Tag: TrumpRussia

Week 130 in Trump

Posted on July 24, 2019 in Politics, Trump

Can we be done with this already?

What a week. The ongoing feud between Trump and the squad; a resolution of condemnation of Trump’s racist tweets; a failed impeachment vote; a contempt vote for Barr and Ross; newly unsealed evidence in Michael Cohen’s case; even more sex traffickers; tensions in Iran; Hong Kong protests; Puerto Rico protests; the USDA and BLM move across country; and an amazing database of all opioid sales between 2006 and 2012.

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending July 21…

Russia:

  1. The judge in Roger Stone’s case bans him from all social media because the guy just can’t keep quiet about his case. The judge also limits Stone’s family’s use of social media. But two hours after the hearing, his wife posts a picture of her and Roger at the hearing
  2. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, says they knew that Julian Assange was interfering in our 2016 presidential election. He accuses Wikileaks of manipulating the information.
  3. The Trump administration is using executive privilege to block House committees from obtaining classified documents from Mueller’s investigation.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Texas Democrat Al Green forces a House vote on articles of impeachment against Trump with a focus on Trump’s behavior and moral fitness for office, which the House votes down. This resolution doesn’t cover obstruction, and it’s Green’s third time trying.
  2. Trump tells Kellyanne Conway to ignore a subpoena from Congress to testify about her violations of the Hatch Act. (She’s been accused of more Hatch Act violations than any other single person, and others have resigned over their violations.)
  3. The judge in Jeffrey Epstein’s child trafficking case denies him bail, ruling that Epstein will remain behind bars while he awaits trial. The judge also says that Epstein’s behavior around young girls seems uncontrollable.
  4. While the newly released evidence from Michael Cohen’s case implicate Trump in the conspiracy to pay hush money to women with whom he had affairs, the Southern District of New York announces there won’t be any more charges filed in the case.
    • It’s understandable, since the working theory is that you can’t indict a sitting president; but also confusing, since other people appear to be implicated in the crime as well (including Hope Hicks, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson, and AMI executive David Pecker).
    • The unsealed evidence shows the impetus to keep the women quiet came from the release of the Access Hollywood tapes where Trumps brags that he can (and does) grab women and do what he wants because he’s rich.
    • The judge ordered the release of the documents because he believes them to be a matter of national importance.
    • As a result of the document release, the House Judiciary Committee has asked Hope Hicks for clarity on the inconsistencies in her testimony.
  1. More information comes out about Epstein’s sweetheart deal brokered by Alex Acosta in 2008.
    • The jail supervisor wrote a memo to his staff to let them know that Epstein was a first-time offender “poorly versed in jail routine,” and “his adjustment to incarceration will most likely be atypical.”
    • The supervisor ordered Epstein’s cell to be unlocked with frequent access to the attorney room where they installed a TV for him.
    • Epstein was allowed to leave the jail for 12 hours a day, six days a week under a work release program. At times, he was left unattended.
  1. And because you just can’t know enough sex traffickers, the Eastern District of Virginia indicts George Nader on charges of trafficking a 14-year-old boy from Europe to have sex. George Nader worked with the Trump campaign to enable private meetings between the campaign and Russia, and between the campaign and the United Arab Emirates.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A court rules that the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, must pay $14 million in damages to a woman against whom they instigated a troll storm. The Daily Stormer launched “an online anti-Semitic harassment and intimidation campaign” against the Montana woman who had complained about her dealings with the mother of white supremacist leader Richard Spencer. This is the second multi-million judgement against the Daily Stormer.
  2. While the DOJ is concentrating on prosecuting immigration violations, opioid cases, and violent crimes, white collar prosecutions under Trump are down dramatically, both in the number of cases and the fines imposed.

Healthcare:

  1. A federal judge upholds Trump’s extension of bare-bones insurance policies that don’t meet the standards outlined in Obamacare. People can now keep these policies for up to three years.
  2. This database is whack. It turns out that the DEA has kept a database of every single oxycodone and hydrocodone transaction from 2006 to 2012. These account for 75% of all opioid drugs shipped to pharmacies. They’ve known all along where the problems were and where doctors and pharmacies were overselling.
    • 76 billion pills were distributed across the country during that time. In the areas hit hardest, that amounted to 150 or more pills per person per year. You can look up different areas of the country for yourself.
    • Six companies sold 75% of the pills tracked: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS, and Walmart.
    • SpecGx manufactured 29 million of the pills sold; Actavis Pharma manufactured 26 million. Purdue Pharma, which has taken the brunt of the fight against opioids, manufactured 2.5 million by comparison.
  1. DHHS will begin enforcing a new regulation preventing family planning clinics that receive federal funding from performing or referring women for abortions.

International:

  1. The BBC agrees not to share information gathered by one of their correspondents in an upcoming trip to Iran with the BBC’s Persian language channel, giving in to the Iranian government’s restrictions on a free press.
  2. Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo is arrested under an extradition warrant on corruption charges. Now Peru has arrested all of its living former presidents in connection with bribery charges connected to Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company.
  3. The U.S. drops to 128th in the annual Global Peace Index, largely because of increases in violence and political instability. We’re now between South Africa and Saudi Arabia.
  4. Over the past two years under Trump, DHS has gotten rid of or reduced programs that were put in place to detect terrorist threats around weapons of mass destruction. These programs were put in place after the attacks on 9/11. DHS is tasked with domestic security, including identifying these threats.
  5. Iran seizes what appears to be a United Arab Emirates tanker carrying what Iran calls “smuggled fuel.”
  6. Trump announces that we brought down an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz.
  7. Britain officials claim that Iranian authorities seized two British oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, one under the British flag and one under Liberia’s flag.
  8. Angela Merkel joins the ranks of foreign leaders who criticize Trump’s racist tweets and comments about four Congresswomen of color. Leaders have also expressed disapproval of the crowds chanting “Send her back!”
  9. Trump denies that he gave Rand Paul permission to negotiate with Iran, and then the next day he reverses himself and says he did give Paul permission. Interesting choice, since Paul is an admitted isolationist.
  10. The protests in Hong Kong continue—we’re in the fourth month. Protesters vandalize the Chinese government’s liaison office there, and police use tear gas and rubber bullets in response. In a separate incident, masked men with sticks attack protesters in a train station. Even so, the protests have been mostly peaceful, and illustrate how the populace feels about Chinese sovereignty.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Mostly along party-line votes, the House votes to condemn Trump’s racist tweets about the four Congresswomen of color. The resolution “strongly condemns [Trump’s] racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.” It received high criticism and little support from Republicans (four Republicans and one Independent voted for it). Some members of the GOP object to the use of the word “racist”n on the House floor. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…
  2. The House votes to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt after they ignore subpoenas for information in the investigation into adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
  3. The House passes a bill to increase the minimum wage to $15. This will likely not be taken up in the Senate, and the Congressional Budget Office reports that this could cut jobs and might not result in higher incomes in the long term.
  4. Rep. Joaquin Castro introduces legislation to remove words from the federal government‘s vocabulary that describe immigrants in ways that are now considered derogatory.
  5. Following the Senate’s approval, the House passes a series of measures to prevent the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Trump is likely to veto this.

Family Separation:

  1. Here’s what happening at the border. A family at a Border Patrol holding facility in El Paso was told that one parent would be sent back to Mexico and one parent could stay in the U.S. with their children. The agent then asked their three-year-old daughter to choose whether her Mom or Dad should be the one to stay. The girl said Mom, but cried when they started to take away her Dad. The agent said to the girl, “You said with mom.”
    • By the way, the three-year-old has heart disease and has had open heart surgery.
    • The only reason this family is together right now is because of the hard work of an American doctor who examined the little girl.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. While defending Trump’s racist tweets, Kellyanne Conway asks a Jewish journalist what his ethnicity is. This is in response to the journalist asking which country Trump wants the [mostly U.S.-born] Congresswomen to return to.
  2. Trump says he tried to stop the crowd from chanting “Send her back” at his first campaign rally after he made his racist tweets about the Congresswomen of color. He says he started speaking very quickly to cut off the chant, but video shows that he leaned back and soaked it in for about 15-20 seconds before beginning to speak. And 12 minutes later, he says, “If they don’t like it, let them leave… You know what? If they don’t love it, TELL THEM to leave it.”
    • Lara Trump throws Trump’s supporters under the bus, saying they were the ones who started the chant. She says Trump didn’t do anything.
  1. The following days, Trump continues his fight against the women, calling them pro-terrorist and anti-Israel and anti-USA. Trump’s aides have been working overtime to get him to stop.
  2. But eight days later, Trump is still tweeting about the Congresswoman, accusing them of hating America and Israel. He lies about:
    • Ilhan Omar supporting Al Qaeda (she doesn’t).
    • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling the U.S. people garbage (she didn’t).
    • All four women calling Jews evil (they haven’t).
  1. The Anti-Defamation League, which was founded to stop defamation of Jewish people, criticizes Trump for using Israel as a shield to defend his racist tweets. They point out how white supremacists across the country are cheering his tweets. The neo-Nazi who runs the Daily Stormer tweeted, “This is the kind of WHITE NATIONALISM we elected him for…”
  2. The four Congresswomen hold a press conference condemning the “recent xenophobic, bigoted remarks from the occupant of the White House.” They call this a distraction. They also call for Trump’s impeachment.
  3. Now we’re learning that Trump’s attacks on the squad was part of a strategy gone awry, seemingly because he doesn’t understand how racist it was. He meant to drive a wedge between House leadership and the squad, but his words unified the two groups in their condemnation Trump. He’s also trying to make this four women the face of the Democratic party in the run-up to 2020.
  4. Upon returning to her home state of Minnesota, Ilhan Omar is welcomed home by cheering supporters at the airport.
  5. The DOJ issues a new rule that you can’t seek asylum in the U.S. if you traveled through another country to get here and didn’t request asylum from that country. This is targeted at Central Americans coming through Mexico, but the DOJ is forgetting that Mexico is not safe for many asylum seekers because people they are fleeing follow them there.
    • Unlike Canada, neither Mexico nor Guatemala has a safe third-country agreement with the U.S.
    • That’s OK, though. Trump’s new rule doesn’t require that the third country be deemed as safe for asylum seekers.
    • These rules also apply to minors crossing the border alone.
    • The ACLU files a lawsuit to block the rule, saying “It’s patently unlawful under U.S. law as well as international human rights law.”
  1. A federal judge definitively blocks Trump from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The judge also retains jurisdiction in the case to ensure that the census is processed properly.
  2. Trump tells aides that he wants to fire Wilbur Ross after the failure to get the citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
  3. Customs and Border Protection open an investigation into 70 current or former Border Patrol employees who belong to the Facebook group that mocked and denigrated both migrants and elected officials.
  4. Wanna know how all that funding for border security is being spent? Southwest Key Programs paid six employees at least $1 million in 2017. Southwest Key is a nonprofit agency that provides housing for thousands of migrant children.
  5. Catholic sisters, clergy, and parishioners gather in the Russell Senate Office Building in DC to protest Trump’s immigration policies and our treatment of immigrants. 70 are arrested by DC police.
  6. Even though you can’t pray away the gay, Amazon is getting flack from House Republicans for no longer carrying books by a leading proponent of gay conversion therapy. Conversion therapy has not only been debunked, it’s also been found to lead to mental problems and even suicide.
  7. During a House Oversight and Reform Committee meeting, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asks DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan if he’d seen the photoshopped images of a violent rape of AOC that were being spread by border patrol agents. She then asks whether the people who spread these images are still in charge of taking care of women and children. McAleenan has no answer.

  8. Under the Trump administration, undocumented immigrants who serve in the military are being denied citizenship at rates higher than foreign-born immigrants who don’t serve.
  9. CBP uses tear gas to stop a group of about 50 migrants who try to rush the barriers on a bridge at the border in Rio Grande City.
  10. The Pentagon authorizes 1,100 more troops and 1,000 Texas National Guard soldiers to be deployed to the border.
  11. The DOJ announces they won’t bring charges against the police officer who killed Eric Garner because they say they can’t prove the officer acted willfully. Garner was killed five years ago. “I can’t breathe.”
  12. Three more white supremacists are sentenced to prison sentences for charges stemming from the violence in Charlottesville where activist Heather Heyer was killed.

Climate:

  1. The Trump campaign comes up with a novel way to own the libs. They start selling MAGA plastic straws to get back at environmentalists who have pushed through regulations banning plastic straws.
  2. NOAA and NASA say that this past June was the hottest June on record (which goes back to 1880).
  3. The EPA announces that they will not ban chlorpyrifos even though the EPA’s own experts have linked the pesticide to serious health problems, especially in children.
  4. The USDA blocks the release of their own plan for responding and adapting to the effects of climate change.

Budget/Economy:

  1. China’s economic growth continues to slow. Last month, their growth rate was the slowest it’s been in nearly three decades. This is partly from the trade war with the U.S., but their growth rate is still 6.2%.
  2. Manufacturing employment shows a slight increase in July, but is still down overall because of a deep dive in June.
  3. Retail growth slowed in the first half of the year, largely because of the struggles of brick-and-mortar stores. Online retail sales have also been slowing down over the past
  4. Corporate earnings decline for the second quarter in a row.
  5. Chinese investment in the U.S. has fallen from $46.5 billion in 2016 to $5.4 billion in 2018.

Elections:

  1. The Marine Corps orders Duncan Hunter to stop using their emblem and phrase on his re-election campaign materials.
    • Duncan’s racist mailers tie two of his fellow members of the House to terrorism as well as tying his Democratic opponent to terrorism.
    • The mailer, not surprisingly, does NOT mention that Hunter has been indicted on campaign finance charges. It also doesn’t mention the numerous affairs he had on his wife using said campaign finances.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Trump tweets that his administration will take a look into allegations by Peter Thiel that Google is compromised by China.
    • Thiel has no evidence and says he was just raising questions, but he did say they needed to be investigated by the FBI and CIA.
    • Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic advisor, dismissed Thiel’s claims.
  1. Trump lets loose with a barrage of lies during his cabinet meeting. He falsely claims:
    • The governments of Guatemala and Honduras are forming and sending migrant caravans.
    • Asylum seekers who are released on their own recognizance don’t show up for hearings (89% do).
    • Human traffickers don’t come through ports of entry (they do).
    • Democrats want open borders (the vast majority do not).
    • He approved the permits for an energy facility in Louisiana (Obama’s administration approved them).
    • The program to repatriate remains of U.S. soldiers who died in North Korea is still going on (it’s been suspended).
    • The renegotiated NAFTA would force auto manufacturers to stay in the U.S. (there’s nothing in the new agreement that would require that).
    • We’re building lots of wall at the southern border (no actual construction has begun on any new fencing).
    • The most China has purchased from famers in a year is $16 billion, and since we’re taking in many times that in tariffs, we can pay the farmers $16 billion to make up for their loss in sales. (I can barely unwind this one. The most China spent in a year is nearly $30 billion, the tariffs have generated about $21 billion (which is not many times $16 billion), and Americans pay those costs, not China or Chinese companies).
    • During the Obama administration, the trade deficit with China was $500 billion (it’s never been that high; in fact, the highest it’s ever been is 2018 when it was $381 billion for goods and services, and $420 billion for just goods (we’re an exporter of services)).
    • The Chinese economy has lost $20 trillion since Trump’s election (China’s GDP continues to go up, and their economy grew by 6.6% last year).
    • The Iran deal cost Obama’s administration $150 billion (it wasn’t U.S. money, it was Iran’s; it wasn’t all held in the U.S. but in financial institutions around the world; and it was closer to $60 billion in Iranian-owned assets that were unfrozen).
  1. Trump announces he’ll nominate Eugene Scalia to be Secretary of Labor, replacing Alex Acosta who left over the Epstein scandal. Scalia is the son of late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
  2. Puerto Rican protestors are out in force trying to oust their governor over leaked misogynistic and homophobic texts exchanged with his top advisors. Anger at the governor has been brewing over his mishandling of the economy, but this put a match to the flame. The governor says he won’t step down, but he won’t seek re-election next year. Protestors say that’s not good enough.
  3. The USDA suffers a brain drain, as they move offices from DC to Kansas City and force workers to move there as well if they want to keep their jobs. Less than 2/3 of the researchers asked to relocate have accepted the offer.
  4. At the same time, the BLM is moving its headquarters from DC to Grand Junction, CO. Some worry that this means the agency will have less clout in decision making in DC.
  5. A Pennsylvania school sends letters to parents threatening to send their kids to foster care if they don’t pay their past-due school lunch debts.
  6. Attorney General William Barr donated $51,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee over the five months leading up to his confirmation. Aside from that, he’s given just six times since 2009.

