Tag: TrumpRussia

Week 116 in Trump

Posted on April 15, 2019 in Politics, Trump

This week reminds me again of how we can all interpret the very same occurrence in vastly different ways. Even though we hear the exact same speeches, our reactions vary. Maybe we hear what we want to hear or maybe we actually do just support very different values in those speeches. No, I’m not talking about William Barr’s testimony. I’m talking about Candace Owens, who Republican leaders brought in to testify on the rising problem of white nationalism. Among other things, she said the Southern Strategy never happened (we have the audio to prove it did), that Democrats want black and brown people to live in fear (not any Democrats I know), that the statistics showing the rise in hate crimes are faked (even though the numbers come from Trump’s own government agencies), and the real problem isn’t white nationalism, it’s far-left extremism (even though our intelligence agencies say it’s far-right extremism).

I’m not saying Owens voice isn’t important, it is. But it didn’t add anything but controversy to a hearing with victims of white nationalist hate crimes in attendance. I remember white nationalist groups when I was a kid. I remember when we all took them as a serious threat. We should all take them as a serious threat now.

Anyway, off my soapbox. Here’s what else happened this week in politics…

Russia:

  1. Attorney General William Barr testifies before the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Here are some highlights:
    • Barr says that Mueller declined to review Barr’s initial letter summarizing the main findings of the report.
    • Barr won’t say whether he’s briefed the White House on the report or whether he even showed it to the White House.
    • Barr says he’ll release a redacted version of Mueller’s report to Congress and the public within a week.
    • The redactions will be color coded so we know the reason we can’t see the information. Some information is protected under grand jury rules, some affects ongoing investigations, some is defamatory (does that qualify as protected?), and some is simply classified.
    • Barr says he won’t ask a judge to rule on whether he can release any of the grand jury information.
    • And here we go again. Barr says he formed a team to investigate the investigations into the DOJ and FBI leading up to the federal probe and FISA warrants in the 2016 elections. This is the second IG review of the events, and the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight Committee held year-long hearings on them.
    • Barr tells the Senate Appropriations Committee that the government was spying on Trump’s campaign, but he doesn’t give any evidence supporting that assertion. Barr does add that he didn’t think any rules were violated, and he doesn’t think there was an endemic problem in our intelligence agencies.
  1. Trump says Mueller‘s investigation was an attempted coup to remove him from office.
  2. In rare bipartisan form, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and Ranking Member Devin Nunes send a demand to Barr, FBI Director Chris Wray, and Rod Rosenstein that Mueller must brief them on all materials obtained during his investigation.
  3. Nunes says the Mueller report is a partisan document, even though Mueller’s a Republican and Nunes hasn’t see a single word of the report.
  4. Devin Nunes says he’ll send eight criminal referrals in the Russia investigations to Barr. Most of the referrals are around lying to or misleading Congress, but three involve conspiracy and have to do with the FISA warrant request.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, retires as a federal appellate judge. She was under investigation for violating judicial conduct rules based on the tax schemes she and her family were involved in. Stepping down effectively ends the investigation.
  2. Steve Mnuchin says the Treasury will miss the deadline to deliver Trump’s tax returns. It’s OK though, because Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Congress isn’t smart enough to understand his tax returns.
  3. Mnuchin consulted with the White House over releasing the tax returns.
  4. Trump’s attorneys threaten legal action against an accounting firm if they comply with a subpoena to release his financial records.
  5. If federal efforts to obtain Trump’s tax returns fail, New York lawmakers prepare to introduce a bill allowing the New York Department of Taxation and Finance to release state tax returns if requested by a congressional committee.
  6. Officials in the UK arrest Julian Assange, and the U.S. charges him on conspiracy to hack a Pentagon computer. This is related to his 2010 dump of classified documents and his work to help Chelsea Manning crack a password. It’s not related to his actions during the 2016 elections.
    • Ecuador withdrew his asylum, opening the door for the arrest.
    • The U.S. has an extradition warrant for Assange.
    • Trump, who has previously said he loves WikiLeaks, now says he doesn’t know anything about WikiLeaks.
  1. At first, Assange’s arrest starts a major debate over what this means for freedom of the press (though I wouldn’t technically call WikiLeaks the press, some do). But it turns out he’s not being charged for disseminating classified information; just for the commission of a crime in obtaining it.
  2. The DOJ adopts a new and narrower definition of the emoluments clause, which would allows some of Trump’s hotels to accept foreign payments or gifts.
  3. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) introduces a bill to remove fellow Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) from his role as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. In a play on Trump’s nickname for Schiff, Gaetz calls it the PENCIL Act. He accuses Schiff of slandering the president and also wants Schiff’s security clearance revoked.
  4. U.S. attorneys charge Gregory Craig with lying to officials over whether his work for the Ukrainian government meant he should have registered as a foreign agent. Craig served as White House Counsel during Obama’s first two years, and not surprisingly was working with Paul Manafort when on the Ukraine project.
  5. Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti faces 36 charges of defrauding his clients. This is on top of the charges of attempting to extort Nike.
  6. Devin Nunes has been busy. He’s suing Twitter over two parody accounts that make fun of him and he’s suing McClatchy Company for defamation stemming from an article about a winery of which he is part owner.

Healthcare:

  1. Texas State Rep. Tony Tinderholt introduces a bill that would criminalize all abortion without exception, and possibly give women the death penalty if they do it. Remind me again how this is pro-life?
    • Tinderholt, who’s been married five times, says he just wants to make women more responsible. Don’t get me started. Find me an unwanted pregnancy that a man wasn’t responsible for.
  1. As he does every year, Lindsey Graham sponsors a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks.
  2. The Ohio legislature passes one of the most restrictive “heartbeat” anti-abortion bills in the country, which would outlaw abortion after just five or six weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Former Governor Kasich vetoed such bills, but current Governor Mike DeWine says he’ll sign it.
  3. Representative Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) blames people for being unhealthy and says healthy people shouldn’t have to share in the cost of their insurance. I get what he’s saying; people with unhealthy habits cost us all more. Except that cancer doesn’t care how you lived your life. Neither does MS, Crohn’s, arthritis, or a host of other diseases.
  4. Democrats in the House are trying to investigate prescription drug pricing, but are being thwarted by certain House Republicans who are warning drug companies against providing any information.
  5. New York orders mandatory vaccinations in areas hit hardest by the measles outbreak. They can’t force people to vaccinate, but they’re fining people who don’t $1,000.
  6. The measles outbreak in Madagascar has killed over 1,200 people. They have a vaccination rate of under 60%, but not because people don’t want to vaccinate their kids. They do. The country just doesn’t have the resources to get them all vaccinated.

