being involved with Charles PIckering’s nomination to an appeals court; and
    • Lied in a previous hearing about interviewing William Pryor, who was another judicial nominee.
  1. In his hearing, Kavanaugh refers to birth control pills “abortion inducing drugs.” This is from a case he presided over, and it’s not clear whether he’s quoting the plaintiffs here or if he actually thinks that’s what they are.
  2. The DOJ says that Jeff Sessions will meet with state attorneys general over whether social media platforms are suppressing conservative views. This follows a Senate hearing with Facebook and Twitter. A House committee is also holding a hearing on this alleged bias.

International:

  1. This isn’t political news, but it’s big news. The world’s largest anthropological museum burns down in Brazil, destroying millions of archeological and natural artifacts. Some of these artifacts were the only things that remained of lost cultures.
  2. Trump fills the Western Hemisphere Affairs office at the National Security Council with Cuban hard-liners. The latest addition, Mauricio Claver-Carone, is a pro-embargo activist, and is also dedicated to promoted human rights and democracy in Cuba.
  3. Later this month, Trump will preside over the UN Security Council. He’s already stirring up controversy by saying he’ll focus solely on Iran.
  4. And once again, fears of a far-right, anti-immigrant, protectionist, white nationalist take over in a European country are greatly exaggerated. Elections in Sweden maintain about the same level of support for most parties, though the far-right Sweden Democrats did make big gains. Power still rests with the Social Democrats and the Moderates.
  5. We learn that last year, the Trump administration met with Venezuelan rebels to discuss plans for a coup. One of the rebels is on our own sanctions list of corrupt officials. Nothing came of it.
  6. The Trump administration is expanding a drone program in Africa that the Obama administration had constricted due to collateral damage.

Family Separation:

  1. More than 400 immigrant children are still separated from their parents. Of these, around 300 of the parents are out of the country, either because they were deported or because the children came with other family members.
  2. 199 of the parents signed papers stating that they didn’t want to be reunited. Some might be valid, but most are suspected to have been coerced by immigration officials.
  3. 34 of the parents had red flags in their background checks or were deemed unsafe.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The Trump administration proposed rules blocking immigrants who have used any kind of welfare from ever becoming citizens. Even though these rules haven’t been implemented yet, immigrants are dropping out of these programs out of fear of a crackdown.
  2. Nike announces Colin Kaepernick as the new face of the company in ad campaigns. People cut the Nike logo off their shirts and burn their shoes in protest. Also, Nike sees a 31% increase in sales.
  3. And here’s another way Trump is getting rid of immigrants in the U.S. The administration has been trying to deport Vietnamese immigrants who are here under a formal agreement with Vietnam. They’ve been here for over two decades.
  4. It turns out that the Trump administration ignored a report from the National Counterterrorism Center that showed that refugees do not pose a domestic threat. They replaced it instead with a report written by immigration hardliners in the administration that over-inflate the cost and threat of refugees here. In the end, the administration didn’t cite security as an excuse to reduce the number of refugees we accept; instead they said DHS was shorthanded and couldn’t handle any more.
  5. The Trump administration proposes a regulation to overrule the Flores rule that blocks us from detaining immigrant children indefinitely. This is how they’re trying to get around the laws about detaining or separating families seeking asylum.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Eight states’ attorneys general bring a suit against the Department of the Interior over their narrowing of migratory bird protections. I thought Trump loved birds. Isn’t that why he doesn’t like wind turbines?
  2. Eric Buermann, the former general counsel of Florida’s Republican Party and the chair of the South Florida Water Management District, puts the blame for the current toxic algae bloom on Governor Rick Scott, who is running for Senate. Buermann says that Scott only recently started to address the issue because it’s become political and not because Scott wants to address pollution or climate change. The blooms are devastating Florida communities.
  3. I’m not sure where to put this since it covers a few things, but Trump plans to roll back regulations on safety inspections for underground mines, on offshore oil rigs, and on meat processing plants, all pretty dangerous occupations. The offshore rig rules were put in place to prevent another Deepwater Horizon disaster.
  4. A jury finds Plains All American Pipeline guilty of one felony and eight misdemeanors in the Santa Barbara oil spill in the waters off Refugio State Beach. The felony was for failure to maintain the pipeline. The misdemeanors were things like not reporting the spill right away, killing marine life, and lying about it.
  5. Tens of thousands of climate activists hold rallies and marches around the globe to demand action on climate change.
  6. Ryan Zinke opens 251,000 acres in 30 wildlife refuges to hunting and fishing.
  7. California Governor Jerry Brown signs a bill into law blocking Trump’s expansion of offshore drilling in the state. Brown also announces opposition to Trump’s expansion of BLM land for new oil drilling.
  8. The inspector general for the EPA releases their final report on the cost of Scott Pruitt’s protective services. The report says there is no justification for the costs.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Economists think that U.S. GDP growth might have peaked in the second quarter at 4.2%.
  2. The U.S. trade deficit is getting larger despite Trump’s trade wars and threats. It’s growing at its fastest rate since 2015, reaching new records with the EU and China.
  3. The new farm bill in the House would knock nearly 2 million low-income Americans off their SNAP benefits.
  4. The latest BLS report shows the economy added 201,000 jobs in August, and the unemployment rate held at 3.9%.
  5. Ahead of the elections, Republicans shelve a plan to make the limits on SALT (State And Local Taxes) deductions permanent. This rule hits people hardest in states with high property values and high taxes, and Republicans are afraid that pushing it through now would make it harder for Republicans to win elections.
  6. Trump is open to shutting down the government if a spending bill agreement can’t be reached in September.