Polls:

  1. 68% of Americans polled say Trump’s tweets and comments about the four women in Congress are offensive. 75% of women find the tweets offensive. But only 25% of Republicans find them offensive. And here’s where we have the disconnect in this country. It’s also why you don’t hear Republicans in Congress calling Trump out for racism.
  2. A separate poll found Trump’s approval rating among Republican rose 5% after his racist tweets.

Week 129 in Trump

Posted on July 17, 2019 in Politics, Trump

This week ended with a bizarre series of racists tweets from the Commander in Chief who was apparently trying to pick a fight with four freshman Representatives who also happen to be women of color. It appears Trump is trying to make them the face of the Democratic party ahead of the 2020 elections so that his base will believe that Democrats = Socialists. For anyone who believes that, I have some recommended reading on socialism.

But the worst thing is that he told them to go back to their countries. He didn’t tell any white male immigrants in Congress to go back to their countries; he told four women of color, all of whom are U.S. citizens and three of whom were born here, to go back to their countries. If you don’t get it, here’s a little background on why “go back to your country” is racist.

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending July 14…

Missing From Last Week:

  1. Now that I’m reading last week’s New York Times piece about the conditions in Clint, it turns out that even border agents are broken up about the conditions the kids are being kept in. They have repeatedly reported the conditions to their superiors with no response and no assistance.
    • With all the recent publicity, though, an internal investigation into the facility was ordered last month.
    • It’s a really tough read.

Russia:

  1. The White House blocks Annie Donaldson, Don McGahn’s former chief of staff, from answering over 200 questions from Congress about obstruction of justice. The Mueller report cites Donaldson’s notes dozens of times, and Congress asked her to elaborate.
  2. The DOJ interviewed Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the now infamous Steele dossier, for 16 hours last month as part of the inspector general’s investigation into the Russia investigation. At first, the interviews were contentious with interviewers hostile to Steele’s information, but they found his testimony to be both credible and surprising.
    • Reminder #1: The surveillance of Carter Page began after he left the Trump campaign.
    • Reminder #2: The FISA warrant didn’t rely on the Steele dossier, though they did use the dossier as a supporting document.
  1. The House Judiciary votes (along party lines, of course) to authorize subpoenas of a dozen witnesses as part of their obstruction probe: Jared Kushner; Jeff Sessions; Rod Rosenstein; Michael Flynn; John Kelly; Rob Porter; American Media, Inc. executives David Pecker and Dylan Howard; Keith Davidson (Stormy Daniels’ one-time attorney), Corey Lewandowski, Rick Dearborn, and Jody Hunt.
  2. Robert Mueller and House Democrats reach an agreement to delay his testimony by one week and to extend the length of his interview in order to give more members a chance to question him.
  3. The DOJ orders two of Mueller’s investigators not to appear for House interviews. I’m not clear on how anyone can look at this and not realize how obstructive the DOJ is being.

Legal Fallout:

  1. New York State passes a law that allows congressional committees to access state tax returns for any “specified and legitimate legislative purpose.” This opens the door to them getting Trump’s state tax returns, if not his federal returns. Suits to obtain Trumps federal returns are pending against the Treasury and IRS.
  2. Congressional Democrats who are suing Trump for using the presidency to profit from foreign governments issue dozens of subpoenas to Trump Organization and other Trump businesses. The DOJ asks an appeals court to stop the subpoenas. Wait… is it the DOJ’s job to get involved in lawsuits against a sitting president?
  3. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals dismisses a separate emoluments case involving the Trump Hotel in DC. This case was brought by the Attorneys General of Maryland and the District of Columbia.
  4. Labor Secretary Alex Acosta defends the plea deal he brokered with Jeff Epstein a decade ago, which allowed Epstein to plead to soliciting prostitution (a reduced plea for what he actually did). Acosta says it was the best he could do, and blames the state attorney’s office.
    • A Palm Beach County attorney disputes Acosta’s account, saying that a lengthy indictment was prepared but never used after Acosta brokered the plea deal.
    • Though Trump takes Acosta’s side in the controversy, Acosta resigns as Labor Secretary. As with all the questionable characters who’ve fallen from this administration, Trump says he feels very bad for Acosta. I wonder if he also feels bad for the children Epstein hurt?
    • Finally, can we all just call this what it is and stop candy-coating it? Epstein raped these girls over and over again, and he pimped them out to his friends to be raped over and over again.
  1. If you’re feeling sorry for Acosta, he’s never had the interest of children at heart. As Secretary of Labor, he tried to cut the budget allocated to fighting child labor, forced labor, and child trafficking from $68 million to just $18.5 million.
  2. After recusing himself from the Epstein sex trafficking case, Attorney General William Barr unrecuses himself (hey, Jeff Sessions, I guess you can unrecuse!). He will recuse himself from any investigation of Epstein’s previous case in Florida. Barr’s former law firm had represented Epstein.
  3. When federal officials arrested Jeff Epstein last week, they found a trove of nude photos of underage girls locked away in a safe.
  4. Michael Flynn was supposed to testify against his former business partner, Bijan Rafiekian. But prosecutors no longer believe Flynn’s version of events and view Flynn as a co-conspirator. So far, the judge says there isn’t enough evidence of that.
  5. Felix Sater finally sits down with House Intelligence Committee investigators for an interview about Trump Tower Moscow dealings. Sater has delayed his testimony before and missed his previously scheduled testimony.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A unanimous ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a previous ruling that Trump cannot block followers on Twitter because he uses the account for government business. Please remember this before dismissing Trump’s tweets as insignificant.

Healthcare:

  1. A federal judge blocks Trump’s rule that would’ve forced drug companies to include prices in their TV ads. This was part of Trump’s efforts to reduce drug prices.
  2. After that, Trump withdraws a plan to limit drug rebates to middlemen like insurance companies and Medicare.
  3. Republican Senators express hope that the courts do completely gut Obamacare, though they have no plan at this time to fall back on in case the courts do rule that way. They’re awaiting a decision in a Trump-backed lawsuit.
    • If the courts do decimate Obamacare, it would likely cause chaos in the insurance markets.
    • Mitt Romney says he has some ideas. And of course he does. Obamacare was based on the plan Romney instituted in Massachusetts.
    • Susan Collins, on the other hand, thinks it would be very bad if the courts decide to do away with Obamacare. Too bad she didn’t think about that while she was voting to confirm judges who won’t uphold Obamacare.
  1. Trump signs an executive order directing DHHS to develop policies to improve treatments for patients with kidney problems. The goals are to reduce kidney failure, reduce the need for dialysis, and make more kidneys available for transplant.

International:

  1. Massive protests continue in Hong Kong even though the Chinese extradition bill they were protesting has been deemed dead.
    • People! This should be your wakeup call. If you want to effect change you have to get out and protest. You have to call your Members of Congress. Across the world, we’ve seen how effective protests are for the people.
  1. The British ambassador to the U.S. resigns after his cables criticizing President Crazy Train are leaked (and after Trump calls him a pompous fool). Turns out his cables weren’t undiplomatic at all; they’re typical of how ambassadors criticize governments (in private). It also turns out that our own ambassadors to other countries have been behaving worse, and very publicly so.
    • Our ambassador in Berlin regularly and openly criticizes the German government (he started within hours of taking his role).
    • Our ambassador to the Netherlands has lied about their being “no go” zones in the country because of Islamic extremists (though he later admitted he had no idea what he was talking about).
    • Most of the foreign ambassadors in DC share the UK ambassador’s view of Trump.
  1. The former ambassador to the UK reported back to his country that Trump was embarking on “an act of diplomatic vandalism” when he pulled out of the Iran deal, and that the reason Trump pulled out was merely because it was a deal brokered by Barack Obama. The White House failed to produce a “day after” plan for the withdrawal, which is likely why we’re now looking at a uranium-enriched Iran.
  2. After the cables are leaked, Trump criticizes Theresa May for making a mess of Brexit. Two weeks ago, Trump said May had done a very good job handling Brexit.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The House votes to prevent Trump from launching a strike against Iran without Congressional approval.

Family Separation:

  1. Here are some highlights of the House Oversight Committee report on child separations:
    • In March 2017, the Trump administration announced the child separation policy would be used as a deterrent.
    • In April, Jeff Sessions announced the ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Kirstjen Nielsen approved the policy in April or May.
    • In May, Trump and Nielsen both lied about creating these policies. Trump also lied about the separations being necessary to prosecute the parents on federal criminal charges; most parents were never sent to federal criminal custody. Some who were sent were returned because federal prosecutors declined to prosecute.
    • Parents were deported without their children.
    • At least 18 infants and toddlers under two were removed from their parents for anywhere from 20 days to 6 months due to these baseless policies. Nine of these were under one year old.
    • Hundreds of the children were held for far longer than is legal.
    • And finally, the Trump administration is lying about ending the policy of family separation. They’re still doing it. The report finds that this is contributing to the crisis at the border.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The judge overseeing Trump’s case about getting the citizenship question on the 2020 Census denies the DOJ’s request to change out their entire team of lawyers on the case.
  2. Trump blames the radical left for blocking the citizenship question, even though it was a conservative right SCOTUS that actually blocked it.
  3. The House announces a vote next week on whether to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt regarding their refusal to comply with subpoenas over the citizenship question. Of course, the DOJ will refuse to charge them with a crime (in fact the DOJ urges people not to comply with these subpoenas).
  1. 4chan has always been an online forum for hate speech, but racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and gender slurs have increased by 40% since 2015.
    • If you think it’s harmless, former users say that the constant exposure to the hate desensitized them to hateful language and even violence in their real lives.
    • The proportion of terrorist attacks carried out by the far-right has tripled in the last five years.
    • Extremists have posted about their terrorist plans on 8chan, which is an even more vitriolic version of 4chan. Other users encouraged their terrorist activities, such as the Christ Church mosque shooting.
  1. Trump invites a group of alt-right online social media personalities to the White House, and announces to them that instead of adding a citizenship question to the White House, he’s issued an executive order to obtain citizenship information from government agencies. Which is actually how it already works.
    • Barr, speaking after Trump’s announcement, essentially says that this is a workaround of the legal system.
    • The invited group of online personalities include discredited videographers from Project Veritas, online conspiracy theorists (especially those who spread the QAnon crazy), and online meme creators.
    • The event ends in Rose Garden chaos as Seb Gorka gets in a screaming match with a journalist.
  1. ICE opens three new detention centers despite being told by Congress not to. Congress also told them to stop detaining people.
  2. We learn that ICE has been using facial recognition software to go through drivers license photos to identify undocumented immigrants. That means they’ve combed through photos of American citizens without their permission.
  3. Migrant children being held at yet another overcrowded Arizona migrant detention facility accuse border patrol officers of sexual abuse.
  4. There are over 800 candlelight vigils across the globe in solidarity with migrants, especially the children, being held at the border in horrible conditions.
  5. President Crazy Train rounds out the week with a series of tweets, several of which are directed at four progressive Democrat women in Congress “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all)” and that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” 
    • The only problem is that all but one of them were born in the U.S., and the one who wasn’t came here as a refugee. The president of the United States should at least know these facts.
    • His tweets unite Democrats and get a firm backlash from Speaker Pelosi.
    • Trump’s feelings are apparently hurt when the four women don’t take it sitting down and instead take to Twitter to defend themselves. He says they should apologize to him for the bad things they say about him.
    • And finally, the media is actually using the term “racist” as opposed to couching it in terms like “racially charged.”
  1. Trump threatens all week that he’ll deport thousands of undocumented immigrants in wide-ranging raids across the country, but for the second time in as many weeks, this threats fail to materialize and a very small number are actually arrested.
    • New Orleans was on the list of cities to be raided, but with the flooding and a tropical storm on the way, ICE cancels that one. They learned something from Katrina.
  1. Apparently unable to grasp the optics here, Trump’s Doral golf club plans to host a charity tournament put on by a strip club where golfers can buy a stripper to be their caddy girl for the day.
    • It’s for a worthwhile charity, but the charity pulls out after seeing the ads touting how you can buy your own caddy girl. The event is ultimately canceled.

Climate:

  1. The DC area gets hit with wide-spread flooding from slow-moving rain storms; even the White House basement is flooded. 
  1. New Orleans was already flooding by the time Hurricane Barry made landfall (and thankfully turned into a tropical storm and then a depression).
  2. An intelligence analyst in the State Department resigns after the White House blocks evidence in his testimony on climate change and its relationship to national security. The military has long understood that climate change is one of our greatest national security threats.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Religious charities and publishers warn that Trump’s newly proposed tariffs on Chinese goods will likely reduce the availability of Bibles in the U.S.
  1. The lowest-paid workers are finally seeing a better increase in wages than their higher paid counterparts. This has been the slowest economic group to recover from the Great Recession. Only the top 10% of earners have recovered fully from the recession.
  2. In response, corporations report a record level of concern about the cost of labor. Investors aren’t concerned about it at all. Corporate earnings are still growing faster than wages.
  3. Even corporations like Walmart and Amazon are lobbying for a $15 minimum wage (likely to put pressure on small competing businesses). But this week, the Congressional Budget Office issues a report saying that while 27 million Americans would get a raise, it would remove 1.3 million jobs and reduce family income by 0.1% by 2025.
  4. Economists forecast very low GDP growth for the second quarter of 2019, coming it at just 1.4%, the weakest since Q4 2015. The reason given is that the impact of the tax cuts has faded. Inventory investment is also expected to be down.
  5. The Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, spearheaded by Ivanka, announces its first grants totaling $27 million for 14 projects in 22 countries. More than half of it is for incentives for private businesses to partner up with them.
  6. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin warns that the U.S. is running out of cash faster than expected, and is concerned that the government might have to default on its debts before Congress returns from summer recess in September. We can’t borrow money because of a congressional debt ceiling, which needs to be raised.
  7. The deficit is also growing quicker than expected, due in part to the tax cuts. The deficit for the first nine months of fiscal year 2019 is 23.1% higher than the year before. Gosh. If only there was a way we could’ve had $1.5 trillion more in tax revenues.
  8. Fed chairman Jerome Powell signals a likely cut in interest rates due to the drag on the economy caused by Trump’s tariffs.

Elections:

  1. Trump asks his aides to look into ways to devalue the dollar in order to boost the economy ahead of the 2020 elections.
    • Trump thinks the high value of the dollar is getting in the way of his America First initiatives
    • This practice is called currency manipulation, a practice Trump has publicly said he hates.
  1. Trump acknowledges that the number one reason for adding the citizenship question to the 2020 Census is to tilt the legislative districts in favor of Republicans.
    • Note that this reason was never used for justification of the question in any previous arguments, though many on the left have alleged that this is the ultimate purpose.

Miscellaneous:

  1. DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser sends Trump a letter stating that Trump’s 4th of July event bankrupted their emergency security funding, and that the city is still owed $7.1 million from Trump’s inauguration.
  2. Trump has been telling aides he wants to replace Dan Coates as national security director. The last adult in the room. What could go wrong?
  3. There are more open civilian and military positions at the Pentagon than at any other time in history, including the positions of Defense Secretary and Deputy Defense Secretary.
  4. Sunday’s Twitter meltdown over the four Democratic women in Congress wasn’t Trump’s first meltdown of the week. On Thursday, he:
    • Tries to shame the fake news media while misremembering not just the month but also the year he launched his bid for office
    • Says he’ll stay in office for 14 years
    • Tries to insult Mayor Pete Buttigieg by mistakenly tagging someone who is clearly not a Trump fan
    • Body shames Elizabeth Warren while at the same time managing to get in a racial slur (and saying she’s 1000/24 Native American—whoopsies)
    • Criticizes a small Minneapolis suburb
    • Lies about his dealing with Deutsche Bank.

And that was all before 8 AM.

  1. A new book says Paul Ryan couldn’t stomach another two years with Trump and saw retirement as his escape hatch.
    • This, of course, launched a one-sided feud with Trump blasting Ryan’s performance as Speaker of the House.
    • It should be noted that the rhetoric of leaders like Ryan helped lead the Republican party to elect someone like Trump.

Week 128 in Trump

Posted on July 10, 2019 in Politics, Trump

The billionaire most vilified by the right and the billionaire most vilified by the left have joined forces to end what they call “forever war.” Yes, George Soros and Charles Koch are creating a think tank to work on coming up with diplomatic solutions instead of using bombs and threats. That they’re working together on this underscores just how important they think it is, and it’s something most of us can get behind. And if they can come together, maybe the rest of us from opposite ends of the spectrum can start to do the same. Maybe?