International:

  1. Trump designates Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organization. Benjamin Netanyahu says it was his idea. Iran responds by designating the United States Central Command a terrorist organization.
  2. Even though the parties of Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponent, Benny Gantz, nearly tied in this week’s elections, Netanyahu won by courting far-right extremist parties to establish a stronger coalition than Gantz pulled together.
    • Netanyahu is facing possible indictments on bribery and breach of trust. He calls it a witch hunt. Sounds familiar, no?
  1. Great Britain and the European Union agree to delay Brexit until the end of October, largely out of consideration for Ireland. The longer this drags out, the worse the effects are on the UK’s economy.
    • Theresa May and opposition party leader Jeremy Corbyn are now in negotiations.
    • This puts everyone in a weird spot when European parliament elections come up in next month. At first May said the UK wouldn’t participate, but now she says they will. I’m not sure why they should have a voice in the EU at all right now.
    • Residents of Britain are stockpiling their favorite supplies in case they lose access to goods during the Brexit process.
  1. The Trump administration cancels a deal made in December to provide a safe way for Cuban baseball players to come to the U.S. to play in the major league.
  2. Russia’s foreign minister says trust in the U.S. is waning across the globe and that the balance of economic power is shifting from the West to the East.
  3. Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir is ousted in a military coup. He led the genocide in Darfur, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The House votes to reinstate net neutrality regulations, which were reversed by the FCC in 2017. Net neutrality prohibits service providers from slowing down internet traffic or from charging certain entities extra for service.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. The Pentagon awards almost $1 billion in contracts to build part of Trump’s wall. As it turns out, the contracts are for new fencing.

Family Separation:

  1. Trump repeats the debunked narrative that family separations occurred under Obama and that he (Trump) was the one who stopped it. Let’s go over it again:
    • Under both Bush and Obama, children were separated from their family only when the family member was considered a danger or criminal.
    • The Obama administration did consider family separation, but deemed it too inhumane.
    • The Trump administration began a pilot separation program in the middle of 2017.
    • In April 2018, Jeff Sessions publicly announced their zero tolerance policy that led to widespread family separations (if it was already a thing under Obama, why would he have to announce the change in policy?).
    • The kids in cages that Trump points to under Obama were from an influx of unaccompanied minors (not the same as us separating them with no reunification plans).