Elections:

  1. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey appoints former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl to fill John McCain’s old Senate seat.
  2. ICE subpoenas voter information from the North Carolina Elections Board in an apparent hunt for undocumented voters. The Elections Board fights those subpoenas for both the state and county elections boards. The information ICE is looking for even includes what the ballots look like. So they want to know how people voted. What’s up with that?
  3. Due to the influx of Puerto Ricans into Florida, a judge rules that election ballots must be printed in both Spanish and English.
  4. Former president Obama hits the campaign trail to stump for Democratic congressional candidates. Republicans dig up their old vitriol against him.
  5. Even though a court ruled that North Carolina’s congressional maps are unconstitutionally gerrymandered and that they must redraw the lines for the midterm elections, the same court now acknowledges they don’t have time. So the elections will continue to be racially and politically gerrymandered for this election.

Miscellaneous:

  1. On Labor Day, Trump criticizes AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in a tweet, saying he didn’t represent his labor union well over the weekend. Trumka had said that the things Trump has done to hurt workers are greater than the things he’s done to help them.
  2. Bob Woodward releases his new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” in which accounts from White House insiders give a anxiety-provoking glance into the inner workings of Trump’s White House.
    • I don’t typically like tell-all books, but Bob Woodward is a well-sourced journalist who’s written about many presidents (most of whom complain about his books, Republican or Democrat).
    • Woodward’s account portrays a White House staff that feels they must protect Trump (and us, I guess) from his worst impulses and that frankly seems to be performing a subversive coup by not allowing the president to fulfill his agenda.
  1. Here are a few highlights from the book (or so I’ve heard):
    • John Mattis had to stop Trump from ordering an assassination of Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad.
    • Trump thinks that denouncing white supremacists and Neo-Nazis after the Charlottesville rally was one of the worst things he’s ever done. Apparently he was being sincere the first time when he said there were good Nazis and white supremacists.
    • Trump called Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and a “dumb southerner.” He denies this, saying it isn’t how he talks; but he’s on record saying both of these things at different times in the past.
    • To quote John Kelly (from the book): “We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
  1. Trump calls Woodward to discuss the book, and Woodward (after telling Trump he’s recording it) releases the recording of their discussion.
  2. A top official fans the flames by publishing an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times basically confirming the allegations in Woodward’s book. This official seems to think this little group of resistors on the inside are saving the world from Trump, but I think they’re only doing it to be self-serving. They‘re using Trump to get their own agenda through.
  3. Trump wonders if this might amount to treason and calls on the NYT to release the name of the author.
  4. Journalists and bloggers furiously speculate about who the author could be, while top officials furiously deny it was them. All distracting from the real news of the week, the Kavanaugh hearings.
  5. The op-ed leads a few Democratic officials to urge White House staff to invoke the 25th amendment if they think Trump really isn’t fit for office.
  6. After merely suspending Alex Jones for a week, Twitter bans Infowars and Alex Jones permanently for abusive behavior.
  7. Trump is on the campaign trail, stumping across the midwest. At one rally, he says that someday his speeches will be viewed as being as good as the Gettysburg Address. He also says the “fake news” bashed the Gettysburg Address. Huh?
  8. Trump suggests that protests should be illegal. This isn’t the first time.
  9. Omarosa Manigault-Newman says she recorded nearly every single conversation she had while working in the White House. She’s no fool. But where are the recordings?
  10. The latest rumor is that Trump is looking to replace Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. I only report this because those rumors do actually seem to pan out. We’ll see.
  11. I’d like to catalogue this one under “What a fucking waste of money and time.” The Interior Department inspector general actually looked into inauguration crowd size drama, and found that a photographer had digitally edited the photos to make the crowd size look like it was larger than it actually was.
  12. Trump agrees not to enforce Stormy Daniels’ non-disclosure agreement, likely to get out of testifying in the case.

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 81 in Trump

Posted on August 13, 2018 in Politics, Trump

You can see the constant growth of GDP over the past 10 years, with a few blips. The biggest change has been our perception of growth.

I came across an article in the New York Times that reinforced for me how quirky our perceptions of the economy are. We don’t look so much at actual income, taxes, spending, or the stock market, and we give way too much credit (or blame) to the president. From the article:

“In the 18 months before Mr. Trump moved into the White House, 3.7 million jobs were created, seven in 10 Americans said they were doing fine or living comfortably and the economy grew. In the 18 months since, 3.4 million jobs were created, seven in 10 Americans said they were doing fine or living comfortably and the economy grew. Stubbornly slow wage growth and wide income gaps have spanned both periods.”

So people who complained under Obama suddenly think everything has changed for the better, while those who were praising Obama are now wary of the booming economy. We’re living in a weird time when economic successes don’t improve the popularity of a president from either party.

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

Missed from Last Week:

  1. Trump goes to Ohio to stump for the Republican candidate in a special election, and gets mad at LeBron James and calls him stupid in a tweet. In OHIO. Trump goes on to tweet how great it was that his candidate won by a landslide. Except that he didn’t. It should’ve been a landslide Republican victory in this district, but it’s so close ballots are still being counted.