Here’s what else happened in politics for the week ending July 7…

Missing From Last Week:

  1. Illinois becomes the 11th state to decriminalize marijuana, and will vacate around 800,000 previous convictions.

Russia:

  1. A new study underscores the success of the Russian disinformation campaign in the 2016 presidential campaigns. The study found a direct correlation between Trump’s popularity and the social media activity of Russian trolls and bots. For every 25,000 retweets, Trump’s popularity moved up 1%. The Russian activity didn’t have much of an effect on Clinton’s popularity.
    • For comparison, Trump won by 0.7% in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and by 0.3% in Michigan.
    • Reminder: Correlation doesn’t equal causation; but given that the election hinged on 75,000 votes across three states, there’s a strong likelihood that there was an effect on our elections.
  1. One of Trump’s campaign consultants is taking a page from the Russian disinformation playbook and now runs several fake websites spoofing Democratic presidential campaigns. He also runs a Republican political consulting firm. Seriously folks. Learn how to discern real websites from fake ones. Your country is depending on you.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The House Ways and Means Committee sues the Treasury and IRS for Trump’s tax returns. The lawsuit alleges that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig “have mounted an extraordinary attack on the authority of Congress to obtain information needed to conduct oversight of Treasury, the IRS, and the tax laws on behalf of the American people who participate in the Nation’s voluntary tax system.”
  2. The House Ethics Committee opens an investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) essentially for witness tampering. Gaetz threatened Michael Cohen the night before Cohen’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee, saying he was going to release embarrassing personal information about Cohen.
  3. Officials arrest child molester and trafficker Jeff Epstein, charging him with new sex trafficking charges.
    • You might remember that Acting Labor Secretary Alex Acosta gave Epstein a sweet plea deal for similar charges in Florida where Epstein basically ended up pleading out to far lesser counts of soliciting prostitution. Epstein was actually trafficking and molesting underage girls.
    • As part of that deal, Epstein also could pretty much come and go from prison as he pleased during his short sentence.
    • Acosta is now Trump’s nominee to be Labor Secretary.
    • This could have far-reaching implications given the number of high-power, wealth men who hung around with Epstein.

Healthcare:

  1. A federal judge temporarily blocks Ohio’s fetal heartbeat law, which bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
    • The term “fetal heartbeat” is a misnomer, because at six weeks a fetus doesn’t have a formed heart.
    • What is detectable at six weeks is a flurry of electrical impulses in the area where the heart will eventually form.
    • These impulses aren’t audible, even with a stethoscope.
  1. The AMA sues the state of North Dakota over their Compelled Reversal Mandate law. The law forces doctors to tell their patients that a medication-induced abortion is reversible if they don’t finish their course of pills. This is false and unscientific, and it forces doctors to breach their Hippocratic oath.

International:

  1. Iran says they now have more low-enriched uranium than the limit allowed by the JCPOA (the Iran deal). Up until Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal, and even for a while after, Iran followed the conditions of the deal.
    • Europe has been trying to work around the U.S. sanctions, and now Iran says they’ll restart working toward weapons-grade uranium if Europe doesn’t offer them a deal.
  1. Protests continue in Hong Kong against the Chinese extradition bill, which has since been suspended. Things get more heated this week as protestors ransack and occupy Hong Kong’s Legislative Council chambers, and police end up using tear gas.
  2. Days after Trump paid a “surprise” visit to North Korea to meet briefly with Kim Jong-Un, North Korea accuses Trump of lying. While he’s pushing the public narrative that the two countries have an open dialog, North Korea claims he’s also “hell-bent” on hostile acts.
  3. Brexit party leader Nigel Farage says it’s more important to Brexit from the EU, deal or no deal, than it is to keep the United Kingdom together.
    • Both of Farage’s kids are German citizens and he’s applied for German citizenship himself. If successful, he’ll still be a citizen of the EU. Filing this one under “Hypocrite.”
    • Meanwhile, about 40% of the citizens of the UK are so worried about the aftermath of Brexit that they’re stockpiling food and supplies. Businesses warn of shortages coming up within the next few weeks.
    • The Scottish government pushes for a second referendum on separating from the UK and remaining part of the EU.
  1. When asked about his relationships with dictators, Trump tells reporters, “I get along with everybody. Except you people, actually… I get along with President Putin. I get along with Mohammad from Saudi Arabia. President Erdogan, he’s tough but I get along with him.”
  2. Someone leaks cables from UK’s ambassador to the United States, which reveal that the ambassador has called Trump incompetent, inept, and insecure. He also says conflicts within the White House are like “knife fights.” The White House says they will no longer deal with this ambassador.
  3. We’re not the only country that treats refugees with callousness. European counties have been deporting refugees back to Libyan detention camps, placing them in the middle of a war zone. This week, an airstrike kills 53 migrants being held in Tripoli.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. While the Senate is blocking nearly every piece of legislation put in front of them, here’s a taste of what the House has passed, all while pursuing investigations into Russia, obstruction, and corruption (yes, lawmakers and walk and chew gum at the same time):
    • HR1, For the People Act: One of the most sweeping election reform bills to ensure voting rights and give power back to the people.
    • HR5, Equality Act: A bill to protect the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters in the areas of employment, housing, education, loans, and the jury system, among others.
    • HR6, American Dream and Promise Act: A bill to protect DACA recipients and those with Temporary Protected Status, and to provide them with a pathway to citizenship.
    • HR7, Paycheck Fairness Act: Equal pay for equal work. Note that this doesn’t say that if my husband makes X, I should make X. It says if my colleague who does the same job as me with the same experience and productivity makes X, then I should also make X.
    • HR8, Gun Violence Protection Act: Closes loopholes that allow gun sales without background checks. In other words, mandates universal background checks.
    • HR9, Climate Action Now Act: Requires the president to provide an annual plan for how the U.S. will meet its promises under the Paris Agreement.
    • HR 1644, Save the Internet Act: A bill to restore the FCC’s net neutrality rules, keeping the internet free and open, and preventing internet service providers from price-gouging customers or throttling bandwidth.
    • HR 1585, Violence Against Women Act: This is just a re-authorization of an existing act that improved criminal justice and community responses for victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. Why does this even need to be reauthorized? Why isn’t it permanent? And why won’t Republicans reauthorize it?
    • 10 bills to lower healthcare and drug prices.
  1. In fact, the House has passed 180 bills, most of which are dead in the Senate. These include a number of bills to help veterans, to mitigate the effects of climate change, to protect women’s rights, and more.
  2. House Democrats fold in a fight with Senate Republicans over emergency funding for the humanitarian crisis (caused by us) at the border. Republicans refused to approve additional requirements for how CBP treats detainees, along with these requirements for refugees:
    • Basic medical care
    • Basic nutrition, water, and hygiene
    • Translators at ICE, CBP, and Citizenship and Immigration Services
  1. Michigan Representative Justin Amash leaves the Republican Party after resigning from the House Freedom Caucus over lack of motivation to impeach Trump. Amash is one of the more conservatives members of Congress, and is a founding members of the Freedom Caucus. He might run for president as a Libertarian.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. A federal judge orders CBP to allow medical personnel into detention centers holding immigrant minors to ensure the children are in a safe and sanitary environment.
  2. CBP has not been having a great couple of weeks. Last week, a group of immigration lawyers reported on squalid and unhygienic conditions in an immigrant detention facility. This week they try to repair their image by cleaning things up and inviting some journalists for a visit, but they don’t let them talk to the kids.
  3. But then, a disastrous report containing the findings of the DHS inspector general‘s investigation into detention centers is publicized.
    • The report talks about standing-room-only quarters, no access to showers (they were given wet wipes instead), and no hot meals (just bologna sandwiches). Some children were given hot meals once inspectors arrived.
    • The report also warned DHS two months ago that conditions at a specific facility in El Paso had gotten so bad that agents there were gearing up for possible riots. There were four showers available for 756 detainees, more than half of whom were being held outdoors. Inside was five times past capacity, people couldn’t lay down to sleep, and temperatures were above 80 degrees.
    • DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan disputes his own inspector general’s report.
  1. And then, ProPublica releases messages from a Border Patrol Facebook page that are extremely racist and misogynistic.
    • Former and current agents joke about immigrant deaths and photoshop a picture to show Trump forcing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to give him head.
    • There are 9,600 members on the page, and these are the guys who are taking care of vulnerable women and children. Yay.
    • It’s easy to see why the CBP has trouble hiring and retaining female agents.
  1. And then, we find out that CBP has known about this page for years and has dealt with complaints on the posts before.
  2. And then (yes, there’s more), it leaks that Border Patrol agents tried to humiliate a male Honduran migrant by making walk past detainees holding a sign that said “I like men.”
  3. Members of Congress visit detention centers, including the above-mentioned AOC (who said women in detention told her that border patrol officers told them to drink water out of the toilet). Understandably, the congressional members questioned whether they were actually safe visiting the centers. Democratic presidential candidates have also visited facilities.
  4. The Trump administration gives in on adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
    • But then, the DOJ announces that they’re looking into ways to add it, per Trump’s request. Trump floats the idea of delaying the Census (he can’t), or adding the question through an executive order.
    • This leads the judge in the case to call an emergency meeting with lawyers from both sides of the case. For an uncomfortable read, here’s the laughable transcript of the DOJ lawyers trying to explain the change of plan to the judge, though they don’t have a new plan.
    • And now, the DOJ is trying to replace the current lawyers in the case. So either the current lawyers objected to the new tactics or they’ve just lost credibility because of the chaos from the White House.
    • DOJ lawyers are now scrambling to come up with a legal justification for adding the citizenship question. Attorney General William Barr believes there’s a way. Which tells me he is ignoring a boatload of evidence about the reasons behind the question.
  1. Trump plans to end the practice of having court interpreters for immigrants and asylum seekers at their initial hearings. What could go wrong?
  2. The Trump administration prepares to launch a panel focused on “natural law and natural rights.” The panel will advise Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on human rights. This is an issue because “natural law and natural rights” typically means anti-LGBTQ rights.
  3. A federal judge blocks Trump’s attempt to deny asylum seekers timely bonding hearings and detain them longer. If Trump had been allowed to go forward with this plan, it would’ve meant indefinite detention. Which is crazy when you think of how overcrowded the detention centers already are.
  4. DHS fines some undocumented immigrants nearly $500,000 for failing to leave the U.S. ICE says that under the law they can find people $500 per day for each day they are in violation of an order to leave, and immigration lawyers say they’ve never seen that clause used like this.
  5. Trump again threatens major ICE raids and deportations after July 4th, saying he’ll deport all undocumented immigrants because “that’s what we do.”
  6. A pregnant Alabama woman got in a fight with another woman that resulted in the other woman shooting her in the stomach, causing her to lose the pregnancy. A grand jury refuses to indict the shooter (it seems they thought it was self defense), but they did indict the pregnant woman for putting herself in a position where her fetus could be harmed. So she was arrested. After a boatload of backlash over it, the DA decides not to prosecute and releases here. Talk about personhood laws run amok.
  7. After the American women’s soccer team wins the World Cup, the fans break into echoing chants of “Equal pay! Equal pay!”

Climate:

  1. Anchorage, Alaska, sets an all-time heat record this week, reaching 90 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s five degrees hotter than ever previously recorded there. Other cities across Alaska set their own heat records as well.

Budget/Economy:

  1. As a means to push oil prices back up, OPEC agrees to continue production cuts for 9 more months. They state the following reasons: trade tensions, central bank policies, increased U.S. production, and “geopolitical issues.”
  2. Because of a long-lasting subsidy dispute between Boeing and Airbus, Trump adds more EU products to the list of items to be subject to new tariffs.
  3. 77% of publicly traded companies issue warning ahead of their earnings announcements, saying they won’t make their expected numbers. But it doesn’t seem to hurt their stock prices; U.S. stock markets hit new highs this week.
  4. Morgan Stanley analysts warn of a coming recession, but we’ve been hearing this for more than a year now, so take it with whatever grain of salt you’re comfortable with.
  5. Global manufacturing numbers for June are in. They were weaker; in fact they were at their weakest since October 2012. New orders contracted sharply.
    • This could partly be from the impact of all the newly imposed tariffs, and this could reverse if there’s really a truce.
  1. May’s job numbers were low enough to give economists a little scare (72,000), but June’s numbers bounced back up to 224,000.
  2. People of color are finally starting to reap the benefits of a tight job market, and the unemployment gap between white people and people of color is beginning to shrink.
  3. An analysis of last year’s tax returns finds that around 2/3 of Americans paid less in taxes and 6% paid more (I was one of those lucky ones).
    • Refunds for people making between $100,000 and $250,000 dropped, but rose for people making between $250,000 and $500,000 (which could be from the change in withholding rules).
    • Even though the IRS was more lenient in handing out penalties for underpayment, the penalties they did impose were higher.
    • Note that these numbers don’t include taxpayers who filed for an extension, who tend to be higher-income with more complicated returns.
    • The tax rate dropped for all income brackets, and no income bracket below $500,000 in income reached a 20% rate. And even the average of the highest earners didn’t reach 30%.
    • The number of people using the standard deduction instead of itemizing jumped by 70%.
    • The AMT was essentially removed for households with incomes under $1 million.

Elections:

  1. After Kamala Harris talked about being bussed to desegregated schools, Donald Trump Jr. shared a tweet questioning whether Harris was black enough to talk about the issues facing black Americans. This fits in with the latest right-wing attack on Harris that she isn’t really black because her father is Jamaican and her mother is Indian. Sorry hon, that lady is black.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Trump decides he wants to insert himself into the annual 4th of July celebration on the National Mall in DC. The last time a sitting president spoke on the National Mall on July 4th was nearly 70 years ago, when Truman marked the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
    • So Trump hosts a 4th of July ceremony, a Salute to America, where he gives a speech with military tanks and a military flyover. It looks like it could get rained out, and many are concerned that Trump will make the 4th all about himself, but after a rain delay, he mostly sticks to the teleprompter and doesn’t go too far off the rails.
    • The National Park Service is forced to divert $2.5 million in park fees to help fund Trump’s display.
    • The White House reserves VIP tickets to Trump’s 4th of July event for major Republican donors and political appointees.
  1. The White House hires Breitbart’s White House correspondent to the office of Domestic Policy Council.
  2. California has it’s largest earthquake in years, which is followed up the next day by another quake 11 times stronger than the first one. The earthquakes are centered in Ridgecrest, a town near the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, which is no longer mission capable and is evacuated because of the quakes. There have been thousands of aftershocks, and the quakes left a huge fissure in the Mojave desert. The governor declares a state of emergency.

Tweet of the Week:

This tweet captures the citizenship question chaos:

“The DOJ gave up on this yesterday, but then President Crazy Train issued a tweet that required a federal judge to call the DOJ to the carpet to demand an explanation, and they don’t have one.”

I wish I knew who it was, because that crazy train takes another turn this week.

Week 127 in Trump

Posted on July 3, 2019 in Politics, Trump

Trump likes to say that Obama separated families at the border and locked kids up in cages. Obama didn’t separate families, but he did have a huge influx of migrant children in 2014 and built the makeshift detention centers we still see today. He also had a record number of family units coming across the border. At first the Obama administration released family units with notices to appear. Then they tried to hold them in detention centers together, but human rights activists protested that move and they risked violating the Flores Agreement. So they went back to releasing them. In fact, in 2016, ICE implemented a very successful pilot program, the Family Case Management Program, designed to keep families together, out of detention, and in compliance with immigration laws. The program had a high rate of compliance and helped refugees thrive. In 2017, Trump shut that program down and later that year began his own pilot program, this time mandating the separation and detention of families.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the factsheet for that program. And here’s the AP’s story on ending the program. And here’s Jeff Session’s announcement of the zero tolerance policy (though we now know they were already separating families in fall of 2017). Trump said ending Obama’s program would save money, but it costs us $750 per day per person in private detention centers. That’s a lot of money each day and private companies are making a fortune off the American taxpayers (around $4 billion per year, at the rate we’re going).

Here’s what happened in politics for the week ending June 30…

Missing From Last Week:

  1. Jared Kushner travels to Bahrain to describe how he’ll solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He offers an economic development plan, but no pathway to get to an agreement between the two sides nor any way of dealing with the underlying conflicts. No government officials from either side of the conflict show up, and Palestinian officials dismiss it as a “snow job.”
  2. Mike Pompeo says privately that the plan isn’t particularly original and it’s likely not executable.