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. At a presser, Trump says of people crossing the southern border: They wait at the gate (this seems to be in reference to gates on ranchers’ lands) and then when the gate is open, they kill people. And then they take the truck (because a lot of times they don’t even want to go to the house) so you always go to the gate in doubles. Some are good people and they’re dying on the way.
  2. A judge blocks Trump’s policy of forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico once their asylum application has been accepted. DHS implemented the policy at a few ports of entry, and Kirstjen Nielsen wanted to expand the program further. Migrants forced into Mexico can now come back to the U.S. while they await asylum hearings.
  3. The day after DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigns, Trump tells Mick Mulvaney to ask Secret Service Director Randolph Alles to leave as well. The DHS also lost its FEMA director this year, and when Kevin McAleenan moves over to temporarily replace Nielsen, the position to head the CBP will also be open. Also, under the law, Nielsen’s replacement should automatically be Undersecretary Claire Grady, but she was also asked to leave.
  4. After Trump drops Ron Vitiello from his nomination to head ICE, he replaces him with Matthew Albence, the guy who said that migrant detention centers are like summer camps. He also thinks we should be able to detain minors for as long as we want.
  5. The White House has been complaining that the DHS hasn’t done enough to stem immigration, which is likely the reason for the shakeup.
  6. It turns out that Trump threatened to cut aide to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala the day after Kirstjen Nielsen signed a major pact with them to address immigration and smuggling.
  7. Five former SOUTHCOM commanders put out a statement condemning Trump’s decision to cut off aid funding for those Central American countries. The generals say cutting funding will increase the flow of refugees, and cite Colombia as an example of where funding has worked. It has also helped stem the flow from El Salvador.
  8. The number of attempted border crossings has ballooned this year, and now Trump is happy that the media is reporting about the crisis at the border. Instead of taking concrete steps to deal with this problem, he helped create the crisis by (according to my own analysis):
    • Detaining everyone who crosses illegally, not just criminals, and filling up detention centers and clogging courts.
    • Separating children from their parents so he can detain the parents longer.
    • Making it harder for sponsors to step forward and claim minors in custody, making sure detention centers stay full.
    • Attempting to overturn the Flores ruling so immigrant families could be detained together indefinitely.
    • Dealing with the now-overcrowded detention centers by forcing refugees to wait in Mexico to apply and by slowing down processing to a trickle, leaving them in cities south of the border that don’t have the resources to assist them.
    • Shifting border agents from ports of entry to border areas between ports (slowing down legal traffic).
    • Threatening to close down the border.
    • Cutting funding to the countries from which the refugees are fleeing.
    • Threatening to start separating every family again.
    • Gutting the top-level officials in the DHS and pulling his nomination to lead ICE.
  1. Trump wants to hand over the credible fear interviews for asylum seekers to CBP agents instead of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers who are actually trained in this matter. Stephen Miller says fewer people will pass if CBP handles this.
  2. Trump pressures immigration officials to release asylum seekers to so-called “sanctuary cities” as a way to punish those cities. Those cities, for the most part, say they’d welcome that, since they’re set up with the resources to assist refugees. Top ICE officials warn that this gives the appearance of political retribution.
  3. Trump tells the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection that he’d pardon him if he got sent to jail for breaking the law by stopping asylum seekers from entering the U.S.
  4. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump told Stephen Miller he’s in charge of immigration, but Trump pushes back saying he’s the only one in charge.
  5. Trump’s ban of transgender troops in the military goes into effect. Troops can no longer transition, and they can be discharged if they don’t present as their gender assigned at birth.
    • The ban has been blocked by the courts, but in January the Supreme Court allowed the ban to be enforced while it goes through the courts.
    • Certain military organizations are working on ways to circumvent the ban.
    • The ban could affect up to 13,700 troops. IMO, we should just let people who are willing and able to serve do so. And we should be grateful for their service.
  1. Massachusetts becomes the 16th state to ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors.
  2. Police arrest the suspected arsonist of three black churches in Louisiana. He turns out to be the son of a sheriff. They’re not saying whether it’s a suspected hate crime.
  3. Trump tweets a propaganda video vilifying Representative Ilhan Omar over her comments that seem to undermine the seriousness of 9/11.
    • Omar’s point was that you can’t judge all 1.8 billion Muslims because 20 Muslims carried out the attacks. She did misspeak about the origins of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), though.
    • Omar reports an increase in threats against her and her family after Trump’s tweet (arrests have previously been made for people threatening to kill her).
    • Speaker Nancy Pelosi then meets with the U.S. Capitol Police and sergeant-at-arms, who are now having to put extra work into assessing and protecting the safety of Omar, her family, and her staff.
    • And then Trump doubles down on his comments, accusing Pelosi of protecting Omar.
    • So basically, a statement by the president of the U.S. puts a sitting Representative in danger. And then the president criticizes the Speaker for protecting the Representative. This is just weird. And it’s not OK.
  1. White nationalists meet in Finland for their second annual “Awakening” conference, featuring prominent hate leaders and neo-Nazis from the US, Ukraine, Sweden, and Russia.
  2. The Trump administration proposes a new policy that lets the Social Security Administration monitor people’s social media accounts to make sure they qualify for disability benefits. Because God forbid anyone with a disability is just out there trying to lead a normal life.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Trump signs two executive orders to make it easier to build pipelines and harder for activists to stop or delay construction.
    • One order requests that the EPA review parts of the Clean Water Act that are used to block permits and makes it easier to transport natural gas, among other things.
    • The second order gives the president the power to issue permits for infrastructure projects that cross international borders with the U.S.
  1. The Senate confirms David Bernhardt to be Secretary of Interior. Bernhardt is a former fossil fuel and agribusiness lobbyist.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Herman Cain, Trump’s nominee for the Federal Reserve, says that we don’t have to worry about climate change. God will tell us when to stop using fossil fuels. He also calls the Senate Banking Committee a bunch of yahoos. The Senate Banking Committee has to approve his nomination.
  2. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) becomes the fourth GOP senator to come out against Herman Cain. Cain’s not likely to be confirmed at this point.
  3. The deficit grew to $693 billion in the first half of FY2019. It was $600 billion in the first half of FY2018. Tax revenues were up slightly, likely because people found themselves paying more at the end of the year or receiving smaller refunds (which doesn’t necessarily mean their taxes went up overall).
  4. The tax cuts of 2017 increased the number of companies that pay $0 in taxes from 30 to 60.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The woman who made her way into Mar-a-Lago last week with a variety of electronic devices had even more devices in her hotel room (not at Mar-a-Lago). She had a device to detect hidden cameras, more cell phones, nine USB drives, several SIM cards, thousands of dollars in cash, and several credit cards.
    • In case you’re wondering how they discovered the malware on her thumb drive, a Secret Service agent plugged the device into his computer, which started the installation of the malware on his computer.

Polls:

  1. 51% of voters support the efforts by House Democrats to obtain Trump’s tax returns.
  2. 64% of Americans think Trump should release those returns himself.

Week 115 in Trump

Posted on April 13, 2019 in Politics, Trump

The economy has added jobs for a record 102 months, since October of 2010.

Here’s a stealth release of last week’s recap (ending April 7) because I’m so darn late with it. My typing fingers are still recovering from rock climbing earlier this week.

This week reminds me that while soundbites are easy to remember and fun to say, we should beware of politicians who talk in soundbites and don’t actually talk about specific policies. I know policies are boring as hell, but I’d rather elect someone who can tell me about their policies than someone who’s still trying to figure out how policies work.

Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. I know this isn’t news, but it was quite a thing to watch. Trump tells reporters to look into the oranges of the Russia investigation. Yes, oranges. He says this three times.
  2. The House Judiciary Committee votes to authorize the use of subpoenas, if necessary, to force the release of the full and unredacted Mueller report to Congress.
  3. House Committees have so far been ignored by over half of the entities from whom they’ve requested documents in obstruction and corruption investigations. The deadline was March 18.
  4. Trump goes from saying that the Mueller report should be released in its entirety to putting out hostile tweets about Democrats who want it released.
  5. Members of Robert Mueller’s team say that Attorney General William Barr’s initial assessment of the final report undermines the seriousness of their findings, as well as how damaging those findings are to Trump. Note that these are all just leaks right now.
    • They also say they created completely unclassified summaries of each section, which Barr could easily release now.
    • The House Judiciary Committee requests that Barr release these summaries.
  1. The DOJ defends Barr, saying every single page of the report must be combed through because they all contain protected grand jury information.

Legal Fallout:

  1. A former Trump campaign staffer files a lawsuit alleging that Trump sexually assaulted her during the 2016 campaign. She says he grabbed her and kissed her.
  2. The House Ways and Means Committee formally requests six years worth of Trump’s personal and business tax returns from the IRS, as is their right per the IRS tax code. Steve Mnuchin has said he wouldn’t do that.
  3. Trump’s lawyers say handing over the tax returns would be a dangerous precedent… even though every presidential nominee in recent history has released their tax records.
  4. Michael Cohen says he just found a trove of files that could be valuable to investigators. He requests a delay or shortening of his sentence so he can review them.