Russia:

  1. Here are this week’s highlights in the Manafort Trial:
    • Rick Gates takes the stand, and testifies that both he and Manafort were involved in tax evasion schemes, bank fraud, and hiding money abroad. He also admits to embezzlement from Manafort.
    • Gates admits to filing false tax statements on Manafort’s behalf, and to giving accountants false information at Manafort’s request.
    • Gates says that Manafort used a network of offshore accounts to receive money from Ukrainian businessmen.
    • Gates also says that Manafort was shocked when he had to pay $215,000 in taxes, and complained that Gates was supposed to protect him from that.
    • Evidence shows that Manafort tried to cash in on his influence with Trump to help fix his financial problems. Also, Trump’s relationship with Manafort goes back to at least 2013.
    • The defense tries to portray Gates as a serial liar—not surprising.
    • When a defense attorney questioning Rick Gates asked a question about his time at the Trump campaign, prosecutors object. Prosecutors argue they need to protect the secrecy of an ongoing investigation and limit disclosure of new information, implying that Gates is also cooperating with Mueller in the Russia investigation. The judge seals the transcript for that discussion.
    • Witnesses testify that Manafort promised a Chicago bank CEO various positions in the Trump administration in return for loans. The CEO had even called government officials to get information to prepare himself for running the Army.
    • The judge in the case has been pretty critical of both parties, but especially toward the prosecution. At one point the judge did say that he himself was out of line and that the jury should ignore what he said.
    • The prosecution was supposed to wrap up on Friday, but due to delays in the court, prosecution will likely wrap up on Monday.
    • One of the accountants who testified last week is fired when her current company learns of her questionable activities for Manafort.
  1. A judge holds Andrew Miller in contempt of court for refusing to testify before the grand jury. Miller is a former aide to Trump associate Roger Stone who has already lost his appeal to block the subpoena to testify. Miller’s lawyer says that their appeal is designed to challenge the constitutionality of Mueller’s appointment.
  2. Kristin Davis, the Manhattan Madame, is scheduled to testify before the grand jury in the Russia investigation. Rumor is it’s because of her ties to Roger Stone.
  3. The Democratic National Committee obtains court approval to serve a summons to Wikileaks through Twitter! Some background:
    • The DNC filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government, and Wikileaks alleging a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.
    • The lawsuit is likely a way to obtain and expose evidence and information that otherwise would be kept secret.
    • This isn’t the first problem they’ve had serving a subpoena. They also can’t get past Jared Kushner’s Secret Service to serve him and they judge denied their request to serve him by mail.
  1. Florida Senator Bill Nelson says that Russian hackers have breached some of Florida’s election servers and he requests resources for additional security. Nelson and Marco Rubio wrote to local elections officials to warn them of the threat.
  2. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) meets with Russian officials in Moscow, and then invites some Russian lawmakers to visit Washington.
  3. The Trump administration adds new sanctions against Russia for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter living in England.
  4. A leaked Russian document shows that during their summit, Putin lobbied Trump on nuclear arms control, particularly in space.
  5. Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is caught on tape at a GOP fundraiser where he talks about the GOP strategy to impeach Rod Rosenstein and implores attendees to help make sure Democrats don’t win in November because then the whole impeachment of Rosenstein will go away. The reason the House has to wait to impeach, he says, is that if they impeach now the Senate will have to drop the Kavanaugh hearing to take up the Rosenstein impeachment. He also says that Republicans in the House are the only ones protecting Trump from the Mueller investigation.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Despite not getting the full set of requested records on Brett Kavanaugh, the Senate schedules his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court Justice seat to start on September 4. Even if his full record is disclosed, it will be impossible for Senators or the public to review it by then. But this keeps with McConnell’s plans to get him confirmed before the midterms.
  2. Kavanaugh once argued that it’s OK for the president to ignore laws that they don’t think are constitutional, at least until a court declares otherwise.

International:

  1. Trump signs an executive order to reimpose the sanctions on Iran that were ended when we entered into the JCPA with them. He threatens any countries who try to work around the sanctions.
  2. As the Turkish Finance Minister announces a new plan to help the Turkish economy, Trump tweets that he’ll double the tariffs on steel and aluminum coming from Turkey. And the lira tumbles, reaching a new low against the dollar. President Erdogan asks supporters to save the lira by cashing in their U.S. dollars and euros.
  3. A little background on what’s going on here:
    • We froze assets of certain Turkish officials because Turkey’s detaining an American pastor.
    • Turkey has a plan to buy advanced missile systems from Russia.
    • One of Turkey’s biggest banks is implicated in working to get around American sanctions against Iran.
    • Turkey is mad at us for using a Kurdish group to help fight ISIS.
  1. A Saudi-led airstrike in Yemen hits a school bus, killing dozens of children. Saudi Arabia denies this, saying they targeted and killed the people who executed an attack on civilians.
  2. We learn that senior national security officials urged NATO ambassadors last month to complete their joint communiqué before the NATO summit actually began. They thought this might prevent Trump from upending any agreements. Trump still asked whether an attack on one NATO country was really an attack on us all. I’m sure that wouldn’t even be a question if we were the one attacked.
  3. Tens of thousands of Jewish and Arab demonstrators march in the streets in Israel to protest Netanyahu’s new “Jewish State Law.” Some say the law gives non-Jews second-class status. Others say the move goes against democracy.
  4. Oh, and by the way, Saudi Arabia is now feuding with Canada over Canadian tweets in support of human rights aimed at Saudi Arabia. Seriously. Who fights with Canada? But this one’s getting intense. Ambassadors have been expelled or recalled, and Saudi Arabia stopped flights to Toronto and they’re recalling Saudi students studying in Canada.