Russia:

  1. After much discussion, Robert Mueller agrees to testify in public hearings before both the House Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Committee. It’s scheduled to happen July 17. Both committees issued subpoenas before coming to this agreement.
    • Members of Mueller’s team will also testify, but not in public hearings.
  1. In response, Trump accuses Mueller of committing a crime (deleting emails from FBI agents involved in the investigation, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, of which Trump has no evidence). He also calls Page and Strzok “pathetic.”
  2. The White House refuses to tell the House Oversight Committee where the translator notes are from Trump’s private meetings with Putin. Trump took the notes from the translator personally. The House Oversight Committee says these notes must be maintained under our laws for preserving federal records.
  3. When asked what Trump and Putin will talk about at their G20 meeting, Trump tells reporters that what he says to Putin in private isn’t any of their business.
  4. Trump later jokes with Putin and Russian officials about meddling in our elections, telling them not to meddle at a press conference while they all laugh.
    • Mueller’s investigation concluded that Russia ran a “sweeping and systematic” operation to influence voters in the 2016 elections.
    • The last time the two met, Trump sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies when asked about Russian interference.
  1. Trump then jokes with Putin about “getting rid” of journalists.
  2. The Trump-appointed FBI director, Christopher Wray, maintains that he believes there was no spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump says he disagrees and also refuses to say that he has confidence in Wray.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Paul Manafort pleads not guilty to state charges on mortgage fraud brought by New York. Manafort’s lawyer intends to fight this case under double-jeopardy rules, but the Supreme Court just ruled that state and federal agencies can bring up the same charges.
  2. In keeping with the tradition of the Trump administration, the Commerce Department orders a former official not to answer any questions from House committees about adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
  3. The House Oversight and Reform Committee moves to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt after they ignore subpoenas on the topic of the citizenship question.
  4. Play it again, Sam… The White House orders Kellyanne Conway to refuse to testify at the House Oversight Committee’s behest. They want to talk to her about violations of the Hatch Act as outlined in a report from the Office of Special Counsel (reminder, that’s nothing to do with Mueller).
    • The committee subpoenas Conway after she fails to appear.
  1. Nearly 200 Democrats are suing Trump, claiming that his private business dealings violate the emoluments clause. A federal judge rules against Trump this week, saying the lawsuit can proceed.
  2. The Justice Department sues Omarosa Manigualt Newman, a former advisor to Trump. They say she failed to file a financial disclosure report after Trump fired her. Newman argues that she can’t, because the White House didn’t return her personal files to her.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Supreme Court rules that gerrymandering is out of the scope of federal courts and that it should be handled by legislation.
    • This means that North Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, and Michigan all get a pass on having to redraw their gerrymandered district lines as was previously ordered by lower courts
    • Voters are getting tired of gerrymandering, and voted in five states last year to limit the power of the state houses to gerrymander. That’s on top of states that already have independent redistricting commissions.
  1. The Supreme Court blocks the citizenship question on the 2020 Census for now, saying that the Commerce Department could have a right to reinstate the question but that their reasons were contrived. The case gets kicked back to a lower court.
    • So Trump says he’ll just delay the census. FWIW, he can’t.
    • The Census Bureau estimates that adding the question would cause about 6.5 million people to not be counted (that includes people here legally and not). That equates to a loss of around seven to ten House seats and an unknown number of state seats. It also means those same areas will see a loss of government programs and assistance.
  1. The court agrees to hear arguments about DACA and whether Trump acted illegally in trying to end it.
  2. The court refuses to hear Alabama’s appeal for their stringent abortion law, keeping in place a lower court’s ruling that the law places an undue burden on women.

Healthcare:

  1. The U.S. hits 1,077 measles cases so far this year, making it already the worst year since 1992. If only we had a way to prevent the measles… if only.

International:

  1. Trump signs an executive order to place new “hard-hitting” sanctions on Iran’s Supreme Leader and eight military commanders. The largely symbolic sanctions stem from Iran downing a U.S. drone last week.
  2. Iran’s foreign ministry says the executive orders have closed the door to diplomacy and that they won’t be intimidated. Iran also says they’ll start reducing their commitments to the JCPOA.
  3. Trump threatens to obliterate Iran if they attack. He implies that Kerry and Obama were soft on Iran, even though Iran has followed the guidelines of the JCPOA up until now.
  4. It turns out that when Trump backed down from an actual air attack last week, he also approved a cyberattack, which disabled the computer systems Iran uses to control rocket and missile launches. These attacks were in the works for months.
  5. Trump says he doesn’t need congressional approval to launch a military strike against Iran. He does need their approval, though, unless Pompeo can find evidence to support his assertion that Iran is involved with Al Qaeda.
  6. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) says Trump can launch a strike because we’re already at war with them. Is he talking metaphorically? Because AFAIK, we aren’t at war with Iran.
  7. Trump considers withdrawing from another defense treaty, this time with Japan. Fitting his constant narrative of how everyone’s against us and taking advantage of us, he says the agreement is one-sided. The agreement has been the foundation of a post-war alliance since WWII.
  8. Sean Lawler, Trump’s diplomatic protocol chief, is suspended just before the G20 Summit. Talk about bad timing. He’s under investigation over workplace accusations of intimidation, including carrying a whip around the office.
  9. Trump insults Japan upon arriving in the country for the G20 Summit. He says that if we were attacked, they’d just sit and watch it on TV. He goes on to insult Germany, Britain, and India, and repeats his previous misinformation about NATO. He has nothing bad to say about Putin or Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, though.
  10. At the G20, Trump demands that India pull their latest tariffs on U.S. products.
  11. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gives Trump a colorful diagram to illustrate Japanese investments in the U.S. Abe has him figured out.
  12. Also, what the heck was Ivanka doing a) at the summit and b) getting a front-row seat? Video shows world leaders not very interested in what she has to say, to the point of being dismissive.
  13. Trump pays a surprise visit to North Korea where he meets with Kim Jong Un and becomes the first sitting president to set foot in the country, albeit briefly and at the border with South Korea.
    • The two agree to continue talks.
  1. Trump reverses his ban on U.S. companies supplying software and hardware to Chinese company Huawei. It’s part of an agreement to restart trade negotiations. I’m not sure what this means for the lawsuits against Huawei and its executives.
    • Side note: The restrictions against Huawei were based on national security risks of spying.
  1. Protests in HongKong against an extradition law with mainland China continue, now growing violent as protestor storm the parliament chamber. The mostly peaceful protests have been ongoing for two months.
  2. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson describes how Jared Kushner would bypass the State Department and meet with foreign officials on his own.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Senate Republicans block a proposal that would’ve restricted Trump’s ability to go to war with Iran without congressional approval. The proposal required congressional approval for funding.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. A district court judge permanently blocks Trump from using the billions of dollars in military funds that he had tapped to build his wall.

Family Separation:

  1. House Democrats cave in and pass the GOP-led Senate version of a bill to provide emergency humanitarian aid at the border. The House had previously passed their own version, which included provisions for improving the condition of detention centers and regulating how migrants can be held in custody. The Senate version includes additional funding for DHS with no strings attached.
  2. McConnell says that no one doubts anymore that this is a humanitarian crisis. Congratulations, GOP, for creating this crisis; not quite the one that you said was there all along, but a crisis nonetheless.
  3. Following last week’s reports from immigration lawyers about squalid conditions in child detention camps, CBP invites journalists to come take a look at those facilities. The conditions seem to rebut the lawyer’s claims of lack of hygiene, food, and supplies, but reporters aren’t allowed to talk to detainees.
  4. A federal judge orders that health experts be allowed to examine migrant children and to inspect their living quarters.
  5. The Department of Health and Human Services is running out of money to provide shelter for migrant children. They expect funds to run out in July, and say they don’t have room for any more. To which I say, then release these kids to their families and stop pretending you aren’t part of the problem.
  6. CBP rejects donations for the children held in their overcrowded detention centers. People are sending toys, soap, toothbrushes, diapers, and medicine, but the law prevents Border Patrol from accepting it. So maybe they shouldn’t be holding on to these kids.
  7. Bank of America announces it’ll end its relationships with companies that run the detention centers.
  8. Illinois bans privately run detention centers.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Ravelry.com, a social site for knitters and crocheters, bans any talk of Trump and his administration. They want to keep the site free from hateful expression, and view support for Trump as support for white supremacy.
  2. The acting Commissioner of CBP, John Sanders, resigns following the release of information about the conditions of border detention centers. It’s not clear the two are related.
  3. Trump picks Mark Morgan to replace Sanders. Trump made Morgan acting director of ICE earlier this month. Morgan was the head of Border Patrol under Obama.
  4. In a move that is predicted to create chaos in the military, Trump moves to remove protections for undocumented family members of active-duty troops. A few things outside of the news here:
    • First, we must treat our military with respect.
    • Second, our troops need to concentrate on their work. I mean they really need to concentrate. It’s an enormous distraction to be scared that your family might be deported while you’re deployed. Is that what we want them thinking about?
    • Third, our troops, documented or not, are out there defending our country. THIS country. If they can’t count on us to treat them humanely, why would they continue to defend this country?
  1. James Fields Jr., the Neo-Nazi who killed protestor Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017, gets life without parole.
  2. Far right hate groups have been planning violence at Drag Queen Story Hours. Just like it sounds, drag queens read children’s books to children. One of the first story hour events had to be protected by a SWAT team, 40 officers, and a marksman. WTF people? This is not OK. There is nothing scare about a drag queen!
  3. The inspector general for the Treasury Department announces an investigation into why Steve Mnuchin really delayed the Harriet Tubman $20 bill. The Trump administration denies they delayed it.
  4. DHS says they think arrests on our southern border will fall by 25% this month for two main reasons:
    • Mexico is cracking down on Central American migrants.
    • Trump is expanding the program for keeping asylum seekers in Mexico while they await their asylum hearings. In case you didn’t know, Mexico isn’t necessarily safe for all asylum seekers because the people they are fleeing from can get to Mexico.
  1. Hours after the Democratic-led House passes the package for humanitarian aid and increased security at the border, Trump complains that Democrats in the House won’t do anything about border security.
  2. Trump wants to delay the Census so he can get his citizenship question on it, “no matter how long” it takes.
  3. The far-right Proud Boys and far-left Antifa clash at rallies over the weekend in Portland. Violence and arrests ensue. The Proud Boys are a white supremacist group. Antifa is a far-left group against far-right hate groups.

Climate:

  1. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue says that climate change is just the weather changing. It’s raining today, it’s sunny tomorrow; that’s just climate change, which goes in long and short increments. Lemme help Sonny out with that:
    • Climate: the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.
    • Global: relating to the whole world.
  1. Bill Wehrum resigns as EPA air chief over allegations of ethics violations (shocking for this administration, I know). Wehrum worked to reverse Obama regulations for cutting pollution even before he joined Trump’s administration.

Budget/Economy:

  1. For 2018, farm income ended up half as high as the all-time high in 2013 and the debt held by farmers has increased to almost $427 billion. In the first calendar-year quarter of 2019, the default rate hit its highest level in seven years. Farm income is projected to go up slightly in 2019.
    • Trump blames Obama and says he’s turned it around, but the slight increase in 2019 barely makes a dent in the 2018 decrease.
  1. With no changes to policy, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the national debt will rise from 78% of GDP now to 92% in 2029 and then to 144% in 2049. Spending is outpacing tax collections (surprise, surprise).
  2. Mnuchin says we’re close to a trade deal with China, about 90% of the way. Trump, meanwhile, threatens to raise tariffs on the remaining Chinese imports if things don’t work out at the G20 summit.
  3. The White House is working on a plan to bypass Congress and cut taxes on capital gains by indexing capital gains to inflation. The top 1% of earners would receive 86% of the benefit of this plan. Just a reminder that capital gains are money we earn by doing absolutely nothing but watching our money grow. We don’t work for capital gains—we can earn them in our sleep.

Elections:

  1. Florida governor Ron DeSantis signs a bill forcing felons who’ve served their sentences to pay any fines before they can register to vote. An overwhelming majority of voters voted to give ex-felons the right to vote, and the GOP state legislature and governor are overriding the will of the people. Lawsuits to block the law are already filed.
  2. The Democratic Presidential candidates participate in their first round of debates. I won’t say much about them, since it’s pretty subjective. But here are a few fact-checks:

Miscellaneous:

  1. Fake news? An advisor for the New York Post orders a story about Trump raping writer E. Jean Carroll to be scrubbed from the website. He apparently forgot that you can’t really delete anything from the web. The advisor, Col Allan, was once an editor at the paper and was brought back earlier this year to make the paper more Trump-friendly.
  2. Two women step forward to corroborate E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that Trump raped her (interestingly, Carroll refuses to call it a rape, even though she says Trump forced himself on her and there was penetration). Both women advised Carroll on what to do when it happened.
  3. Trump names Melania’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, to be the next communications director and press secretary. Grisham replaces outgoing press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and former communications director Bill Shine, who left in March.

Polls:

  1. 65% of voters approve Trump’s decision to rescind the orders to attack Iran.

Week 126 in Trump

Posted on June 30, 2019 in Politics, Trump

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

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

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

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

Russia:

  1. The House Judiciary Committee questions Hope Hicks, who, under White House orders, refuses to answer any questions about conduct during the presidential transition and about the White House, including minutia, like where her office was located and other publicly available information.
    • Trump accuses House Democrats of putting Hicks “through hell.” For one day of questioning? Really? I refer you to Hillary’s 11-hour hearing.
    • You can read her testimony here.
  1. Felix Sater is scheduled to testify to the House Intelligence Committee about the Trump Tower Moscow project, but he doesn’t show up. So the committee issues him a subpoena.
    • Sater worked with Michael Cohen on the Trump Tower project (he actually worked on two different Trump Tower Moscow projects).
    • Sater says he’s been sick and slept through his alarm. He also says he’ll answer every single question.
  1. Prosecutors accuse Roger Stone of violating his gag order (yet again) through social media posts.
  2. A top aide to former White House Counsel Don McGahn is scheduled to testify to Congress, but the White House is expected to block her from doing so. Annie Donaldson has a special agreement to provide written answers since she’s pregnant.

Legal Fallout:

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

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Supreme Court rules that you can be tried at both the state and federal levels for the same crimes, and that it doesn’t conflict with the double jeopardy clause in the Constitution, which prevents you from being tried for the same thing twice.
    • This is relevant right now with the idea of pardons being floated by Trump and his associates. Trump can only pardon at the federal level, and this ruling allows states to pick up investigations into crimes that otherwise could’ve been pardoned.
  1. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court rules that the lame duck special session called by outgoing state Republican legislators was constitutional, so the bills they passed in a last-ditch effort to limit the powers of the new Democratic governor will take effect.

Healthcare:

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

International:

  1. In another example of poor vetting, Patrick Shanahan resigns and withdraws from the confirmation process for Secretary of Defense. His background check showed his family to be involved in multiple counts of domestic violence, with the violence coming from him, his wife, and his son.
  2. The White House then announces that Trump will nominate Army Secretary Mark Esper to be Secretary of Defense.
  3. A UN investigator of the Jamal Khashoggi murder says we need to sanction and freeze assets of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. She says we’re not doing enough in the face of credible evidence that MbS was involved in the killing. Her report gives new details that spread the blame beyond the 11 currently on trial.
  4. The Republican-led Senate passes three measure blocking the sale of $8.1 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia. Trump will likely veto this, because he wants to sell them the weapons regardless of their guilt in the Khashoggi case.
  5. Trump and Republicans have long complained that the JCPOA (Iran deal) wasn’t working. Looking back, Iran never came close to breaking the deal before Trump broke our promise to the JCPOA; but now that we’ve pulled out, Iran is on schedule to pass the JCPOA-defined limits on their uranium stockpile within the next week.
    • Iran says they won’t let that happen if Europe promises to fight Trump’s economic sanctions against Iran.
  1. Trump says he’ll send 1,000 more U.S. troops to the Middle East because of what he calls hostile behavior by Iran and its proxies. The Pentagon backs that up.
  2. Trump tweets about new sanctions added against Iran, but it turns out there weren’t any. But then later sanctions were announced, so maybe it was just a timing thing.
  3. Following recent attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) says we should launch a retaliatory strike against Iran.
  4. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggests that Iran has ties to Al Qaeda. He wants to use this to justify allowing the Trump administration to start a war with Iran (using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force).
  5. Tucker Carlson, of all people, compares Pompeo’s assertion that Iran attacked the tankers to when Colin Powell claimed erroneously that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
  6. Iran’s military claims responsibility for shooting down an American drone. Iran says the drone violated its territorial airspace, but the U.S. claims it was in international airspace.
  7. Trump approves a military attack against Iran in retaliation for the drone. But then he pulls back at the last minute, because (according to the White House) he had just learned that 150 people might die. I’m sure we all realize that a casualty report is given long before a strike is approved.
    • There’s some dispute over whether the planes were actually already in the air by the time Trump rescinded the order. He claims they weren’t, but military officials say they were.
  1. Trump sent Iran a warning via Oman to warn them that an attack was imminent.
  2. Fox & Friends say it was weak to rescind the order to attack.
  3. Putin says military conflict with Iran would be a catastrophe, and that he believes Iran is complying with the JCPOA. He says this just hours before Trump calls off the retaliatory strike.
  4. The White House didn’t notify the succession to the presidency of the plans to strike Iran (specifically Nancy Pelosi, who’s second in line behind Mike Pence).