Courts/Justice:

  1. We learn that DOJ officials invited William Barr to meet with them last year on the same day he published his memo criticizing Mueller’s investigation and claiming a president can’t commit obstruction of justice.

Healthcare:

  1. The number of measles cases is at its second highest in nearly 20 years. The disease was considered to be eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, but a lower rate of vaccination has brought it back.
    • In an effort to control the outbreaks, some municipalities ban unvaccinated people under 18 from being in public places.
  1. After Mitch McConnell warns him the Senate won’t take it up, Trump says he’ll put off a Congressional vote for an ACA replacement until after the 2020 elections. Probably because they don’t have a replacement and they aren’t close to having one.
  2. Last week, the DOJ announced they wouldn’t defend the ACA in any lawsuits, so I’m not clear what Trump’s change of direction means for this. The ACA could be struck down at any moment, and there is no plan to replace it.
  3. Despite there being no backup plan, Mick Mulvaney says no one will lose their healthcare coverage if the ACA is struck down.
  4. The House passes a non-binding resolution condemning Trump’s support for the lawsuit to strike down the ACA.
  5. The Trump administration proposes a new inspection system for the meat industry, which would put companies more in charge of checking for things like salmonella and E. coli. Currently, testing for those two is required; under the new plan, they wouldn’t be.
  6. A group of states sue the Trump administration over its reversal of Obama’s nutritional standards for school lunches.
  7. China bans fentanyl, cutting off its supply to the U.S.

International:

  1. The Saudi Arabian government has given Jamal Khashoggi’s (grown) children million-dollar homes as well as large monthly payments to compensate them for their father’s murder. Officials want to be sure that the family exercises restraint in criticizing the government over their father’s death.
  2. The British Parliament fails to pass any of the four new options for Brexit. The votes result in even more defections from the parties.
  3. Even though Brexit hasn’t happened yet, England’s already taking a financial hit. Investment has slowed down and major corporations have moved jobs and assets (over $1 trillion) out of England to other European cities in preparation.
  4. The House passes a resolution demanding an end to U.S. participation in the Yemeni war. The Senate has already passed such a resolution, and Trump will likely veto it.
  5. Trump says there are still key issues to work out in order to get a trade deal with China, and he won’t meet with Xi Jinping until those issues are settled.
  6. Turkey’s strongman president Erdogan might be seeing his support fade. His party loses municipal elections in the capital, Ankara, and the biggest city, Istanbul.
  7. Reminiscent of our own elections, a network of fake Twitter accounts smear Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents in the run-up to Israel’s election.
  8. India’s elections get hit with fake news and fake social media accounts as well.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The House passes a stronger version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).
    • A sticking point in the Senate will likely be a provision that prevents stalkers from purchasing guns. Because what could go wrong with a stalker with a gun?
    • Republicans are also concerned about provisions that give Native Americans more jurisdiction to deal with domestic violence that occurs on their lands.
  1. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) introduces a constitutional amendment to ditch the Electoral College and let the popular vote pick the president and vice-president.
  2. Mitch McConnell triggers the “nuclear option” to reduce debate time on lower-level nominees.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. Regarding a border wall, Pope Francis says, “Those who build walls will become prisoners of the walls they put up.”
  2. Trump visits the border wall at Calexico, CA, where Kirstjen Nielsen attached a plaque with Trump’s name on it to the fencing. Trump says this is where he’s built part of his wall, though it was actually a program begun under Obama to update existing fencing.
    • Fun fact: To date in Trump’s term, no new fencing has been completed; only repairs to existing fencing.
  1. California, in coordination with 19 other states, launches a lawsuit seeking an injunction against Trump’s declaration of national emergency to fund his border wall. At the same time, California’s governor Gavin Newsom goes to El Salvador to learn why so many people are fleeing.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump is considering appointing an immigration czar. Not a bad idea, until you look at his potential candidates. Kris Kobach has pushed for and implemented many anti-immigration policies and works for WeBuildtheWall Inc. Ken Cuccinelli has pushed to get rid of birth-right citizenship.
  2. Trump says his father was born in Germany. Except for that he was born in New York City. This isn’t the first time he’s said that. He also says Obama was born in Kenya, so maybe he’s just bad with geography.
  3. The Mormon church announces that they no longer consider same-sex couples to be apostates (people who renounced their faith). Their children can now be baptized in the church. Likely the change came because after they put their previous policy in place, over 1,500 people left the church.
  4. Trump backs down on his promise to shut down the border with Mexico.
    • Even so, staffing shortages cause huge slowdowns in border transit. The previous week, the Trump administration pulled border agents from their positions at ports of entry to help process asylum seekers.
    • At key economic crossings, the wait to drive into the U.S. can be more than 10 hours.
    • The delays are hurting business production schedules and deliveries, and costing companies in both countries millions. But Mexico is being hurt the worst, facing contract cancellations and massive layoffs if this continues. None of those laid off workers will try to come here to work, right?
  1. In a huge raid, ICE arrests over 280 people at a phone repair company near Dallas. This is part of ICE’s new focus on businesses that hire people without the proper documentation.
  2. Trump tells reporters we need to get rid of family-based migration, the visa lottery, the whole asylum system, and the practice of releasing asylum seekers while they await their hearings. He also says we should get rid of judges and not everyone should get a court case (not everyone does).
    • I didn’t quote his dehumanizing language directly. He used the loaded terms “chain migration” and “catch-and-release” (what are they, fish?).
  1. Trump pulls his nomination to head ICE, Ronald Vitiello, saying he wants to go in a tougher direction.
    • It’s a huge surprise to DHS officials. Vitiello has worked at U.S. Border Patrol for 30 years, and he’s currently the top official.
    • White House advisor Stephen Miller has always opposed Vitiello, and despite his failed policies, Miller has Trump’s ear on immigration.
  1. Trump decides not to close the southern border as he’d previously threatened to do.
  2. Kirstjen Nielsen abruptly resigns as Secretary of Homeland Security following a meeting where she angers Trump by telling him it would violate the law to force asylum seekers to choose between keeping their children and being deported back to their country (another Stephen Miller idea).
    • Fun fact: For a few months now, Trump has been pushing to reinstate blanket separation of migrant families at the border. He‘s convinced that this has been the most effect deterrent to asylum seekers. Interviews with asylum seekers show most don’t know about this policy until they reach the border.
  1. Trump puts CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan temporarily in charge of Homeland Security. A good choice if Trump is looking for bipartisan support.
  2. The U.S. revokes the travel visa of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor over allegations that she’s investigating war crimes in Afghanistan.
  3. Officers arrest a New York man who threatened to kill Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) because she’s a Muslim. He says she’s a terrorist.
  4. Trump defends adding a citizenship question to the census because otherwise the census is “meaningless.” I don’t think he understand the purpose of the census.
    • The next day, a third judge rules against the plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The judge says that Wilbur Ross made up a fake reason to justify adding the question.
    • Fun fact: The Census Bureau itself has consistently recommended against adding the question.
  1. At a gathering of donors and Jewish Republicans, Trump says the U.S. is full, so refugees should just turn around and go back. That anyone in the room laughed at this is remarkable given the criticism of the U.S. for turning away an ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees in WWII.
    • I heard this while driving through empty swaths of land in southern California. The irony was not lost on me. We are not full.
  1. Even though far-right extremism, white nationalist and supremacist groups, and domestic terrorism are all on the rise, last year the Department of Homeland security disbanded a group focused on analyzing those very threats.
  2. Motel 6 agrees to a $12 million settlement for giving ICE personal information on 80,000 of their guests with Latino sounding last names. Big brother is watching… that’s why they leave a light on for you.