Family Separation:

  1. The Trump administration gives the ACLU over 400 phone numbers of parents who haven’t been reunited with their children yet. The ACLU accuses the government of deliberately withholding the numbers to prolong the reunification.
  2. An ICE truck carrying mothers separated from their children at the border crashed into a pickup on July 17. ICE denied the incident for three weeks even though there is an accident report.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The Government Accountability Office releases a report showing that Customs and Border Patrol’s plan to build the wall is lacking in information, will run into cost overruns, and will take longer than expected. The current plan fails to take into account things like logistics, terrain, and ownership of border lands. CBP also didn’t think about where barriers would actually be useful.
  2. A furious judge orders the plane carrying a deported mother and child back to their country to turn around and bring them back. They were in the middle of the pair’s deportation hearing. The judge threatens Jeff Sessions with contempt of court if this continues.
  3. Melania Trump’s parents get their U.S. citizenship through family-based migration. Or as Trump calls it, chain migration (and which he wants to eliminate for everyone else).
  4. Melania’s attorney criticizes Trump’s position on family-based migration, calling the attacks unconscionable. This is the same attorney that represented Melania’s parents.
  5. For the second time, a court rules that Trump can’t bar certain transgender people from serving in the military.
  6. Trump tries to get ahead of the white nationalist rally in DC by tweeting out condemnation of all kinds of racism. Again he fails to mention white supremacy or Nazis by name, and he also implies that other kinds of racism are a problem in the U.S.
  7. Steven Miller has come up with yet another way to prevent people from becoming U.S. citizens. He’s working with Trump to change the rules to prevent someone from getting a green card or citizenship if they’ve ever received any kind of assistance, like ACA or CHIP healthcare benefits or SNAP food benefits. This would affect people who have already been here for years and are currently going through the approval process. Now’s probably a good time to remember that J.K. Rowling was once on food stamps.
  8. White nationalists hold a Unite the Right rally in Washington D.C. to mark the one-year anniversary of their march in Charlottesville where counter-protestor Heather Heyer was killed by a self-proclaimed Nazi sympathizer. Charlottesville denied them a permit this year.
  9. Rally organizer Jason Kessler expected 400 people, but it was closer to 40.
  10. In contrast, over a thousand counter-protestors (some peaceful, some not) showed up to stand up against racist hate.
  11. The white supremacist and white nationalist movements have splintered over the past year. Instead of Charlottesville being pivotal in elevating those movements in the U.S. dialog, the rally backfired and has caused many members to be outed, ostracized, and even fired. It also backfired in that it increased the enthusiasm on the other side to fight racism and discrimination.
  12. At the first preseason NFL games, players continue to protest by taking a knee, raising a fist, or staying off the field during the anthem. Also, as it turns out, the courts decided long ago that you can’t force a patriotic act on anyone, ruling that it’s better for them to choose to do it.

Climate/EPA:

  1. In response to Trump blaming California’s fires on the state’s own water policies, Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire, says: “We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires, but let’s be clear: It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires.”
  2. The EPA is planning to start allowing the use of asbestos in manufacturing again. Remember the story a few weeks ago about how a Russian asbestos company started putting Trump’s face on their packaging? Well now you know why. There are nearly 40,000 asbestos-related deaths each year.
  3. The Trump administration defends its move to reverse Obama’s fuel efficiency standards by saying fuel efficiency is dangerous for drivers. How you might ask? Because if we get better mileage, we’ll drive more. Which I guess is more dangerous...
  4. Puerto Rico finally admits that the death toll from Hurricane Maria is most likely over 1,400, way higher than the original claim of 64.
  5. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the EPA must act on its own research and finalize the ban on chlorpyrifos within 60 days. The court says the findings are undisputed that the chemical is unsafe.
  6. A court awards $290 million to a groundskeeper who says his cancer came from Monsanto’s Roundup pesticide.
  7. Bayer might be regretting their recent takeover of Monsanto; their stock drops 11% after the above decision, and there are at least 800 other cases pending.
  8. Monsanto denies the harmful effects of Roundup and says they’ll appeal.
  9. The Bureau of Land Management says it’s looking at opening up oil and gas leases on BLM land in California. There’s been a moratorium on drilling in these areas for the past five years. In one county, residents are trying to pass a ballot measure that would ban fracking and exploration in San Luis Obispo County.

  10. A toxic algae bloom, called the red tide, is moving up the west coast of Florida and killing off fish and other sea creatures (like dolphins, manatees, and turtles). This happens every year, but this year is particularly bad. Governor Rick Scott has slashed the budget for fighting pollution and climate change and has reduced statewide oversight of polluters. Polluted discharge from lakes and streams can cause or worsen algae blooms.

Budget/Economy:

  1. When Betsy DeVos’s yacht was vandalized a few weeks ago, we learned that it’s registered in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes. Here are just a few other current and past officials doing a little offshoring: Elaine Chao, Wilbur Ross, Jay Clayton, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Steve Mnuchin, Randy Quarles, Tom Barrack, and of course, Carl Icahn.
  2. And speaking of Wilbur Ross, he’s being accused of siphoning over $120 million from business associates.
  3. Trump posits that the revenue made from his new tariffs will help pay down our $21 trillion debt. In order to do this, tariffs would have to generate at least $800 billion this year, and they’re expected to generate $40 billion.
  4. Missouri voters reject the “right to work” laws that were passed last year. Right to Work laws weaken unions and give workers fewer options to ensure they’re being treated fairly.
  5. Element Electronics, one of the last companies left in the U.S. that assembles general-use TVs, announces they will shut down because of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese parts. Their VP says he hopes the shutdown is temporary.
  6. Trump threatens Canadian officials with tariffs on Canadian cars if they won’t give us the trade deal we want. He also seems to be playing Canada against Mexico by saying that negotiations with Mexico are coming along.
  7. China announces additional tariffs of 25% on $16 billion of American goods.
  8. A cargo ship carrying $20 million worth of soybeans has been drifting around the Pacific Ocean since the trade war started. They got caught right in the middle, having launched the ship before the tariffs were announced, but not arriving in China in time to beat the tariffs. Soybean prices haven’t rebounded since the tariffs went into effect.
  9. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will no longer routinely check up on lenders for violations of the Military Lending Act. This act protects military service members from being taking advantage of by lenders in numerous ways, including predatory lending and price gouging.
  10. Trump cuts staff for the Office of Financial Research, a group created after the Great Recession for the purpose of identifying future financial risks.