Family Separation:

  1. Here’s the winner of the week’s gaslighting award. In an interview with Telemundo, Trump tells us that Obama is responsible for the family separation and Trump is the one who’s fixing it and bringing families together. Seriously. He really said this.
    • In 2018, Jeff Sessions announced the zero tolerance policy in a press conference. In the interview, Trump defends the zero tolerance policy while claiming he’s bringing families together.
    • The program was only ended because the ACLU and other activist groups sued the DHS.
    • The only reason any families were unified at all is that the ACLU and other activist groups sued for it.
    • They are still separating families at the borders! How else do you think we ended up with toddlers in a detainment camp for unaccompanied minors? In fairness, some are the children of minor girls, but not all of them are.
    • More debunking can be found here and here and here and here. I could go on, but I shouldn’t have to.
  1. Immigration lawyers visit a child detention center at the border and interview children who were dirty and sick, living in overcrowded rooms, and sleeping on concrete floors. They had to force the facility to send four toddlers with fevers, coughs, vomiting, and diarrhea to the hospital.
    • The lawyers noticed one little girl had a bracelet with a phone number and “U.S. parent” written on it. They dialed the phone number and found her parents. No one had even bothered to try the number before that.
    • And just a reminder, we’re all paying $750 per day to the businesses that run the private prisons that house each and every one of these children who could be released to family in the U.S.
  1. A federal attorney sets off a shitstorm by arguing in front of incredulous circuit court judges that children in detainment camps are being held in safe and sanitary conditions with no soap, no diapers, no toothpaste, and only a hard concrete floor to sleep on.
  2. And then Alexandria Ocasio Cortez sets off a new shitstorm by calling detainment centers “concentration camps” (which by definition, they are; and holocaust experts agree and agree).
  3. After all this, the Trump administration moves some of the children out of the overcrowded detention centers, but they run out of places to move them to, so some end up returning.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump announces that ICE will remove millions of undocumented immigrants over the weekend, spreading panic through immigrant neighborhoods. He then reduces that estimate to thousands of immigrants, with ICE ultimately cancelling the raids altogether because, according to Acting ICE Director Mark Morgan, “someone” leaked information about the raids.
    • Trump says he’ll delay the raids for two weeks so Congress can work out a solution. I’m not sure what solution he’s looking for here.
    • Pelosi called Trump two days before the planned raid to ask him to halt the operation.
  1. BTW, the number of migrant families crossing the southern border is decreasing again, as is the number of arrests. Even though ICE is increasing deportations, they’re still deporting fewer than in the first years under Obama.
  2. Mitch McConnell says that we paid for the sin of slavery by fighting the Civil War, by passing civil rights legislation, and ultimately by electing a black president. He needs to review the generational effects of having property confiscated, running freeways and railways through neighborhoods, being denied the same loans and assistance that are given to white people, forced segregation, and white flight. But, sure. A black president. That makes up for ALL that Jim Crow shit.
  3. The Trump administration announces that they’re permanently cutting off aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador; the three countries where most of our asylum seekers come from. The administration says they’ll resume aid when they see these countries taking concrete steps to stop people from leaving those countries for the U.S.
    • Let’s just file that one under “What could possibly go wrong?”
  1. In 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the Central Park Five to be put to death. The Central Park Five were erroneously found guilty of the brutal beating and rape of the central park jogger, but they were exonerated in 2002 after someone else confessed and DNA tests proved it.
    • The five were all 16 or under at the time, and were all convicted on coerced confessions. Four are black and one is Latino.
    • Trump refuses to apologize for taking out the ad, saying you have people on both sides of that. How can there be a good person on the side of wrongful imprisonment?
    • When the city of New York settled with the five for $41 million, Trump called the settlement a disgrace. Watch “When They See Us” on Netflix to understand this whole thing fully.
  1. Journalist E. Jean Carroll releases an excerpt of her new book where she accuses Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf dressing room in the 1990s. Trump denies it, using a defense he’s used before, “she’s not my type.” He also says he doesn’t know Carroll, though photos of them together have surfaced.

Climate:

  1. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announces the Trump administration’s replacement for Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The new plan ends rules put in place by the Obama administration to combat climate change, including:
    • Scaling back tailpipe emission standards.
    • Removing state targets for reducing carbon emissions.
    • Removing regulations for carbon emissions from coal-powered plants.
    • Limiting the federal government’s ability to set carbon emission standards.
  1. Wheeler says the new plan might lead to new coal plants opening in the U.S. He also says that carbon emissions dropped by 14% between 2005 and 2017, but neglects to mention that they started to rise again in 2018.
  2. An EPA report last year claimed that this plan would result in 300 to 1,500 more deaths annually due to climate-related illnesses.
  3. At least seven State Attorney Generals say they’ll try to block the Clean Power Plan changes in court.
  4. Meanwhile, back in real science, the Arctic permafrost isn’t so permanent under climate change. Scientists find that it’s thawing 70 years earlier than they had predicted.
  5. Air quality in the U.S. has been improving over the past few decades, but the past two years both saw more unhealthy air days than the average from 2013 through 2016.
  6. A federal court rules that an environmental review must be performed for Cadiz Inc. to build a pipeline designed to remove water from the Mojave Trails National Park aquifer for city usage. The judge says Trump’s waiver of the review is illegal.
    • Cadiz claimed they could remove the water under an obscure law waiving environmental review if the water is used for railroad purposes. They claimed that some of the water would be used to power a steam engine.
    • Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration rejected that argument and ordered a review. The Trump administration reversed that decision after David Barnhardt was appointed to be Deputy Interior Secretary (he’s now Interior Secretary). Barnhardt was a lobbyist for Cadiz. Draining the swamp, right?
  1. The Department of Agriculture has been burying federal studies that show the impacts of climate change. The studies by the Agricultural Research Service are peer-reviewed. Some of their findings include:
    • Rice loses vitamins in an environment containing too much carbon.
    • Climate change exacerbates allergies.
    • Climate change will reduce the quality of grasses used to feed livestock.
  1. 70 medical and public health organizations call climate change a health emergency, and produce policy recommendations that are in conflict with Trump’s policies.
  2. Mike Pence says that the Trump administration will always follow the science on climate change. Huh? See all the above. He also refuses to acknowledge that climate change is a legitimate national threat (which the military has long been saying).

Budget/Economy:

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

Elections:

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

Miscellaneous:

  1. The father of one of the Sandy Hook victims wins a defamation lawsuit against the author of “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.” The publisher also pulls the books and apologizes to settle a claim against them. The publisher, Dave Gahary, says his conversations with the father have led him to believe that people actually did die. I’m speechless.
    • Just a reminder that these families have been harassed by Sandy Hook deniers ever since it happened, sometimes moving to get away from it but it never works. That’s why they’ve launched a slew of lawsuits against the offenders, including Alex Jones. And it finally seems to be working.
    • In a separate case against Alex Jones, a Connecticut judge sanctions Jones for a “despicable” tirade against the attorney’s representing Sandy Hook families. Jones accuses them of placing malware on his computer that, in turn, planted child pornography on InfoWars servers. WOW. The child pornography was discovered when InfoWars turned over evidence to the court.
  1. Trump appears to threaten a journalist with imprisonment over a photograph of a letter from Kim Jong Un.
  2. Someone leaks vetting documents from the Trump transition team to Axios. Some of that vetting was outsourced to the Republican National Committee. Here are a few highlights (file them under “Drain That Swamp!”):
    • Trump announced many of his nominees without a full FBI background check or a vetting from the Office of Government Ethics.
    • There’s an entire section of allegations of former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s coziness with big energy companies.
    • Multiple sections on former Health and Human services Secretary Tom Price criticize his management ability and his House Budget Committee leadership (calling it dysfunctional and divisive).
    • Mick Mulvaney said that Trump is not a very good person, among other things.
    • Rudy Giuliani has a whole separate document about his business ties and foreign entanglements.
    • The transition team flagged General David Petraeus because he’s opposed to torture.
    • Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, has Russia ties that go deep.
    • Kris Kobach, who later headed Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity, has ties to white supremacist groups.
    • Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley once said that Trump is everything we “teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.”
    • Seema Verma, appointed to Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was at one time advising Indiana on how to spend Medicaid funds while at the same time representing a client that received those very funds.
    • Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has both business and family conflicts of interest.
    • Ryan Zinke once called Trump “undefendable.”
    • Rick Perry called Trumpism “a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition.”
    • People doing the vetting say they didn’t even know what job they were vetting people for.

Polls:

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

Week 119 in Trump

Posted on May 8, 2019 in Politics, Trump

Of all people, Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano penned an op-ed supporting Mueller and objecting to Barr’s handling of the report. It strikes me here that the Mueller report lists 127 interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and not one person involved didn’t lie about them. Anyway, Napolitano says what anyone who read the Mueller report knows—Bill Barr was wrong to try to absolve Trump of obstruction of justice. Napolitano also says what Trump did was “unlawful, defenseless and condemnable” and it’s up to House Democrats to decide whether to impeach.

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. Someone leaks a letter that Robert Mueller sent to Attorney General William Barr at the end of March objecting to the letter Barr released outlining his own summary of the Mueller report. The letter said:
    • Barr misrepresented Mueller’s findings.
    • Mueller wanted more of the report to come out.
    • Mueller had already provided Barr with redacted summaries of each of the report’s volumes, which were ready in March to be released to the public.
    • Barr’s summary didn’t capture the context, nature, and substance of Mueller’s findings.
    • Barr’s summary caused public confusion.
  1. As for Barr himself, he dismisses the letter in his congressional testimony by saying, “The letter’s a bit snitty and I think it was probably written by one of his staff people.”
  2. The letter also shows that Barr lied to Congress when he previously told them that he didn’t know whether Mueller had taken issue with his summary and subsequent public comments on the report.
  3. Barr testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the start, Lindsey Graham has to be reminded to swear him in, and then right off the bat, Barr contradicts what was in Mueller’s letter to him.
    • Committee Chair Lindsey Graham admits he hasn’t read the full report.
    • When pressed on Mueller accusing Barr of failing to capture context and substance in his summary, Barr tries to focus blame on the media.
    • Barr says (despite Mueller’s letter) that he didn’t know Mueller or his staff disagreed with his summary.
    • Barr defends Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice, despite the evidence laid out by Mueller.
    • Republicans on the committee weren’t really concerned about the nearly dozen instances of attempted obstruction detailed in the Mueller report. They mostly asked questions about investigating the investigators and about Hillary Clinton’s emails.
    • That’s OK, though, because Barr’s with them. He confirms he’s already started a review of how the FBI handled the Russia and Clinton email investigations.
    • Barr says he didn’t review Mueller’s underlying evidence before making a decision on obstruction charged. He didn’t look at the underlying evidence of possible coordination either.
    • And that totally explains why he doesn’t understand why Mueller would investigate obstruction of justice if he knew he couldn’t charge Trump under DOJ rules.
    • Barr says he hasn’t seen the report that launched the FBI investigation (the one provided by an Australian diplomat about George Papadopoulos). Despite calling for an investigation into the FISA warrant, Barr has not yet looked at the underlying evidence here. Earlier in his testimony, Barr told Lindsey Graham that he had concerns about how the investigation started (though apparently not enough concern to review the existing evidence).
    • Barr doesn’t even know what data Paul Manafort shared with a Russian operative nor who the Russian is, so as it turns out, Barr hasn’t read the full Mueller report either.
      • Hint: It was campaign polling data, and Manafort shared it with Konstantin Kilimnik. This is a large section in the Mueller report, and I’m not sure how it’s possible Barr didn’t know this.
    • Barr defends Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller, saying that a president can fire Special Counsel for conflict of interest. But he couldn’t come up with any specific conflicts of interest that might’ve existed.
    • Barr defends his use of the word “spying” for the FBI obtaining a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
    • Barr continues to say Trump fully cooperated, though Trump said he didn’t recall over 30 times in his written answers to Mueller.
    • Barr disputes Trump’s claim of being totally exonerated. Barr says he didn’t exonerate him either.
    • Barr says he “can’t fathom” why the FBI didn’t give the Trump campaign a defense briefing to let them know that Russia was targeting them in 2016. Both the Trump and Clinton campaigns received a security briefing in August of 2016. A security briefing is a step down from a defense briefing, but it’s not like both campaigns weren’t very aware of what was going on.
      • During those briefings, both campaigns were told to let the FBI know of any “suspicious overtures” from Russia to their campaigns.
    • Barr says that Mueller left the decision of whether to pursue obstruction up to Barr, and that the decision not to indict wasn’t influenced by DOJ guidelines. In the report, Mueller talks extensively about Congress’s duty here (so the decision of whether to pursue was left up to them), and talks about DOJ guidelines being one reason he didn’t indict.
  1. After his first hearing, Barr refuses to appear before the House Judiciary Committee due to the format of the questioning (the committee wants a lawyer to handle the questions). The committee threatens to hold him in contempt.
  2. DOJ prosecutors want to prevent Roger Stone from reviewing any parts of the Mueller report that are redacted due to his ongoing court case. They also subpoena Randy Credico to testify against Stone.
  3. A federal appeals court refuses to re-examine a case that claimed Mueller’s appointment was unconstitutional.
  4. Rod Rosenstein tenders his resignation. He’ll leave on May 11.
  5. White House lawyer Emmet Flood sends Barr a letter accusing Mueller of politicizing his report because the report explicitly says it doesn’t exonerate Trump. He also criticizes Mueller for not making a decision on prosecution, though Mueller says he couldn’t make that decision because DOJ guidelines say a sitting president can’t be indicted and therefore Trump would be denied due process because he wouldn’t get a chance to defend himself in a court of law. He’s pretty specific about leaving the next steps to Congress, as specified in the rules of impeachment.
  6. Nancy Pelosi says Barr did not tell the truth to Congress, and that’s a crime.
  7. Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirms that Trump and Putin spoke this week and that they agreed there was no collusion. Well, I guess we can put this whole thing to bed now, right?
  8. Lindsey Graham sends Bob Mueller a letter asking if he wants to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee over his dissatisfaction with Barr misrepresenting his report.
  9. Trump doesn’t want Mueller to testify before Congress, but says he’ll leave that up to Barr.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Trump and Trump Organization, along with Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, sue Deutsche Bank and Capital One over those companies complying with subpoenas for their financial records.They want to prevent the banks from releasing any private materials.
  2. The White House won’t release the documents requested by the House Oversight Committee related to security clearance overrides.
  3. A federal judge allows an emoluments case against Trump to move forward, refusing Trump’s lawyers’ request to dismiss the case. The suit was brought by congressional Democrats.
  4. After being convicted of jumping bail, Julian Assange receives a 50-week prison sentence in the UK. The judge says Assange has cost the UK $21 million, and that he could’ve left the embassy at any time (Assange was claiming he was like a prisoner).
  5. The House Intelligence Committee plans to make a criminal referral to the DOJ for Erik Prince. They say he might have given false testimony to Congress based on information contained in the Mueller report.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Wisconsin Supreme Court restores the 82 people appointed by outgoing Governor Scott Walker whose appointments were previously invalidated based on a lower court ruling. This only affects the 15 people who weren’t reappointed by the new governor. The lower court ruling is still going through appeals.

Healthcare:

  1. The Trump administration submits a court filing claiming that the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) should be struck down.
    • If the court agrees, an estimated 21 million Americans will lose healthcare coverage.
    • Many millions more will be affected if we lose requirements for covering pre-existing conditions, pregnancy, prescription drugs, and mental health services.
    • Just a reminder, Republicans might want to strike this down, but they have no plan to replace it with.
  1. Trump announces a new rule that allows healthcare providers to refuse to provide services based on their religious beliefs. This includes abortions, sterilization, assisted suicide, and advance directives. The rule also lets parents refuse certain types of care for their children.
    • In the past, issues for some medical providers have included AIDS treatments, gender reassignment, and birth control.
  1. The Alabama House passes a bill that would criminalize abortions at any stage of pregnancy unless the mother’s life is threatened or if the fetus has a lethal anomaly. The woman wouldn’t be held criminally liable, but doctors would face a felony charge and up to 99 years in prison.
  2. Just a note here: Whether or not the mother’s life is threatened can be argued in court, so doctors are caught in a catch-22. They can save the fetus and let the mother die and NOT be criminally charged, or they can save the mother and abort the fetus and go to jail for the rest of their lives.
    • Several state legislatures are pushing this issue, hoping to get a case in front of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
  1. A U.S. District Court jury finds the founder and four executives of Insys Therapeutics guilty of federal racketeering conspiracy. They bribed doctors to prescribe powerful opioids to patients who shouldn’t be using them and tricked providers into paying for them.