Climate/EPA:

  1. California strengthens protections for their wetlands and streams that will lose federal protections when the Trump administration rolls back the Clean Water Act.
  2. A new study from the Canadian Environment and Climate Change Department finds that Canada is warming at about double the rate of the rest of the globe.
  3. After Trump disbanded a climate panel put together under Obama, the formed a new independent group, the Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment. This week, they release a new report aimed at helping communities mitigate the negative effects of climate change.
  4. At an NRCC fundraiser, Trump says that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. Studies dispute this (yes, it’s actually been studied), as do the two Republican Senators in the state where Trump said it (Iowa).

Budget/Economy:

  1. The Trump administration proposes tightening work requirements for SNAP participants, which would likely cut more than 750,000 people from the program.
  2. The first quarter of 2019 saw the U.S.’s highest level of layoffs since 2015 (and the highest in the first quarter since 2009, during the Great Recession).
  3. After February’s dismal job numbers (with only 33,000 jobs added), March rebounds with 196,000 jobs added.
    • Fun fact: This is the 102nd month in a row of job gains, the longest period of job growth on record. That’s 8 1/2 years, or since October of 2010.
  1. Trump plans to nominate Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve board. Moore is dicey because he owes so much in back taxes. Cain is dicey because of all the sexual harassment accusations against him (among other qualifying issues).
  2. The Fed says they don’t plan any rate hikes this year, indicating that while the economy is strong, it’s also losing some of its tax-reform momentum. Trade uncertainty with China is also a drag on the economy.
  3. As of January, 19 states had raised their minimum wage. This could help with wage growth, which has been stagnant.
  4. We’re in the middle of a labor shortage. That’s a good sign for the economy, but we don’t have enough workers to fill blue-collar jobs. And with the administration’s restrictions on legal immigration, those jobs will stay empty.
  5. Directors at the World Bank select Trump’s nominee, David Malpass, to run the bank. A weird choice for them, because Malpass has been critical of the bank. But then no one else stepped up to run for the position.
  6. The Senate and House are deadlocked over disaster funding, with the House wanting more funding for Puerto Rico than the Senate will agree to.

Elections:

  1. New Mexico becomes the 14th state to enact the National Popular Vote. Once enough states sign on, these states will give all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner.
  2. Federal prosecutors indict Robin Hayes, the chairman of North Carolina’s Republican Party for bribery, wire fraud, and making false statements.
    • Fun fact: Hayes was also one of the original architects of the GOP’s REDMAP plan, which led to unlawfully gerrymandered legislative districts. Many of the involved states have faced legal challenges to their district lines for the past 8 years (and most have lost).

Miscellaneous:

  1. The Secret Service arrests a Chinese woman who entered Mar-a-Lago with two passports, four cell phones, a laptop, a thumb drive containing malware, and a hard drive.
  2. Trump says Puerto Rico isn’t part of the United States. It is.
  3. Earlier this year, Trump asked Mitch McConnell to prioritize the confirmation of his nominee for chief counsel for the IRS over that of his nominee for attorney general.
  4. Even though David Bernhardt, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior, legally ended his lobbyist status is 2016, he was still working as a lobbyist at least into April of 2017.

Polls:

  1. About the same number of voters don’t trust Trump (59%) or the GOP (58%) to improve healthcare.
  2. 53% of voters trust Democrats to improve it, a surprisingly low number, IMO.

Week 114 in Trump

Posted on April 2, 2019 in Politics, Trump

Refugees waiting in a pen under a bridge in El Paso.

Robert Mueller’s work might be done, but there are a bunch of ongoing investigations—more than I realized. If you’re curious about the players, the charges, and evidence requested, check out CNN’s interactive guide. It’s ridiculously thorough, and you can view it by investigations, charges, people, and investigators. Pretty interesting, and something to keep you busy until we see the actual report.