Elections:

  1. Trump endorses Kris Kobach in the Republican primary for governor of Kansas. The race is so close, they have to do a recount, which is normally overseen by the Secretary of State. Who actually IS Kobach. He only recuses himself from the recount once public pressure builds.
  2. Kobach’s opponent and current governor of Kansas accuses Kobach of telling counties not to count ballots that were in the mail, which must be counted under Kansas law.
  3. A group of attorneys and politicians is suing Massachusetts, Texas, South Carolina, and California over their electoral college votes. The group says that the winner-take-all system (which most states have) disenfranchises millions of voters.
  4. Michael Avenatti says he might run for president. You didn’t think he was doing all this publicity out of the goodness of his heart, did you?
  5. Massachusetts passes an automatic voter registration bill. Six states have done the same this legislative season, making a total of thirteen states plus Washington DC that have automatic voter registration.
  6. Representative Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) is arrested on insider trading charges, and is forced to suspend his re-election campaign for Congress. I have lost count of all the scandals in the past two years at this point.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Federal prosecutors are investigating Trump’s one-time attorney, Michael Cohen, for tax and bank fraud, largely having to do with his taxi medallion business.
  2. Tribune Media ends merger talks with Sinclair Broadcasting and is suing them over the failure of the merger. Tribune accuses Sinclair of not holding up their contractual responsibilities to move the merger through FCC approval.
  3. After Alex Jones is banned from numerous social media sites, his supporters launch a harassment campaign against verified Twitter users, including several journalists.
  4. NASA launches the Parker Solar Probe, which will get closer to the sun than any manmade object ever has before. The purposes are to study how energy and heat move through the sun’s corona and to look at the movement of solar wind and energetic solar particles.
  5. Mike Pence officially announces the formation of a sixth branch of the military, the Space Force, by 2020. First the Pentagon will create a Space Command, with the ultimate goal of developing space technologies for military purposes.
    • Pence says we must have American dominance in space!
    • Last year, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis opposed the creation of a new branch of the military, but now he seems to be all in.
    • Critics say that space development is a peaceful collaboration between countries, and that there’s no reason to militarize it.
    • The Russian Embassy makes fun of the announcement with a tweet: “Good Morning, Space Forces!” with a picture of a rocket with a Russian flag. Not so funny, though, is that Russia also threatens to cut off the supply of rocket engines that we need for our existing space program.
  1. A Kentucky district judge who worked on Trump’s campaign is sentenced to 20 years for human trafficking involving minors.
  2. Omarosa Manigault-Newman releases a tell-all book about the Trump administration. She calls him a racist who uses the n-word and she says she has the tapes to prove it. Trump, in turn, calls her a lowlife.
  3. It turns out she does have some tapes, though their legality is questionable. But she releases one of Chief of Staff John Kelly firing her.
  4. An airport worker at Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport hijacks a passenger plane with no passengers, and then flies around for a bit doing some crazy stunts before crashing it into a sparsely populated island.
  5. Someone who worked at the New York Observer when Jared Kushner was in charge there says that Kushner used to have him remove articles that were critical of Kushner or his friends.
  6. We learn that three Mar-a-Lago members with no official government roles speak daily with Veterans Affairs officials and exert influence over policy and decisions.
  7. Media companies begin employing security for their journalists at Trump rallies.

Polls:

  1. Donald Trump Jr. shares an image of a poll that was faked to make Trump Sr.’s approval rating look 10 points higher than it actually is. Junior says it’s amazing what his dad can do. The original image shows Trump’s 40% approval compared to Obama’s 45% at the same time in his term. The doctored image inflates Trump’s rating to 50%.

Week 78 in Trump

Posted on July 23, 2018 in Politics, Trump

At least one of these guys looks happy.

Confused about all the Russia kerfuffle and whether Trump believes our intelligence agencies over Putin? John Hartzell’s tweet pretty much sums up the cleanup process after the joint press conference:

“Today, Trump lied, lied about lying, changed his mind, lied about changing his mind, changed his mind about lying, blamed someone else for something he did, lied about blaming someone else, took a breath, and lied.”

Even though intelligence agencies presented Trump with proof of Russian interference from the start, he has always muddied the waters to make sure that people continue to question the findings of our own intelligence agencies. It’s the reason he can never come up with a clear and cogent response to questions about it.

Russia:

There’s so much Russia news this week that I have to break it out into sub-sections. So here goes.