International:

  1. In Venezuela, self-declared president Juan Guaidó calls for an uprising against President Nicolás Maduro. Guaidó doesn’t have enough military defectors, the clashes turn violent, and five people are killed.
  2. More than 50 countries support Guaidó, including the U.S., UK, and most Latin American countries. Maduro is backed by Russia and China, among others.
  3. The Senate can’t muster enough votes to overturn Trump’s veto of a bill withdrawing U.S. support for the war in Yemen. So we’re still fighting there.
  4. Under the personal supervision of Kim Jong Un, North Korea tests rocket launchers and guided weapons off its east coast. (It’s OK, though, because they can’t reach the U.S. Forget about all the troops we have deployed in the area.)
  5. Trump deploys a carrier and bombers to the Middle East as a warning to Iran, claiming there have been troubling “indications and warnings” from Iran.
  6. Trump wants to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The Florida House passes a bill to let teachers carry weapons (with training, of course). Frankly, just from my limited and sometimes exasperating experience with teenagers, it’s rarely a good idea for adults to have weapons around them. But seriously, the group that will bear the brunt of this is young males of color.

Family Separation:

  1. The Trump administration promises to reunite thousands of migrant families they separated at the border, but at the same time they send each other private internal emails acknowledging that they only have information for about 60 parents and their kids. This highlights the fact that they were never planning on allowing the children to see their parents again (known in most circles as kidnapping).

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Two men found guilty of rape will do no jail time (and yes, they’re both white).
    • The first is a 25-year-old school bus driver who pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old girl. He has to register as a level 1 offender, so he won’t be on offender databases. Ya know, because there was only one victim and he’d never done it before. So yay justice.
    • The second guy kidnapped a 16-year-old girl, forced her to have sex, and kept her in a dog cage. He received a 10-year sentence, but got time served for the eight months he was in custody and nine years and four months of probation. He also has to register as a sex offender.
  1. A New York man who threatened to hang Barack Obama and kill Maxine Waters gets a four-year prison sentence. He called various offices making the threats and using racist slurs.
  2. Brunei says they won’t impose the death penalty for gay sex after all. They only reversed their initial decision after severe international backlash.
  3. The White House makes an emergency request to Congress for $4.5 billion for the southern border. $3.3 billion is for humanitarian assistance and $1.1 billion is to shore up the border. This is on top of the $8 billion they’re requesting for the border in Trump’s 2020 budget.
  4. Trump restricts asylum seekers by banning them from getting work permits if they cross outside a port of entry, imposing application fees, and limiting their access to relief. Trump also orders that all current asylum claims be settled within 180 days; the current time to settle is around two years.
    • This isn’t something we should rush. A team that followed several asylum seekers who were denied found 60 who had been killed upon their return home.

Climate/EPA:

  1. The White House lobbied to remove the words “climate change” from the Arctic Council’s declaration, refusing to sign on with the wording included. Other members refused to sign on without it. In the end, the declaration is watered down.
  2. South Dakota’s Oglala Sioux Tribal Council votes to ban Governor Kristi Noem from tribal land unless she rescinds her support for two state bills aimed at curbing and punishing protestors (specifically around the Keystone pipelines).
  3. In April, renewable energy sources provided more megawatt hours in the U.S. than coal for the first time ever.
  4. A court in Ecuador rules that the government must consult with an indigenous tribe, the Waorani, before opening up their land to oil exploration.
  5. Trump rolls back the safety rules that the Obama administration added after the 2010 BP oil spill. The rollback eases restrictions on offshore drilling and reduces testing of safety equipment like blowout preventers.
  6. The House passes a bill that requires Trump to create a plan for the U.S. to meet the goals of the Paris agreement, even though he’s withdrawing from it. Mitch McConnell says the Senate won’t take the bill up.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump’s nominee Stephen Moore withdraws his name from consideration for the Federal Reserve Board. He was a horrible choice partly because he’s so frequently wrong about economic happenings and partly because he’s a raging misogynist.
  2. In the middle of all the contention, Trump and Democratic leaders agree to pursue a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that will include improvements to highways, railroads, bridges, and broadband.
  3. On top of good GDP news, we also added 263,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.6%.
  4. Trump says he’ll raise tariffs on Chinese goods from 10% to 25% because talks between the U.S. and China aren’t moving fast enough. Just a reminder, a recent study showed that the existing tariffs raised the costs of both domestic and imported goods.
    • Soon after, stock futures fall sharply.

Elections:

  1. Jack Burman and Jacob Wohl (right-wing lobbyist and internet troll, respectively) try to enact a social media scheme to smear presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg with fake sexual assault charges. They tried recruited young Republican men to make the accusations, and far-right news sources ran with the story. Just a reminder to not believe what you hear about any of the candidates. Check them out yourselves.
  2. The California Senate passes a bill requiring presidential candidates to release their taxes in order to be on the ballot. Several states have already proposed such bills.
  3. A three-judge panel in Ohio rules that the state’s congressional maps are partisan and unconstitutional. The judges say this partisan gerrymander was drawn with intent and that it can’t be justified. The lines were drawn to favor the GOP.
  4. After Joe Biden receives the endorsement of the largest firefighter union for his presidential run, Trump retweets 60 other Twitter users in under an hour to show he, too, has support from firefighters.
  5. The Trump campaign is resurrecting their “Lock her up!” slogan but with a new target. Trump wants Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, to be investigated for their actions around Ukraine. Biden’s son worked for a company called Burisma that was being investigated by a prosecutor that Biden was pressuring the Ukraine to remove from office as part of an anti-corruption campaign.
    • That prosecutor has been criticized around the globe for his corruption.
    • Rudy Giuliani says he wants Ukraine investigated because that’ll give us the origins of the Steele Dossier. Don’t we already know the origin?
    • Off topic, Hunter Biden seems to be a hot mess.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Trump says the Johnson Amendment (which prevents religious leaders and organizations from endorsing candidates) is effectively eliminated. Actually, it would take an act of Congress for that to happen.
  2. There’s another mass shooting, this time at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Two people are dead and four more are injured.
  3. Facebook announces a major purge, banning extremist figures like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, Paul Nehlen, and Louis Farrakhan. Their reasoning is that these people violate Facebook’s rules about promoting or engaging in violence and hate.
  4. When Democrats start walking out of Tennessee’s House chambers after Republican leadership appointed only Republican members to a committee, the Republican Speaker of the House, Glen Casada, orders the doors locked so they can’t leave. Their departure would’ve left the House without enough members to proceed.
  5. Trump retweets Jerry Falwell’s suggestion that he should get two extra years added to his term since his first two were stolen by a “failed coup.”

Week 118 in Trump

Posted on April 30, 2019 in Politics, Trump

This week, the White House directs a former security official not to appear before Congress and blocks Don McGahn from testifying. The DOJ ignores a Congressional subpoena, the Treasury ignores the House deadline to turn in Trump’s tax returns, and Trump sues to block a subpoena of his accounting firm. So House Democrats have started floating ways to get them to comply, including pursuing them in the courts (which would take a really long time) or changing the rules so they can fine them. Rep. Gerry Connolly says he’ll enforce House subpoenas in the courts, even if that means jail time. Rep. Jerrold Nadler proposes fining people who won’t comply. This is not politics as usual.

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. As Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen tried to ramp up efforts to fight Russian meddling in the 2020 election. Mick Mulvaney told her not to talk to Trump about it pretty much because it makes him feel bad (it questions the legitimacy of his presidency).
    • As a result, we are not likely aware of nor prepared for the meddling to come.
  1. Trump calls the Russia investigation an attempted coup.
  2. The House Judiciary Committee issues a subpoena to Don McGahn, Trump’s former White House counsel who refused to carry out Trump’s instructions to obstruct justice.
    • Trump wants to stop McGahn from complying with the subpoena, but executive privilege went out the window when he allowed McGahn to be interviewed by Mueller.
    • McGahn told Mueller that Trump pressured him to have Mueller fired and then pressured him to deny that ever happened.
    • The Trump campaign hires a new attorney for 2020 to replace McGahn’s law firm.
  1. Trump opposes any current and former White House staff giving testimony to Congress. He plans to assert executive privilege, and says, “We’re fighting all the subpoenas” (because he thinks subpoenas are ridiculous).
  2. Trump doesn’t appear to have learned from the Mueller investigation, because he continues to threaten witnesses and refuses to cooperate with ongoing investigations, setting him up for more potential obstruction cases.
  3. Contradicting the Mueller report, Trump says, “Nobody disobeys my orders.” According to the report, the only thing that prevented Trump from succeeding in some of his attempts to commit obstruction of justice was that his staff disobeyed his orders.
  4. Trump says that he can’t be impeached because he didn’t commit any high crimes or misdemeanors. Mueller’s report lays out legal cases for obstruction, and how and why it’s now the responsibility of Congress to handle it.
  5. Democrats are still split on whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings.
  6. Attorney General William Barr is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, but he threatens not to because a lawyer would be doing the questioning. Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler threatens to subpoena him.
  7. Jared Kushner tries to minimize Russia’s interference in the 2016 and 2018 elections, saying it was just a few Facebook ads. The Mueller report and court filings describe interference efforts too numerous to describe here.
    • Meanwhile, FBI Director Christopher Wray says that Russia poses a significant counterintelligence threat. Rod Rosenstein says that hacking and social media manipulation are the tip of the iceberg.
  1. Over 5,000 Twitter bots push the idea that Mueller’s investigation was a Russiagate hoax. You’d think this would be a Russian effort, but no, it came from Saudi Arabia.
  2. Trump says he’ll take it to the Supreme Court if Democrats try to impeach him. A 1993 Supreme Court ruling says the House has the sole power of impeachment and the Senate has the sole power to try impeachments.
  3. Two prosecutors who worked on Mueller’s investigation say they found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on obstruction charges.
  4. On the same day that Maria Butina is sentenced to 18 months in prison, Trump speaks at the NRA convention. Butina took a plea deal last year for conspiring to act as a Russian agent by infiltrating the NRA.
  5. A new study of Russian troll tweets shows that the Russians were trying to use Bernie Sanders to drive a wedge between Democratic voters (good job on that, btw!).
    • Part of that effort was to get Sanders voters to vote for Trump or third-party candidates; another part was to simply discourage them from voting at all. The trolls also pushed the narrative that the party didn’t treat Sanders fairly.
    • Specifically, trolls were told to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).”
  1. Do these disinformation campaigns work? Consider these survey results: 25% believe Clinton was in very poor health, 10% believe the pope endorsed Trump, and 35% believe Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic militants, including ISIS. None of these stories are true.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Trump sues his own accounting firm and House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings over House subpoenas for his financial records.
    • The House Oversight Committee agrees to postpone the deadline on the subpoena until a court rules on it.
  1. Deutsche Bank starts providing the New York state’s attorney general with documents related to loans they made to Trump and to the Trump Organization.
  2. Carl Kline, the former White House personnel security director who overrode several security clearance recommendations, fails to appear before the House Oversight Committee after the White House tells him to ignore his subpoena. The committee moves to hold him in contempt of Congress. Before they do, though, the White House says he can give limited testimony.
  3. Steve Mnuchin once more delays his decision on whether to turn over Trump’s tax returns as requested by the House Ways and Means Committee.
  4. Not only is Trump’s pick to lead the Interior Department under ethics investigations, but the agency’s inspector general also opened investigations into six other of Trump’s appointees in the department, largely for unethical lobbying activities.
  5. Michael Cohen now says he isn’t guilty of tax evasion, even though he pleaded guilty to five counts of it.

Courts/Justice:

  1. New York’s attorney general launches an investigation into the finances of both the NRA and its foundation. There are reports that the NRA foundation transferred more than $100 million from its charitable foundation, and there are allegations of extortion in their leadership fight.
    • Trump accuses the attorney general of opening an “illegal investigation” into the NRA.
  1. Gabrielle Giffords’ organization files a lawsuit against the FEC for not doing anything about the NRA’s alleged campaign finance violations, including using shell companies to donate to several GOP campaigns and coordinating with campaigns.
  2. The Supreme Court hears arguments about whether to add a citizenship question to the census. The question was previously blocked by three federal judges, partly based on Census Bureau experts saying that it would negatively affect the accuracy of the count.
    • This is a big deal because the census results determine many things, like representation at the state and local level and funding for programs.
    • Conservative judges on SCOTUS indicate support for the question. Some are the same judges who didn’t think we needed the Voting Rights Act anymore because we live in a post-discrimination society.
    • The question would likely discourage immigrants, both here legally and illegally, from completing the census.
  1. Outgoing deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein defends his handling of the Russia investigation while criticizing Congress, politics, and media (even though the media got most things right, according to the Mueller report). He also criticizes the Obama administration for not revealing more information about Russia sooner, apparently forgetting that Mitch McConnell refused to join a bipartisan statement and threatened Obama if he released it.

Healthcare:

  1. The World Health Organization begins administering the first ever malaria vaccine in several African nations.
  2. The U.S. threatens to veto a UN resolution on sexual violence in global conflicts because it includes giving timely “sexual and reproductive health” help to survivors of assault. The Trump administration translates that as “abortion” and forces the UN to water down their language on the resolution.
  3. The Kansas Supreme Court rules that the state constitution protects the “right of personal autonomy.” This means a woman has a right to make decisions about her own body. The ruling blocks previous restrictions.
  4. As of this week, three different federal judges have blocked Trump’s Title X “gag rule,” which eliminates federal funding for medical practitioners if they do or say anything that assists a patient in getting an abortion.
  5. In 2015, Trump linked vaccines to autism. Now he says children have to get their shots because it’s so important. I guess I applaud his evolution on the topic.

International:

  1. Now that Trump wants to recognize Golan Heights as being under the sovereignty of Israel, Netanyahu wants to name a neighborhood in Golan Heights after Trump.
  2. The U.S. charges an American engineer and a Chinese business person with espionage for trying to steal turbine technology for the Chinese government.
  3. Kim Jong Un travels to Russia where he has his first meeting with Putin. Kim wants to save face after the breakdown in denuclearization talks with the U.S. and Putin gets to intervene in our negotiations.
  4. A new report says that the Trump administration agreed to pay North Korea $2 million for Otto Warmbier’s healthcare. Both Trump and John Bolton deny it was ever paid, though.
  5. The head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan meets with Taliban leaders to start full peace negotiations.
  6. Saudi Arabia beheads 37 people convicted of offenses related to terrorism. It’s the largest mass execution in three years, when they executed 47 people. It also brings the total executed this year to 105.
  7. During his NRA speech, Trump not only announces he’s ending support for the Arms Trade Treaty, he signs a document asking the Senate to return the pact to the White House.
    • The treaty was agreed upon under the George W. Bush administration, and was later signed by Obama. It regulates international sales of all kinds of weaponry.
    • It’s meant to prevent illicit arms sales that escalate armed conflicts.
    • Congress never ratified the pact, but 100 countries did. An additional 30 countries have signed on but not ratified.
    • Again we’re joining exemplary global leaders like Russia, North Korea, and Syria to oppose global agreements.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Florida’s Senate passes a bill that would allow teachers to be armed. The House still needs to vote on the bill.
  2. Florida’s House passes a bill that restores felon’s voting rights only after they’ve paid any fees, fines, and court costs. Florida voters voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights for all but the most heinous felons, regardless of ability to pay.
  3. Irony alert. In an op-ed, Mitch McConnell accuses Democrats of histrionic obstruction. And then at a rally he says that if he’s in power after 2020, he won’t let any Democratic bills pass the Senate. He also poses with someone holding a t-shirt celebrating the expiration of Merrick Garland’s nomination to SCOTUS. He’s a master obstructor.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. The House files a motion in court to block Trump’s plan to use Department of Defense funds to build his wall.
  2. Last week, Mexican troops pulled their weapons on two of our National Guard at the border. It turned out to be a geographical error, but Trump says (with no proof) it was just a diversionary tactic to allow drug smugglers through the border.