Here’s what else happened this week in politics…

Russia:

  1. After Attorney General William Barr released his summary of the Mueller report, the Trump campaign sends an email to several TV producers demanding they challenge guests who’ve accused his campaign of collusion with Russia. The email goes on to list Democratic politicians, the DNC chair, and former intelligence officers they should challenge.
    • The letter also says there’s no other way to interpret Mueller’s lack of action other than “as a total and complete vindication of President Trump.” Just a reminder that previous special counsels have also declined to decide on charges.
  1. Lawyers and former intelligence officials question Barr’s claim that there can’t be an obstruction case if there was no cooperation between Russia and Trump. According to legal precedent, obstruction is a crime whether or not you can prove an underlying crime.
    • Lawyers also question why Barr included his own legal argument in his summary.
  1. Lindsey Graham says that Barr told him he’ll send Mueller’s report to the White House first so they can make any redactions based on executive privilege.
  2. Barr sends a second letter to Congress saying that his original letter was misinterpreted and that he’ll provide the redacted Mueller report in mid-April. He says Mueller is helping with the redactions, and that he’ll redact:
    • Info that is secret according to the laws about grand juries.
    • Info affecting ongoing investigations.
    • Info that could compromise our intelligence community’s resources and methods.
    • Info that would “infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties” (that sounds pretty broad).
  1. Barr says he will NOT, in fact, submit the report to the White House for review before sending it out.
  2. Barr clarifies that his original letter was never intended to summarize Mueller’s findings.
  3. A federal prosecutor says in court that the grand jury convened by Mueller is still “continuing robustly,” indicating that there could be more developments.
  4. Mitch McConnell again blocks a resolution in the Senate to have the Mueller report be made public.
  5. Democratic chairs of House committees demand the Mueller report and underlying evidence be released in full to those committees by April 2.
  6. Kellyanne Conway says House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff should resign. Schiff’s Republican colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee give their opening statements in a committee hearing criticizing Schiff and calling on his to resign.
    • Did people call for Devin Nunes to resign when he made his midnight run to the White House? I think they just requested that he recuse himself.
    • I’ve never seen Schiff mad, but his response was epically angry. You can see the Republican accusation at 6:15 and Schiff’s response at 9:30 in this C-SPAN video.
  1. BTA Bank, along with the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, sues Trump real estate associate Felix Sater, accusing him of planning to launder money stolen from the bank. They say Sater used Trump real estate deals and Trump-branded skyscrapers to launder the money.
    • Sater is a convicted felon turned state’s witness in unrelated cases.
    • The House Intelligence Committee postpones Sater’s planned testimony.
  1. A Swedish bank (Swedbank) is accused of being a conduit to launder money from the former Soviet Union into the West. The bank is also accused of being the pipeline for sending money from Russia to the Trump campaign and Paul Manafort.
  2. In an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump promises to release the complete and unredacted documents used to obtain the FISA warrants in the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference. He’ll also release the FISA warrant itself.
    • Trump calls the FBI treasonous, calls the former director of the CIA mentally ill, and calls Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) a criminal.
    • Trump also says (possibly correctly) that none of this (the Russia investigation) would’ve happened if William Barr would’ve been his Attorney General from the start.
  1. A federal judge orders the release (to the courts) of James Comey’s unredacted memos covering his interactions with Trump. This is part of a lawsuit brought by media organizations to obtain the information.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Newly surfaced documents show how Trump inflated his assets in order to obtain loans. The “Statements of Financial Condition” show he lied about the number of lots available in a golf course development, the size of the vineyard in Virginia, and the number of stories in Trump Tower, among others.
  2. The GOP revs up their own plans for investigations into the 2016 elections, focusing on investigating the investigators of both Russia’s meddling and Hillary’s emails (again), abuses of FISA warrants (again), and former Obama officials.
    • Some claim that the Steele Dossier started the whole Russia investigation, but the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee found in 2018 that the investigation was triggered by George Papadopoulos’s drunken confession to an Australian diplomat.
  1. Here’s a weird one. According to Jeff Bezos’ security consultant, his investigation into the AMI release of Bezos’ private texts found that the Saudi Arabian government hacked into Bezos’ phone. He’s not sure if it’s related to the National Enquirer’s publication of private text messages between Bezos and his mistress.
    • Remember there was an issue a while back about AMI’s relationship with Saudi Arabia surrounding the fluff issue they published on the crown prince.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Supreme Court refuses to temporarily block the federal ban on bump stocks, so the ban remains in place while the case moves through the justice system.

  2. The ACLU files suit against three South Dakota anti-protest laws, including the Riot Boosting Act, which could fine or criminalize protestors. Two previous laws put similar restrictions on freedom of speech.
  3. A federal judge in San Diego strikes down California’s ban on owning high-capacity gun magazines (defined by the law as holding more than 10 bullets). He based his ruling partly on instances he cited where people ran out of bullets while protecting themselves from home invaders.
    • The judge also claims that the problem of mass shootings is “very small.”
    • California’s ban on purchasing high-capacity magazines is still in place.
    • Also, the fact that a handful of homeowners ran out of bullets might support an argument that we need better training in order to obtain a gun.
  1. Trump told confidants that he’s saving Judge Amy Barrett for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. That’s kind of morose, no?

Healthcare:

  1. In a new legal filing, the Department of Justice reverses its previous opinions and says we should strike all of the ACA from the law.
    • Previously, they said that only protections for people with pre-existing conditions needed to be stricken.
    • Striking the ACA would cause an estimated 20 million more Americans to be unable to obtain coverage.
    • Around 129 million Americans would lose coverage for pre-existing conditions or face higher premiums.
    • States’ attorneys are defending the law.
    • Even though Trump has promised a way better plan for three years, neither Republicans in Congress nor the White House have brought up a plan to replace the ACA. There aren’t even plans to make a plan.
    • This directive came straight from Trump, who was convinced by Mick Mulvaney. Attorney General William Barr, VP Mike Pence, and HHS secretary Alex Azar oppose it.
  1. At the same time, Democrats unveil their new plan to strengthen and expand healthcare. Their plan would:
    • Expand insurance subsidies by increasing tax credits and loosening eligibility requirements.
    • Reverse Trump’s changes to the ACA.
    • Create a national reinsurance program to offset high insurer costs and keep premium prices steady.
  1. Parts of the ACA are popular. Voters in several states have passed referendums to force the ACA’s Medicaid expansion after their own elected officials refused to do so. (Carol’s tip of the week: Stop electing those officials.)
  2. A federal judge rejects efforts by the Trump administration to place work requirements on people receiving Medicaid in Kentucky and Arkansas.
    • And yet, Indiana is phasing in work requirements with no plans to stop, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) continues to approve other states’ work requirements.
  1. A federal judge strikes down a law in North Carolina that bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. He gives the state two months to amend the law or appeal his ruling.
    • A bill in 2015 made the 1973 law more restrictive, but the state claims it never intended to enforce it. In that case, I don’t know why they bothered amending the original bill.
  1. This year alone, 14 states have brought up bills banning abortions after six weeks (commonly known as “heartbeat bills”). Most won’t pass, and the courts will strike down those that do. Pro-life advocates hope that one will make it to the Supreme Court and end up overturning Roe vs. Wade.
  2. A federal court strikes down Trump’s changes to the ACA that allowed small businesses to offer insurance policies that don’t fulfill the requirements of the ACA.
  3. Trump names Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) to be the point person on the GOP healthcare plan. Interesting choice, since Scott resigned as CEO from Columbia/HCA after what became the largest case of Medicare fraud in history. The company was fined $1.7 billion.

International:

  1. Palestinians launch a rocket from the Gaza Strip that hits near Tel Aviv and injures seven people. Hamas says it was a mistake. Israel responds with warplane attacks on Hamas targets. Egypt negotiates a cease-fire.
  2. Theresa May promises to resign if the parliament accepts the Brexit deal, and still they can’t agree on it. Now May wants to hold yet another vote (that’ll be the fourth vote on this).
    • So now they vote on a series of options to move forward, like renegotiating (it sounds like the EU is giving this a hard pass), having a new general election, or holding a vote of no confidence. April 12 is the new deadline.
  1. Here’s the most international story of the week: Ten members of a dissident group raid a North Korean embassy in Spain, stealing computers and documents. They flee through Portugal to the U.S. and offer their stolen goods to the FBI. A Mexican national who graduated from Yale and has done time in a Chinese jail is the group leader. They wants to topple the Kim regime.
  2. Slovakia elects their first female president, Zuzana Caputova.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) reads Mein Kampf on the House floor to scold Democrats.
    • He compares the Russia investigation to Hitler’s “big lie.”
    • He mistakenly calls Hitler a socialist (he was closer to a fascist, though more extreme).
    • He seems to suggest that the Democratic party is repeating the moves of Hitler.
  1. Colorado’s Senate passes a “red flag” gun bill. Red flag laws allow judges to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed to be a risk to themselves or others. Some Colorado sheriffs say they won’t uphold the law.
  2. On the other end of the spectrum, North Dakota’s legislature passes a bill that bans taxpayer-funded gun buyback programs.
  3. The NRA opposes the expansion of the Violence Against Women Act. Specifically, they oppose preventing people who’ve committed domestic violence from obtaining weapons. Over half of the women murdered in the U.S. in a single-victim or single-perpetrator crime were romantic partners with their killer.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. After Trump vetoed a resolution passed by the House and the Senate to block his declaration of national emergency, the House fails to garner enough votes to override his veto. So the national emergency stands.
  2. The Pentagon tells Congress that they’ve authorized $1 billion earmarked for other projects to be used for new border wall construction. Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee lodge a protest against the transfer of funds.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. This story won’t die. Prosecutors drop all charges against Jussie Smollett, saying he’s already paid his penance by doing community service and donating his bond to the city. They do say, however, this doesn’t mean they don’t think he’s guilty; they do.
    • The mayor and chief of police are furious over the decision, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about it. Trump says the FBI is opening an investigation into it, but I doubt that.
  1. After conversations with academics and civil rights groups, Facebook expands its policies on hate groups by banning white nationalism and white supremacy.
  2. Trump delays the deportation of Liberians who migrated here under protected status. I don’t know what brought about his change of heart.
  3. Trump says he’ll close down the border with Mexico unless Mexico stops all unauthorized border crossings. DHS says that would be a disaster so it would only be used as a last resort. I’ll miss those delicious avocados and fresh veggies.
    • Over a half-million people cross that border legally each day in Texas alone, many for work (and it goes both ways).
  1. The next day, the State Department announces that Trump is cutting off all direct aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador (or as Fox News put it, the “three Mexican countries”). Because that will stop people from wanting to leave those countries for a better life here, right?
  2. CBP holds asylum seekers in El Paso in a makeshift, penned-in encampment under a bridge because there’s no space left for processing.
  3. Kirstjen Nielsen asks Congress for permission to immediately deport unaccompanied minor migrants back to their home countries. Currently, Mexican minors can be deported immediately, but not those from other countries. She also wants to detain migrant families together until their asylum requests are processed.
    • Why should we pay for this detention? It’s soooo much cheaper to release them on their own recognizance or to a sponsor.
    • Halting the previous release program and making it harder for sponsors to come forward are what’s causing most of the overcrowding in the detention centers.
  1. James Fields, the man found guilty of murdering Heather Heyer in the Charlottesville rallies, pleads guilty to 29 hate crimes.
  2. The House passes the Paycheck Fairness Act to strengthen the Equal Pay Act. It lets employees discuss salary, expands collection of pay data, prevents employers from requiring you to divulge your salary history, and helps people fight pay discrimination.
    • Women still make 80 cents to each dollar men make, and only about 27% of that difference can be explained by differences in education, occupation, or experience.
    • The pay gap is smaller for younger women than for older women, so there’s some good news.
    • Men are more likely to negotiate a higher starting salary, and women who do so are still likely to be punished for it.
  1. PR failure for NASA. They cancel their first all-woman spacewalk because they didn’t have enough spacesuits to fit them all. Now one woman and one man will go instead.
  2. Orange County ends its contract with ICE, meaning they won’t hold ICE detainees in their jails. Detainees will likely be sent to other holding facilities where they won’t get as much charitable assistance.
  3. The Supreme Court blocks a Texas execution because the prisoner was denied the presence of a Buddhist spiritual advisor. Compare this to the case in Alabama where the Supreme Court allowed them to execute a man though he was denied having a Muslim imam be there.
  4. Since the beginning of 2018, five white nationalists/supremacists have been convicted after threatening to kill Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA).
    • Prosecutions for death threats against Trump were also high in 2018, but not as high as for Obama in six of his eight years in office, for Bush during any year in office, or for Clinton for his last three years (the only years I have numbers for). In fairness, it depends on how each administration decides to prosecute.
    • Threats against officials overall were up 41% in 2018.
    • Going back to 1990, the perpetrators are 85% white males (almost all are male and U.S. citizens). 75% come from the far right.