Trump/Putin Summit:

  1. Trump and Putin hold a two-hour summit, followed by a controversial press conference that sets off a worldwide firestorm. I’ll just start by saying that Russian officials call the summit and press conference major success for Putin, while Trump receives massive criticism back at home.
  2. What did they discuss at the summit? Trump says war and peace, Syria, Ukraine, and Israel (Putin loves Bibi, apparently). But no one really knows for sure.
  3. There was no one in attendance in the Trump/Putin summit except translators, so we have no official record of what happened. There was no joint statement so we don’t know what they agreed on.
  4. Here are some press conference highlights of what Trump says (remember this is just days after the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents for hacking the DNC and after Dan Coates told us that there are warning signs of more hacking):
    • When asked about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Trump refuses to support our own intelligence agencies, and instead says Putin’s denials were forceful and credible.
    • He denies collusion and calls the Russia investigation a disaster for the U.S. Even though the Russia investigation has spawned state investigations and resulted in 32 indictments, 5 guilty pleas, and over 100 charges.
    • Trump suggests that our intelligence agencies (specifically Dan Coates) are not credible and are conspiring against him. Even though Coates told him that Russia was behind the hacking of the DNC servers, Trump doesn’t see any reason why Russia would do that and it could be anybody else.
    • Trump blames the U.S. for our current relationship with Russia, calling the U.S. foolish (and ignoring Russia’s attacks on Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine; their actions in Syria; the poisonings in England; and the downing of the Malaysian passenger jet). Trump sees the U.S. and Russia as morally equivalent.
    • Trump brings up his electoral win, claiming incorrectly that it’s harder for a Republican to win the electoral college than a Democrat. In reality, Democrats need an extra margin of about 11% of the popular vote.
    • He brings up Hillary’s emails again, along with a debunked conspiracy theory about a Pakistani DNC staffer who was arrested. He adds that Russia would never let this happen in their country.
    • Trump calls Putin a good competitor, not an adversary… just after he called the EU one of our biggest foes.
    • He is impressed by Putin’s offer to have Mueller share his evidence on the 12 indicted Russian officials if we allow Russia to interrogate U.S. officials. This would give Russia a view into how our intelligence agencies work and what their capabilities are.
    • Trump also considers handing over Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and Bill Browder for questioning. Putin has long wanted Bill Browder, who exposed the corruption in the Russian government that led to the Magnitsky Act. Side note: Browder is no longer a U.S. citizen, so we can’t really hand him over anyway.
  1. Here‘s some of what Putin says:
    • Russia has never interfered in a U.S. election and they never will.
    • Putin supports Trump in his assertion that there was no collusion.
    • Putin says he knows nothing about any kompromat, claiming he didn’t even know Trump was in town during the Miss Universe pageant. Uh-huh. Even though he cancelled a meeting with Trump during that time.
  1. Later, in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Putin says that our efforts to isolate Russia have failed.
  2. Putin also says he misspoke when he said that Clinton received $400 million from associates of Bill Browder and that it was $400,000 (the actual number is closer to $18,000).
  3. A member of Russia’s parliament says that Russian intelligence stole the 2016 presidential election right out from under the noses of U.S. intelligence.
  4. In a follow-up interview with Sean Hannity, Trump reiterates that Putin says there’s no collusion and that Putin is very, very strong on that. Trump also says Mueller’s Russia investigation is a “phony, witch hunt deal” and that Putin thinks it’s a shame.

Press Conference Fallout:

  1. Reaction is swift, harsh, and bipartisan. Politicians from both sides reiterate that Russia isn’t our friend, there‘s no doubt that Russia interfered in our 2016 elections, and the interference campaign was organized by the Russian government.
  2. Even Fox News is highly critical, with the exception of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
  3. GOP critics use these words to describe the conference: tragic, disgraceful, bizarre, flat-out wrong, shameful, a propaganda win for Putin, and a missed opportunity to hold Russia accountable. Critics on the left call Trump’s response dangerous and weak.
  4. So Trump and the White House attempt some backpedaling… and then forward pedaling… and then backpedaling again:
    • Trump says he misspoke when he said he couldn’t see why Russia WOULD interfere, and says he meant to say WOULDN’T.
    • He accepts intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in our 2016 elections, but then adds that it could also be other people.
    • The next day Trump responds “no” to questions of whether Russia is still interfering, contradicting all of our intelligence agencies and the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee.
    • The White House tries to clarify by saying that Trump was saying “no” to answering any more questions, not “no” to whether Russia is still meddling. This could actually be true; it’s hard to tell.
    • Trump says he was very strong when admonishing Putin that he can’t interfere in our elections.
    • On Monday, Trump thinks Putin made an incredible offer to collaborate on investigations. On Wednesday, Trump says he’ll meet with his advisors to discuss handing over Browder, McFaul, and other government agents to Russia for questioning. And then on Thursday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Trump disagrees with the offer.
    • Trump says he believes Putin when he says he didn’t interfere, but then he says Putin must have known about the interference because he’s in charge of the country.
  1. Even Paul Ryan, who just the week before said we shouldn’t criticize Trump while he’s overseas (in reference to his NATO meetings), criticizes Trump’s words. Mitch McConnell reiterates that Russia is not our friend.
  2. European officials call Trump weak and say he can’t be counted on, though some NATO members do try to smooth things over.
  3. Democrats demand that Republican leaders (like they’re in a position to demand anything):
    • Strengthen sanctions against Russia
    • Force the security team that went to Helsinki with Trump to testify before Congress so we can learn about what was agreed
    • End their attacks on our intelligence agencies and Mueller
    • Extradite the 12 indicted Russian hackers.
  1. McConnell and Ryan consider additional Russia sanctions.
  2. The Russian Ambassador to the U.S. says the summit produced important verbal agreements. Russian officials and the Russian press start talking about all the agreements that were made, yet the American people have no idea what those are.
  3. The Russian Ministry of Defense says that they’re ready to implement all the summit agreements around global security.
  4. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says the summit was fabulous, “better than super.”
  5. In contrast, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refuses to talk to the press about it.
  6. House Intelligence Committee Democrats request a subpoena for the American interpreter, who was the only other American in the room at the meeting between Trump and Putin. The GOP leadership rejects that request.
  7. The whole thing incites protests in Washington, DC, including at the White House. These have been ongoing for a week now.
  8. Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, intelligence agencies presented him with proof that Putin personally directed the 2016 election interference. This proof included emails and texts from Russian military officers. Sources say Trump was “grudgingly” convinced.
  9. While Dan Coates is being interviewed by Andrea Mitchell, he finds out by tweet that Trump is inviting Putin to the White House in the fall. He appears to laugh at Trump at this point.
  10. At the same forum, Kirstjen Nielsen refuses to say she agrees with our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia, specifically Putin, was behind the election interference. She’s the Secretary of HOMELAND SECURITY. Come on!
  11. Trump tries to blame Obama for Russian interference. Obama probably could’ve done more but in reality he was blocked by Mitch McConnell.
    • McConnell received the same intelligence briefing, so he knew what was going on leading up to the 2016 elections.
    • When Obama asked him to sign on to a bipartisan public statement about it, McConnell refused.
    • McConnell told Obama not to release the information and that he [McConnell] would consider any efforts to publicly challenge Russia “an act of partisan politics.”
    • Well played, Mitch; well played.