Family Separation:

  1. A federal judge gives Trump’s administration six months to identify and reunite the remaining migrant children they separated from their parents who were seeking asylum at the southern border. The administration says it might take longer than that, because they didn’t keep track of them.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The Supreme Court says it will hear two cases about whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevents discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community.
  2. The National Guard in five states will continue to allow transgender troops to serve, in opposition to Trump’s transgender ban in the military.
  3. Brunei defends their new policy of stoning people for having gay sex by saying it’s rarely prosecuted. So no big, right?
  4. Sri Lankan officials have arrested 60 people for the Easter Sunday bombings. Their president orders two top security officials to step down over the government’s handling of advance warning of the attacks. They also face coverings. The death toll from the attacks is over 320.
  5. The leader of the militia that’s been detaining migrants crossing the southern border says that his militia was training to assassinate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros.
    • The FBI has known about this since October 2017, but didn’t do anything about it until the New York Times reported it.
  1. Remember that Coast Guard officer who was arrested with a stash of weapons and was planning a terrorist attack on liberal politicians and journalists? Prosecutors now allege that he was driven by his views on race. He had searched the internet for the best gun to kill black people with, “white homeland,” and “please god let there be a race war.”
    • A federal judge orders him released from detention. They‘re working on options for supervised release.
  1. An Alabama sheriff is placed on leave after he mocks a teen who committed suicide over being bullied over his sexuality. In his anti-LGBTQ post, the sheriff says it stands for Liberty Guns Bible Trump BBQ.
  2. The Department of Justice refuses to comply with a subpoena from the House Oversight and Reform Committee over the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Attorney General Barr directs John Gore to defy the subpoena and won’t let him testify unless he can have a DOJ attorney present.
    • The census hasn’t asked a citizenship question since 1950.
  1. In keeping with Trump’s threats, the White House refuses to allow Stephen Miller to testify before the House Oversight Committee about immigration policies.
  2. The Pentagon prepares to expand the military’s role at the border, and is changing the rules about how troops can interact with immigrants.
  3. A driver intentionally drives his car into a group of pedestrians in Sunnyvale, CA. Police say the driver thought he was targeting a Muslim family. None were killed, but a young girl is in a coma.
  4. The FBI thwarts a terrorist attack planned to hit Huntington Beach, CA, a white power rally in Long Beach, and the Santa Monica Pier. The potential terrorist is a vet looking for retribution for the attacks on the mosques in New Zealand.
  5. A 19-year-old man shoots worshipers at a synagogue in Poway, CA. He kills one person, and people say he would’ve shot more but it seems like his gun jammed.
    • He posted an antisemitic and anti-Muslim manifesto online and took credit for a mosque fire a few weeks ago.
    • According to the manifesto, he was radicalized over a period of 18 months on 8Chan, an online discussion board.
  1. A small white nationalist group storms a bookstore in protest of an event on racial politics. The far-right group is linked to Identity Evropa.
  2. Joe Biden puts out a video pointing out that there were not “very fine people on both sides” of the clashes in Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally, reigniting the “Charlottesville Hoax” cries from the right.
    • Trump defends his words by saying he was talking about people who were protesting the removal of a confederate statue.
    • Context: It was a white nationalist rally sponsored by hate groups and neo-Nazis. Attendees wore swastikas and chanted antisemitic slogans, like “Jews will not replace us!” If there were very fine people among that group, you would think they would’ve distanced themselves fairly quickly.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The Trump administration pushes Republicans in Congress to act quickly to raise the debt ceiling and avoid another standoff.
  2. The S&P 500 hits an all-time high of 2,943, likely on optimism over trade talks with China. Nasdaq also hit an all-time high of 8,161.85.
  3. The U.S. economy far exceeds economist expectations by posting a GDP growth rate of 3.2%. Drivers include companies stockpiling their inventory and higher U.S. exports. These aren’t expected to last, but the fears of a recession are slightly eased.
  4. Trump is working hard to wind down the trade wars so he can remove tariffs before the 2020 elections. With the tariffs came higher prices for imported goods, so domestic manufacturers raised their prices to match. Trade wars are easy to win, right?
  5. The Trump administration tried to pre-empt an independent report showing minimal improvements in the renegotiated NAFTA by releasing their own, more flattering report first.
  6. The GOP tax reform forced some Gold Star families to spend thousands more in taxes by changing the way survivor benefits are taxed.
  7. After the White House decides to stop renewing waivers for countries to buy oil from Iran, oil prices hit a six-month high.
  8. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent decades courting members of the GOP. Now they’re working to become less aligned with the right. The GOP has moved toward nativism, isolationism, and protectionism, contrary to the Chamber’s support for legal immigration, infrastructure investment, and free trade.
    • According to the president and CEO, they don’t want to play to the extremes on either side and they want to fill in the gaping hole in the political middle.
  1. Likewise, the Koch political network is moving away from the GOP, despite being probably the largest benefactor of Republicans in power.
  2. She gets it. Disney heiress Abigail Disney calls on the company to give 50% of executive bonuses to their lowest-paid employees.
  3. Trump’s pick for the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Moore, says his enemies are “pulling a Kavanaugh against” him. We have it in his own writings, though, that women shouldn’t be allowed to referee men’s sports (unless they’re attractive), that female athletes want equal pay for inferior work, and that his own wife is a “loss leader” who doesn’t have a job. He’s mocked AIDS, objectified women, and has been held in contempt of court for failing to pay alimony and child support to the woman who, not surprisingly, divorced him.
  4. Herman Cain, another Trump nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, withdraws after accusations of sexual harassment arise. Trump calls the accusations a witch hunt.

Elections:

  1. Tampa elects Jane Castor as mayor, the first openly gay women to be mayor in a major city in the Southeast.
  2. As part of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s re-election effort, a Malaysian development company is under investigation for money laundering. Attorney General Barr gets a waiver to participate in the investigation even though his former employer represents a party in the investigation.
  3. The DNC makes a pledge not to use stolen or hacked material in the 2020 presidential election, and they challenge the RNC to do the same. So far, the Trump campaign has refused to make the pledge.
  4. Federal judges order Michigan state lawmakers to redraw their gerrymandered districts. They rule that 34 state and federal legislative districts are unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. Last year, private emails showed that Republicans drew the district lines with bias, contradicting their own defense.

Miscellaneous:

  1. A NASA subcontractor who falsified test results in aluminum manufacturing for nearly 20 years has to pay a $46 million fine. NASA says their parts caused two rocket launches to fail.
  2. Trump wants people who went through a criminal diversion program instead of serving time to divulge that information on federal job applications, making it harder for former offenders to get jobs.
  3. A bipartisan group of lawmakers oppose this move, saying it contradicts the First Step Act that Trump signed into law last year.
  4. Trump orders his administration to boycott the White House Correspondents’s Association dinner. This year, instead of being roasted by a comedian, the association hired a historian to speak.
  5. In a meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Trump accuses them of messing with his follower count (apparently he’s a little alarmed that he lost followers). Trump says a bunch of conservatives have lost followers. Dorsey says followers fluctuate, especially right now while they’re trying to keep fake accounts and bots off the platform. Dorsey, himself, has lost followers.
  6. Sonny Perdue is relocating two scientific agencies currently located in downtown Washington D.C. This will likely lead to some brain drain, as scientists and experts might not move with those agencies.
  7. Kentucky’s governor blames teachers’ “sick outs” for the shooting death of a seven-year-old girl. She was accidentally shot by her brother with their uncle’s weapon. They were home because of a sick out, but no teacher put a gun in his hands.
  8. In the midst of their national convention (at which Trump spoke), the NRA seems to have a midlife crisis. They suspend their lawyer, and Ollie North steps down as leader after just six months and accuses CEO Wayne LaPierre of financial misconduct and suggests they could lose their nonprofit status. New York launches an investigation into them and a lawsuit is filed over the handling of their election activities.

Polls:

  1. Gallup polled over 150,000 people globally and found Americans to be the most stressed out. 55% of us reported experiencing a lot of stress the previous day, compared with 35% globally.
  2. 43% of Americans feel like they’ve benefited from recent economic growth; 54% say they haven’t.

Week 117 in Trump

Posted on April 23, 2019 in Politics, Trump

The Mueller report is out!

Finally the Mueller report is released, if only in redacted form. Now we can put it all behind us and lay it to rest, right? Wrong. That couldn’t be more wrong. The reactions to the report couldn’t be more different, ranging from complete exoneration to obviously there were some bad deeds done to we must impeach. Even my quick take on the report is too long to include here, but it doesn’t really exonerate anybody, there are still ongoing cases, and Congress will have to figure out whether to do the ethical thing and start impeachment hearings or the political thing and hope for the best in 2020.

Here’s that and what else happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. I’m working on a more detailed summary of the Mueller report, but here’s my quick take on what I’ve read so far. If you want to read the full report, here’s a good version.
  2. Russian aluminum company Rusal announces it’s spending $200 million on a new low-carbon aluminum mill in Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky. Last year, the company was under U.S. sanctions under the ownership of oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The Treasury lifted sanctions once Deripaska divested.
  3. House committees subpoena Trump’s financial records from Deutsche Bank. They also subpoena documents from JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America regarding potential money laundering by Russians and Eastern Europeans.
  4. During a FOIA hearing, a federal judge says that Attorney General William Barr has created an environment of distrust around the DOJ’s commitment to sharing information about the Mueller investigation. Still, the judge denies a request to disclose the full and unredacted report.
  5. Current and former White House staffers are anxious about whether their cooperation with the Mueller investigation will be revealed in his report. They say they’re doubly concerned over how Trump will respond.
  6. Officials from the DOJ met with White House lawyers several times to discuss the findings in the Mueller report, giving them nearly a month to prepare rebuttals. This is a break from precedent. Kenneth Starr didn’t let the Clinton White House review his report, but then he also released his report in full, excruciating detail on the web.
  7. The DOJ refuses to release sealed records in Paul Manafort’s court cases because there are still ongoing investigations. The Washington Post had requested the release, but ongoing cases around Manafort include Gregory Craig, Sam Patten (just sentenced), Roger Stone, Stormy Daniels hush money payments, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn.
  8. Attorney General William Barr announces he’ll hold a press conference to talk about the Mueller report before he actually releases the redacted version. This means reporters are going in with no background information on which to base their questions. Democratic House committee chairs demand he cancel the press conference, saying it’s “unnecessary and inappropriate, and appears designed to shape public perceptions of the report before anyone can read it.” And it seems they’re right. Here are some highlights.
  9. Mueller’s team, which was tight-lipped and pretty leak-proof during the investigation, has been opening up to say Barr is minimizing the evidence and findings from the investigation.
  10. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler subpoenas the full, unredacted Mueller report. For certain, the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, along with the Gang of Eight will receive a version of the report with redactions only for grand jury information unless a judge rules otherwise on the grand jury bit.
  11. Even though Trump and his legal team claim that Mueller’s report exonerates him, they’re putting together a rebuttal to the report’s findings.
  12. Republicans for the Rule of Law, a conservative group formed to defend “the institutions of our republic,” runs an ad on Fox News urging Republicans in Congress to hold Trump accountable for the wrongdoing presented in Mueller’s report and to rebuild the Republican party back to what it once was.
  13. Rudy Giuliani says there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians. Even if the FBI warned the campaign about it and asked to be alerted about Russian contacts?

Legal Fallout:

  1. The inspector general for the Department of the Interior opens an ethics investigation into the newly confirmed secretary of the department, David Bernhardt.
  2. Sears sues Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and their former CEO, Edward Lampert. Sears alleges that as member of the board, Mnuchin helped Lampert strip Sears of more than $2 billion.
  3. The White House refuses to comply with a request from the House Judiciary Committee for documents regarding the merger between AT&T and Time Warner. If you remember, Trump told Gary Cohn to pressure the DOJ to prevent the merger (Time Warner owns CNN).

Healthcare:

  1. The DOJ brings charges against 60 medical professionals, including 31 doctors, in five states for illegally prescribing opiates and for exchanging sex for pills. The states span areas where the opioid crisis is hitting hardest (Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia).
  2. McConnell says he’ll block any attempts at Medicare for All. His words: ”Medicare for all? Not as long as I’m majority leader. It ought to be called Medicare for none.”

International:

  1. Trump vetoes a resolution passed in both the House and Senate that would’ve withdrawn U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
  2. The EU has been building schools for Palestinian children in the West Bank. This week, Israel damages or demolishes three of them citing permitting issues. These kids have to go to school outdoors or in tents.
  3. The Trump administration announces new restrictions against Cuba, reversing steps made under Obama to help improve relations between the U.S. and Cuba. They place restrictions on travel and on the amount of money Cuban Americans can send to relatives there. They also allow Cuban exiles to sue the government for seized property.
    • The announcement also includes new sanctions against Venezuela and Nicaragua .
  1. North Korea announces a test of a new tactical guided weapon, likely a short-range missile.
  2. A new study shows that Russia’s been hacking into the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), and using it to confuse ships and planes. Almost 10,000 incidents have been reported or detected.
  3. Trump orders the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to dismiss most of their Palestinian aid workers. Eventually he wants to bring it down to 14 workers.
  4. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo wins a second term.
  5. Ukraine elects a TV Comedian as President by a landslide—he wins by nearly a 50 point spread. He’s a bit of a populist and ran on a platform of anti-corruption.

Legislation/Congress:

Congress is on recess. I hope you all went to a town hall with your Representative!

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Yo-Yo Ma gives a performance at the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge, which spans between Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. His message is unity, and he says, “A country is not a hotel, and it’s not full.”
  2. Last week, ICE deported the spouse of a U.S. soldier who was killed in Afghanistan in 2020, leaving their 12-year-old daughter in Phoenix. This week, ICE reverses that decision and brings him back. I don’t know the reason.
  3. Attorney General Barr orders immigration judges to deny bail to some asylum seekers, which will keep even more migrants in detention centers indefinitely (and cost us more money). DHS will have sole authority to decide who is released.
  4. Trump decides not to nominate anyone to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a continuation of his withdrawal from international agencies on human rights.
  5. Democrats in Arizona try to force a vote on the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment—yes, it’s still a thing). Republicans block the vote.
  6. Texas passes state bills that would allow municipalities to not enforce anti-discrimination laws for LGBTQ Texans.
  7. The House Judiciary Committee is looking into Trump’s alleged promise to pardon Kevin McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, if he illegally blocks asylum seekers from entering the U.S. From what I’ve read about McAleenan, the offer was pointless; he doesn’t seem like a law-breaker.
  8. Trump wants 9,000 to 10,000 additional troops deployed to the border. The Pentagon says they’ll add about 3,000.
  9. The Ninth Court of Appeals temporarily lifts the injunction against Trump’s policy to make asylum applicants remain in Mexico to await their court hearings. The administration is already working to send refugees back while court cases are pending.
  10. The Mexican government contradicts Trump’s claims that they agreed to this policy of making refugees wait in Mexico.
  11. The White House considers restricting travel from counties whose citizens have high rates of overstaying their visas in the U.S. They’re largely focused on African nations.
  12. Leaders in sanctuary cities and states have varied responses to Trump’s “threats” to send asylum seekers to sanctuary localities. While they say they welcome refugees, they also say Trump thinks he’s punishing his political opponents and that it would be illegal anyway. But still, we’re set up for this and we welcome migrants, so bring it on.
    • Three House committees are looking into this proposal, and want Stephen Miller to testify since he seems to be the “boss” of all things around immigration.
  1. Despite an increase in threats that led to an increase in security for Representative Ilhan Omar, Trump continues his attacks on her, calling her out of control, antisemitic, and anti-Israel, and saying she hates the U.S.
  2. At least four House freshman women are under death threats—Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Katie Hill. I’m not sure whether this goes under “Discrimination” or mere “Far-Right Assholery” since the women in question fall into one or more of these categories: Muslim, black, Palestinian, Puerto Rican, and bisexual.
  3. U.S. officials arrest a Florida man who made threatening and hate-filled calls to Democratic officials. He specifically ranted about Muslims, black people, and Ilhan Omar. He threatened Eric Swalwell with death if he “comes after our guns.” He called Rashida Tlaib to rant about Omar. He also called Cory Booker, among others.
  4. Authorities charge Holden Matthews with additional counts of hate crimes after arresting him for starting three black churches in Louisiana on fire.
  5. Starting in 2020, based on Trump’s transgender ban, the U.S. Naval Academy will stop enrolling transgender students.
  6. Steve Bannon is funding a new academy at a monastery in Italy. They’re creating the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, a Christian nationalist institute. I hope this goes about as well as the fortified city Glenn Beck was planning in Idaho.
  7. Here’s a twist. Canada asks the U.S. for help in stemming the flow of refugees across their southern border… with the U.S.
  8. An armed civilian militia group holds over 200 asylum seekers at gunpoint as they tried to cross the border. The United Constitutional Patriots have been “guarding” this area of the border for a few months. The FBI later arrests the leader of the group on weapons charges. Customer and Border Patrol does not support this kind of vigilante action.
  9. Fire destroys the main offices of the Highlander Center, a Tennessee social justice center that has hosted several civil rights leaders. A white power symbol is found spray-painted on the parking lot.
  10. Washington State Representative Matt Shea discussed acts of extreme violence, intimidation, and surveillance against perceived enemies (AKA, the left) with far-right figures Jack Robertson and Anthony Bosworth. Shea outed three individuals for the group to target. Shea has pushed right-wing conspiracy theories for years. Vote him out!
  11. The week ends with horrific terrorist bombings of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. Nearly 300 are dead, and over 500 injured. The attack was carried out by local militant groups, and the Islamic State claims credit for it. Police arrest thirteen suspects, and three officers are killed in the process.
    • Security officials were warned of a threat to churches 10 days prior to the attacks, and it’s not clear if any action was taken to address them.
    • Trump tweets that at least 138 million were killed, and then deletes it.