Other Russia News:

  1. The head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command says he’s directed both agencies to coordinate to fight any future interference in our elections by foreign powers. But they’re on their own; he hasn’t received any White House guidance on this.
  2. Federal agents arrest Maria Butina, a gun rights advocate who is charged with being an unregistered foreign agent (aka “spy”). She allegedly infiltrated the NRA and cozied up to GOP politicians to influence U.S. politics in the interest of Russia.
    • According to prosecutors, Butina tried to exchange sex for influence. She’s been living with Paul Erickson, a conservative political operative from South Dakota who is under investigation for fraud.
    • Her alleged co-conspirator in Russia is Alexander Torshin, who is currently under U.S. sanctions. They were trying to develop back-channel lines of communication between Russian and American officials.
    • Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif) calls the indictment against Butina bogus. Does he protest too much? The affidavit implies that Butina was setting up a meeting between Rohrabacher and Torshin when Rohrabacher visited Russia in 2015.
    • The FBI has a proposal authored by Butina talking about how they can take power away from the Democrats in 2016 and give it to a (not named) party that will be more friendly to Russian interests. The influence campaign started with the NRA and CPAC.
    • It was Butina who secured invitations for Russian officials to attend the National Prayer Breakfast.
    • The affidavit also suggests that Russia had some influence on Trump’s selection for Secretary of State.
    • Butina was arrested when it appeared she was preparing to leave the country. She’s deemed a flight risk, so is being held without bail.
    • Russia’s foreign minister demands Butina’s immediate release.
  1. Twitter suspends the accounts of Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks after last week’s indictment of the Russian hackers.
  2. Trey Gowdy says there’s no good reason to impeach Rod Rosenstein.
  3. Mueller requests immunity for five witnesses in the Paul Manafort trial. He also releases over 500 pieces of evidence being used in the trial.
  4. Remember those Macedonian trolls who pushed pro-Trump, anti-Hillary, and conservative fake stories and conspiracy theories before the 2016 elections? It turns out the effort was started by a Macedonian attorney with the assistance of two American conservatives, Ben Goldman and Paris Wade (you might remember a profile done on them in 2016 describing them writing fake news stories out of their Long Beach apartment). Paris Wade is running for Nevada State Assembly.
  5. The data that Cambridge Analytica mined off Facebook was accessed by a server in Russia.
  6. Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, says Russia is very aggressive in election interference and that they’re actively creating discord and divisiveness in the U.S. right now.
  7. The DOJ releases highly redacted documents that were used to support the Carter Page FISA warrant application. This type of information is typically not made public.
  8. Trump claims that the redacted documents show that his campaign really was being illegally spied on, even though there’s nothing in the released documents that imply that.

Courts/Justice:

  1. I guess we’re cool with the FBI again? Jeff Sessions delivers an address to students at Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC). These are members of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Sessions says, “You and your brothers and sisters are in every corner of America, working 24 hours a day to courageously and faithfully protect this nation and our people. We are proud of you.”
  2. Republicans in the Senate pull Trump’s nomination for the 9th circuit court of appeals, Ryan Bounds, not because of Bounds’ racist writings, but because they don’t have enough votes to confirm him.
  3. Mitch McConnell says that if Democrats keep pushing for documentation around Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, he’ll delay the confirmation hearings until right before the midterms to hurt vulnerable Democrats in their re-election efforts.

Healthcare:

  1. A district court judge rules in Trump’s favor on changes to Title X regarding family planning grants. The changes move the emphasis from contraception and safe sex to abstinence and natural family planning (whatever that is). Because we all know that when you tell youngsters to abstain from sex, that’s what they do, right?

International:

  1. Trumps says that NATO members agreed to pony up way more money because he was so assertive. NATO members say, not. They’re just meeting the conditions of their 2014 agreement with the Obama administration.
  2. During the NATO summit, Trump reportedly praised authoritarian Turkish president Erdogan while criticizing our allies in Europe for needing to consult with their respective legislative branches before making policy decisions.
  3. Trump questions why we would come to the defense of a small country like NATO member Montenegro.
  4. While Trump meets with Putin, leaders from the EU and China meet and agree on a joint resolution as well as a commitment to keep the global system strong.
  5. Trump tells diplomats to initiate negotiations directly with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Previously, we’ve worked to include the Afghanistan government in these talks, but the Taliban only wants to talk to the U.S. government.
  6. Israel’s parliament passes a bill that defines Israel as the Jewish nation-state, where Hebrew is the official language and Jerusalem is the capital.
  7. And speaking of Israel, moving our embassy to Jerusalem will cost us $21.2 million instead of the $250,000 Trump said it would.
  8. So far Brexit is costing the UK Treasury 440 million pounds a week; more than the EU ever cost them. Brexit was sold as an economic boon for the country.
  9. North Korean officials have been cancelling meetings and demanded more money. They don’t seem to be slowing down their nuclear program any either. Trump is frustrated by the slow pace and obstacles.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Senate Democrats put forth a resolution to prevent the president from turning over American citizens to hostile foreign powers. It passes unanimously.
  2. The House passes the BUILD Act, which will encourage private investment in countries with lower income economies to help fight extreme poverty.
  3. The GOP blocks Democratic legislation to question the translator at the Trump/Putin summit, to investigate NRA ties to Russian money, and to back our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections.
  4. Democrats continue to request a vote on an amendment that would provide funding to states for election security, but the GOP leadership continues to refuse the vote.

Separating Families:

  1. A judge blocks the government from deporting newly reunited families to make sure none are improperly deported.
  2. A court orders counseling for children who are victims of family separation at the border. They court calls it a constitutional injury, and in some cases may require treatment for PTSD.
  3. So far, only 364 of the more than 2,500 children taken at the border have been reunited with their parents. Of 1,600 parents waiting to be reunited, almost half are slated for deportation.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. More than 100 elected officials from 20 states sign on to an open letter arguing that we should abolish ICE, the agency created after 9/11 to keep our borders secure. They say ICE is too broken to be reformed and should be abolished. They don’t have an alternative yet.
  2. A district judge in Pennsylvania rules that religious adoption agencies do not have the right to discriminate against prospective parents based on religious beliefs while at the same time accepting taxpayer money.
  3. The NFL puts its new kneeling-during-the-anthem policy on hold while they negotiate the terms with the teams. So Trump tweets a call for extreme punishments for players who kneel.
  4. A federal appeals court rejects the Trump administration’s efforts to reinstate the ban on transgender troops while the his original ban makes its way through the courts.

Climate/EPA:

  1. The Department of the Interior issues a proposal to overhaul the endangered species act to make it more friendly to economic development (or as it’s better known, drilling and mining projects). This is the act that saved the Yellowstone grizzly and the BALD FREAKING EAGLE from extinction, among others.
  2. California just reached their goal of reducing their carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020—two years ahead of time.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The EU and Japan sign a major trade agreement that gets rid of most of the tariffs on goods imported between the two.
  2. Trump criticizes the Feds‘ decision to raise interest rates again, saying it’ll slow down our booming economy. Which is kind of the point of interest rate hikes.
  3. A group of major U.S. companies signs on to a new jobs training initiative by the Trump administration.
  4. China files a complaint with the World Trade Organization over Trump’s proposed tariffs, saying they fall under protectionism.
  5. The Congressional Budget Office updates its estimates, and now says our deficit will hit $1 trillion next year.
  6. Trump threatens even higher tariffs against China, saying he’ll go up to $500 billion if he has to.
  7. Republicans in Congress back off from making sure the sanctions against Chinese company ZTE stick, and instead allow Trump to make this a personal favor to China president Xi Jinping.

Elections:

  1. A lawyer for one of Roy Moore’s accusers has recorded conversations of two of Moore’s supporters offering him $10,000 to drop the case and discredit the victim before the Senate election that Democrat Doug Jones won.
  2. No dark money in politics, you say? The Trump administration ends IRS disclosure requirements for certain nonprofits, allowing donors to give money without any scrutiny. How many ways can we make Citizens United worse?
  3. Some states’ voter registration systems operate on systems owned by Russian-backed companies.
  4. A top voting machine manufacturer admits they issued a few of those servers with the remote sharing application pcAnywhere installed.
  5. The reason the FBI took so long to announce the reopening of Hillary Clinton’s email investigation (which is why it happened just nine days before the election) is that the bureau was so overwhelmed with the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.

Miscellaneous:

  1. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai pushes back on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s merger with Tribune Media. There’s concern that even with the changes Sinclair is willing to make, they would still control too many stations.
  2. Also on the Sinclair front, the company recently announced that they’ll release a streaming app later this year to compete with other agencies, such as Fox News.
  3. A recent court filing indicates that the secret service has been blocking attempts to serve a subpoena to Jared Kushner.
  4. The inspector general for the Interior Department opens an investigation into a real estate deal between Ryan Zinke’s foundation and certain developers (including Halliburton).
  5. In the material seized from Michael Cohen, there’s a recorded conversation between him and Trump discussing payments to Karen McDougal, the Playboy model who says she had an affair with Trump. The conversation took place a few months before the election.
  6. Oddly enough, Trump’s lawyers waived attorney-client privilege around this recording.
  7. In the middle of a signing ceremony for work training and apprenticeships, Trump realizes that his reality show, The Apprentice, was about apprenticeships.
  8. Obama gives the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa, where he alludes to Trump without calling him out by name. He says these are strange and uncertain times, with the rise of strongman politics around the globe.
  9. Starting August 1, people can download plans for 3-D printable guns. None of which will be traceable because they don’t have a serial number. Yay us.

Polls:

The only thing I’ll say about polls is that Trump’s approval numbers should’ve changed this week, but they didn’t. ‘Nuff said.