Climate/EPA:

  1. A new study concludes that climate change is partly to blame for the strength of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The central region of the island typically gets 150 inches of rain a year, and Maria dropped nearly 1/4 of that in one day.
  2. Several states, including Idaho, Colorado, and New Mexico, plan to retire old coal plants early thanks to lower costs of renewable energy sources. This isn’t happening due to political pressure nor to renewable energy mandates. Several states are working to ease the transition, but coal in southeast and northeast states are subsidized and immune to these market pressures.
  3. Duke Energy plans to develop six utility-scale power plants in North Carolina.
  4. New York City passes a bill limiting greenhouse gas emissions from big buildings.
  5. Over 3,000 scientists sign on to a letter of support for Youth Strike for Climate, led by Swedish student activist Greta Thunberg. The letter emphasizes the need to act now, and says that our current actions are not adequate.
  6. The EPA’s Andrew Wheeler previously dismissed a qualified and independent panel of air pollution scientists (because, you know, Obama), and now the panel admits they don’t have the expertise to make recommendations. But they propose changes to the Clean Air Act anyway that would put people’s health at risk.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Illinois passes a bill banning “right to work” laws for municipalities in the state. Right to work laws are touted as being better for everyone, but they really take away employees’ collective bargaining power.
  2. An independent analysis by the International Trade Commission shows that Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA will have a limited effect on the economy (boosting it by just 0.35%). The greatest positive effects are in manufacturing and services, but it’ll make U.S. production more expensive overall, reduce exports, and cut wages and possibly employment.
    • This still has to be approved by Congress. Democrats are pushing for better labor protections and tougher compliance enforcement with Mexico. Republicans are pushing to remove tariffs.
  1. February’s deficit was the largest one-month deficit in history, reaching $234 billion. This is partly from the GOP tax reform bill and partly from the spending bill compromise.
  2. Tariffs have brought in $82 million to the Treasury, but they also raised consumer prices in the U.S. by $1.5 billion. They did create about 1,800 new jobs, but at a cost of over $800,000 per job.

Elections:

  1. Kansas passes a law allowing people to vote anywhere in their county instead of just one assigned polling place. In 2018, they closed or moved several polling places, making it harder for people to vote. Around 1,100 voters voted in the wrong polling place so their votes weren’t fully counted.
  2. Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld announces he’ll run against Trump in the 2020 presidential Republican primary.
  3. Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders accuses the “establishment” of working against him (again) after Think Progress publishes an article that’s critical of him. They’ve published articles criticizing several other candidates, “establishment” and otherwise.
  4. Elizabeth Warren is the first Democratic presidential candidate to call for the House to start impeachment proceedings. There are two camps on this: one that thinks impeachment is a moral and ethical imperative, and one that thinks it would be political suicide for the Democratic party. IMO, this shows Warren puts ethics above politics.
    • While most candidates back more investigations before making a decision on impeachment, a handful followed Warren’s lead.

Miscellaneous:

  1. While I was writing my recap last week, Paris’s 800-year-plus-old Notre Dame cathedral went up in flames. It’s spire collapsed, but firefighters had saved the structure and stopped its spread.
    • Online conspiracy theorists immediately began spreading vile hoaxes about arson, people with Arabic-sounding names celebrating, terrorism, Muslims, and Ilhan Omar saying they reap what they sow. (She didn’t—I can’t believe I have to clarify that. She actually tweeted about the wonder of Notre Dame and prayed for firefighters.)
    • The fire is suspected to have been ignited by accident.
  1. Trump advises French firefighters to dump water from air tankers on the Notre Dame blaze to put it out. Is there anything he doesn’t know how to do better than the experts? French firefighters let him know that it could cause the entire structure to collapse. Looks like they did a fine job all on their own.
  2. Trump says Boeing should just fix the 737 MAX airliners and rebrand them with a new name. Because that’ll make everyone forget about the two deadly plane crashes, right?
  3. With the 20th anniversary of the Columbine shooting this week, a young woman from Florida who was fixated on the shooting causes Denver area schools to shut down when she travels to Denver and purchases a shotgun near the school. She’s later found dead from a self-inflicted gun shot wound.
  4. Days after the Notre Dame fire, a man goes into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City carrying gallons of gas, lighters, and lighter fluid. He’s charged with attempted arson and reckless endangerment. Earlier in the week, he was arrested for refusing to leave the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark, NJ.

Polls:

  1. Trump’s approval rating took a slight dip, but is holding surprisingly steady after the release of the Mueller report. It’s at an aggregate of 41.4%.
  2. The electorate is pretty equally divided over whether to impeach or not following the release of the Mueller report.

Mueller Report – My Quick and Early Take

Posted on April 23, 2019 in Politics, Trump

Here’s my quick and early take on what’s in the Mueller report. I’m still slogging through the details, but here are a few things I’ve found. A lot of this we already know from the past three years of solid reporting on it, and a lot of the obstructive actions occurred in public right in front of our faces. But the report does fill in some details that are new to me.

Reading through it, it strikes me that the FBI told both the Clinton and Trump campaigns that Russia was attempting to interfere in the elections and told both campaigns to alert them immediately if they were approached by Russians. Mueller outlines numerous Russian contacts with the Trump campaign and the campaign did not report even one to the FBI.

  1. The released Mueller report is about 448 redacted pages. Here’s a searchable version of the report.
  2. About half of the report covers the collusion aspect and goes into details about contacts between Trump campaign members or associates and Russian officials and oligarchs. The other half covers around a dozen attempts by Trump to potentially obstruct justice.
  3. The report confirms most of the news stories we’ve read over the past three years, but does contradict a few. For example, there is no evidence that Michael Cohen traveled to Prague or that Trump directly told him to lie in his testimony.

FISA Warrant and Intelligence Investigation

  1. The report clearly says that the FBI investigation into Trump’s campaign was launched not from the Steele Dossier, but from George Papadopoulos’s drunken brag to an Australian diplomat, who later reported the incident to intelligence officials.
  2. IMO, it took George Papadopoulos less than a month of being on the campaign to blow everything up. He was like throwing in a grenade. He actively worked to meet with Russians, tried to get campaign members to meet with Russians, and he spilled the beans about Russia claiming to have private Clinton documents that could help Trump. And that’s what started the investigation into the campaign.

Russian Interference and Possible Coordination

  1. Mueller found a sweeping effort by Russia to interfere in our 2016 elections through social media, political and activist events, hacking and releasing Democratic emails and documents, trying to hack into our state election systems, traveling to the U.S. to obtain information, and initiating contacts with Trump campaign members and associates.
  2. Russia is behind the online personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, through which they published their stolen materials.
  3. By 2016, Russian efforts were focused on lifting Trump (and sometimes Bernie Sanders) and disparaging Clinton.
  4. Mueller found that the Trump campaign and associates welcomed Russia’s assistance and showed interest in the hacked material. He also found that even though there were numerous contacts between the Russia and Trump associates, there isn’t sufficient evidence to support conspiracy or coordination of efforts.
    • I’m beginning to think Lindsey Graham was right when he said Trump couldn’t have colluded with Russia because “he doesn’t collude with his own government.”
  1. The Trump campaign knew about upcoming dumps of hacked material and had a social media, press, and PR strategy prepared to capitalize on the release.
  2. Within hours of Trump publicly calling for Russia to find Clinton’s 30,000 ‘lost’ emails, they tried to hack into her personal server for the very first time.
  3. There were several points of contact between the campaign and Russian oligarchs and officials. For example:
    • Michael Cohen, Donald Trump Sr., Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka worked periodically on Trump Tower Moscow.
    • Paul Manafort was in frequent contact with Konstantin Kilimnik and shared campaign, polling, and strategy information with him.
    • The aforementioned George Papadopoulos.
    • The Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya plus two other Russians. Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were in attendance. (This one posed a difficult legal question for Mueller’s team not over whether the action was wrong, but over whether it was willful.)
    • Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak had contacts with Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, and campaign advisor J. D. Gordon.
    • Michael Flynn also discussed sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and according to Flynn this was in coordination with the Trump transition team.
    • Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, head of a Russian-government-owned bank.
    • Several campaign associates were in contact with Dmitry Simes, CEO of CNI (a think tank with expertise in and ties to the Russian government).
    • Erik Prince met with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles. Dmitriev also met with an associate of Jared Kushner named Rick Gerson.
    • Carter Page took trips to Russia, speaking at the New Economic School twice, and had several contacts with Russians, including contacts prior to the campaign with two agents who attempted to recruit him.
  1. Of note, the above lied to cover up pretty much every single one of their meetings, and several people were charged, convicted, or pleaded guilty to that.
  2. Russia released a dump of stolen emails and other material within an hour of the release of the Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about sexually abusing women.
  3. Mueller‘s investigation found that a Florida county’s election server network was breached, seemingly through a spearphishing effort. There’s no evidence any votes were changed, though. (Score one for former Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who made this claim on the heels of his tight loss to Rick Scott. The majority of politicians and MSM dismissed his claim at the time.)
  4. Mueller also confirms that Russians breached the Illinois State Board Of Elections computer network by exploiting a vulnerability in their website.
  5. The FBI opened an investigation into Russian interference and possible coordination with the Trump campaign in July 2016, and in 2017, three congressional committees opened investigations.
  6. Russian agents and entities violated criminal law with their interference. One company, Concord, has been fighting this in court, but the others will likely never be arrested.

Potential Obstruction of Justice

  1. In Volume II, Mueller looks at several actions taken by Trump that could be construed as obstruction of justice. Much of this occurred in the public eye, so we can verify they happened. Here are a few of Trump’s potentially obstructive actions:
    • Lying about his ties to Russia.
    • Asking Comey to end the investigation.
    • Firing Comey.
    • Asking White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller (over which McGahn threatened to resign).
    • Telling McGahn to lie about his request to fire Mueller.
    • Trying to stop Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the investigation.
    • And then trying to get Sessions to unrecuse himself.
    • Trying to get Mueller to only focus on future elections.
    • Telling Corey Lewandowski to deliver a message to Sessions saying Sessions should tell the public that the investigation was very unfair to Trump and that Trump did nothing wrong.
    • Lying about the Trump Tower meeting. Oddly, this one seems to be the weakest case for obstruction.
    • Pushing top officials to publicly say his team didn’t collude with Russians, even though it was an active investigation at the time.
    • Talking to witnesses about their testimony, specifically Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort.
    • Attempting to influence Paul Manfort’s jury.
    • Publicly attacking Michael Cohen and his family after he started cooperating.
    • Interactions with his personal lawyer (Michael Cohen) over his testimony to Congress. Apparently Trump’s lawyers helped form Cohen’s testimony, but Mueller didn’t establish that Trump actually told him to lie.
  1. The people who lied about their contacts with Russian agents listed in the previous section actually did commit obstruction of justice.
  2. Lucky for Trump, multiple people whom he told to obstruct justice in some way ignored his requests (instead of explaining to him why they were wrong). This likely saved Trump from a slam-dunk case of obstruction of justice. To quote:
    “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”A few of the people who refused to obstruct: House Counsel Don McGahn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowsky, White House official Rick Dearborn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Staff Secretary Rob Porter, FBI Director James Comey, Deputy FBI Directory Andrew McCabe, National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland, and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.
  3. Trump never sat down for an interview with Mueller’s team; he provided written answers instead, which were incredibly useless. He states at least 30 times that he doesn’t recall. The report also says they didn’t subpoena him in the end because the White House would continue to delay and Mueller thought it better to wrap up the investigation as they weren’t likely to find out anything new.
  4. Trump was concerned that talk about Russian interference would make his presidency look illegitimate.

Ongoing Investigations

  1. Mueller spun off 14 additional inquiries from his investigation, which are currently being investigated in other jurisdictions. Two that we know of involve Gregory Craig, a Manafort associate and former Obama White House lawyer, and Michael Cohen. The other 12 are redacted.
  2. Mueller also transferred 11 cases in progress to be wrapped up by other prosecutors.
  3. In all, 15 people have been indicted in this and related cases, plus 25 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations (including Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Concord Management and Consulting LLC).

Lies Our Press Secretaries Told

The report exposes a few lies from our White House press secretaries:

  1. Spicer lied when he said the decision to fire Comey was all Rod Rosenstein’s. Sanders also lied about who was involved in the firing. According to the report, it was Trump’s decision with several people weighing in after the decision was made.
  2. Sanders lied about the timing of the decision to fire Comey.
  3. Spicer lied about who decided to fire Michael Flynn.
  4. Sanders lied when she said countless FBI agents had lost faith in Comey. She later excused this by saying it was a “slip of the tongue,” though the damage on that one is done and done.
  5. Sanders lied when she said Trump “certainly didn’t dictate” the Trump Tower meeting statement for Donald Jr.

Conclusions

  1. In the end, Mueller finds there isn’t sufficient evidence to support criminal charges for coordination or conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign on Russia’s interference in the election (though he does say some communications were destroyed, and subjects of the investigation used encrypted apps or apps that don’t store data to communicate). To quote:

    “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

  2. Mueller declines to prosecute on the obstruction charges, and instead lays out the legality of each attempt and leaves it to Congress to decide what to do next (as a reminder, Congress is the arm of government that constitutionally serves as a check and balance to the president). Mueller includes a pretty large section on the responsibilities of Congress as put forth in the constitution around this issue. Again, to quote:

    “With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.”

    And

    “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

  3. In the report, Mueller says they declined to prosecute Trump on obstruction not because there isn’t enough evidence to do so, but rather because of DOJ rules around indicting a sitting president. Volume II of the report plainly outlines possible crimes and gives Congress a clear path toward impeachment should they choose to go that route.
    • The report also says indictment could preempt impeachment, the constitutional process to address presidential misconduct. Quoted from the report, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” (So it doesn’t exactly exonerate anyone.)
    • The report also states that while a sitting president can’t be indicted, once that person is no longer in office, charges can be brought.

William Barr on the Mueller Report

Posted on April 23, 2019 in Bad Politicians, Politics, Trump

Attorney General William Barr gave a controversial press conference hours before releasing the Mueller report. Like we can’t read the report for ourselves? He’s had nearly a month to put out his own narrative on the report and then embed that narrative in the minds of the American public. Because of this and because of conflicting and overblown media reports, I really do recommend reading the report on your own. If not the full report, at least read the summaries at the beginning of each volume and the conclusions at the end of each volume.

Here are a few highlights from Barr’s take on the report:

  1. Barr uses “collusion” and “coordination” interchangeably in his press conference, which is unusual for a lawyer of his caliber. They’re generally much more careful with terminology, and collusion is not a legal term (Mueller even states that in his report).
  2. While Mueller laid out a pretty solid path to indict on obstruction, Barr says he doesn’t think the evidence is sufficient to charge Trump.
  3. Barr says:
    “As you will see, the Special Counsel’s report states that his “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.””
    But this leaves out contextual information. Here’s that full sentence from the report:
    “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
  4. Barr says, correctly, that we know:
    • The Russian government interfered in our elections through a social media campaign to sow disinformation and discord.
    • The GRU hacked into U.S. servers and stole documents and emails, which they later publicized.
  1. Barr also says Russia didn’t have the knowing or intentional cooperation of Trump or his campaign, or any other American for that matter. However,the report clarifies that to meet the requirements of coordination would require an agreement, tacit or expressed.
  2. Barr says that there’s not enough evidence to establish Trump committed obstruction of justice, despite all the evidence Mueller lays out. According to the report, Mueller actually declined to prosecute based on DOJ norms, and specifically says the evidence does not clear Trump and if it did, he would say so.
    • In neither his letters nor his statement does Barr give the reason Mueller gave for not deciding to prosecute. It wasn’t because he didn’t think there were crimes; it was because of DOJ guidelines around indicting a sitting president.
  1. Barr only mentions the bolded part below, ignoring the remaining supporting information for obstruction of justice:
    • “…the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. But the evidence does point to a range of other possible personal motives animating the President’s conduct. These include concerns that continued investigation would call into question the legitimacy of his election and potential uncertainty about whether certain events—such as advance notice of WikiLeaks’s release of hacked information or the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians—could be seen as criminal activity by the President, his campaign, or his family.”
  1. In his press conference, Barr goes into a lengthy defense of Trump, and even says if he did obstruct it was because he was frustrated over the investigation (let’s see how that excuse works for your everyday criminal).
  2. Barr also says the White House cooperated with the investigation fully and completely, even though about 182 pages of the Mueller report is about obstructive actions, Trump refused to sit down for an interview, and he said he didn’t recall about 30 times in his written answers.
  3. I‘m not clear if Barr means to say that Trump believes this investigation was propelled by his political enemies and fueled by illegal leaks or if that’s what Barr himself believes. It’s not clear in his speech or his transcript. Either way, it’s a weird thing for an attorney general to say.
  4. Barr makes no mention of the plea deals and convictions that came from the investigation.
  5. Barr implies that because there was no crime of conspiracy or coordination, Trump couldn’t be guilty of obstructing justice. Mueller directly contradicts that in the report, saying:“In addition, the President had a motive to put the FBI’s Russia investigation behind him… But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.”