Climate/EPA:

  1. House Democrats introduce the Climate Action Now Act to reduce carbon emissions, keep our part of the Paris agreement, and pave the way for more clean energy.
  2. In the Senate, Chuck Schumer announces a Special Committee on the Climate Crisis to help develop policies on energy and the environment.
  3. Mitch McConnell brings the Green New Deal to a Senate vote. He‘s trying to force Senate Democrats to put their support on record, but most simply vote “present.”
  4. Puerto Rico passes a bill requiring the island to be powered by 100% renewable energy sources by 2050.
  5. Two-thirds of Iran’s provinces are either already flooding or facing imminent flooding.
  6. In response to a judge delaying construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump tries to circumvent the court by issuing a new permit for construction.
  7. A federal judge restores Obama’s ban on offshore drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. She says Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed the bans.
  8. At a rally in Michigan, Trump vows to fund the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative even though he proposed to cut by 90% in his recent budget. Well, actually in his last three budget proposals. The Great Lakes restoration was one of Obama’s campaign promises.
  9. David Bernhardt, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior, once blocked a report that found the pesticides malathion and chlorpyrifos to be so toxic that they endanger the existence of 1,200 species. No wonder people had so many health problems after they doused Los Angeles in malathion in the late 80s.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans about $1.4 billion a month in reduced income according to the Fed. That’s if the government offset the cost; if the government didn’t, then the cost is closer to $12.3 billion.
  2. A different economic study says the trade policies of the last two years cost the American economy $7.8 billion.
  3. Betsy DeVos appears before Congress to defend the Trump budget cuts to educational programs, specifically to programs that help people with disabilities and most prominently to the Special Olympics.
    • After a major backlash, Trump takes credit for overriding DeVos and reinstating funding for the Special Olympics even though she just spent three days defending his cuts. He’s cut funding for this in all three of his budgets.
  1. Trump complains about the amount of disaster relief funds earmarked for Puerto Rico, claiming an amount that’s far higher than the actual. He wants to halt funds for their relief and refuses to meet with the governor.
  2. Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow wants the Fed to cut interest rates by 50 basis points (or .5%). Trump blames the Fed’s interest rate increases for slower economic growth.

Elections:

  1. A study finds that in Florida’s 2018 midterm elections, mail-in ballots from college-age voters in Parkland went uncounted at a much higher rate than the statewide average. About 15% of those ballots were rejected or didn’t arrive in time to be counted; the Florida average is 1.2%.
    • Election officials dispute these findings.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The EU votes to eliminate changing time zones during spring and fall (seems to be going around these days).
  2. Because Trump’s tweets are public record, Twitter wants to label any of his tweets that violate their policies instead of deleting them.
  3. Emails surface between NRA official Mark Richardson and Wolfgang Halbig, a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist, harasser of victims‘ families, and Infowars employee. Richardson tried to get Halbig to push a conspiracy theory that there was more than one shooter at Parkland.
  4. Speaking of Infowars, Alex Jones says in a deposition that he had a form of psychosis when he was tormenting Sandy Hook families and pushing conspiracy theories about the shooting.
  5. Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is charged in a multi-million-dollar extortion scheme against Nike. He’s already facing charges for bank fraud, tax fraud, and stealing $1.6 million from a client.
  6. Trump holds a campaign rally in Michigan, which I won’t go into. He doesn’t have any new material.
  7. According to a White House security adviser, Trump overrode 25 denials of security clearance in order to give clearance to people in the White House.
  8. Mike Pence talked Dan Coats out of resigning last year after Trump decided to pull troops out of Syria. And this was after Trump pushed Coats to prove that Obama wiretapped him, told Coats to say our intelligence agencies are biased, and accused Coats of leaking info.

Polls:

After William Barr releases his summary/not-summary of the Mueller report:

  1. 29% of Americans think Mueller’s report cleared Trump of wrongdoing.
  2. 40% believe he has not been cleared.
  3. 31% are unsure.

Well played, Mr. Barr. Well played.

Week 113 in Trump

Posted on March 26, 2019 in Politics, Trump

NBC News

Finally the week we’ve been waiting for. Mueller completes his investigation and turns in his final report to Attorney General William Barr. Barr takes two days to review it and send a summary to Congress. It sounds like good news for Trump (no collusion!), but we won’t know for sure until we can see it ourselves. If we can see it ourselves, that is. Mueller declined to make a determination on obstruction, and Barr’s letter barely skims the surface of the content. At any rate, it’s been a little anti-climactic.

Here’s what else happened this week…

Russia:

  1. A court releases documents pertaining to the raid on Michael Cohen’s properties. It turns out that when federal prosecutors were investigating Michael Cohen last year, they were easily able to obtain digital data stored in the U.S., but Google wasn’t turning over information stored abroad. That is, until Trump signed the CLOUD Act, which made it easier for the FBI to obtain offshore information.
  2. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had planned to leave the DOJ in mid-March, but now it appears he’ll stay on longer to help the new Attorney General and to help his replacement transition in.
  3. The most intriguing thing I read this week is about a Russian journalist who went undercover at the Russian troll factory Internet Research, LLC, in 2014. Unfortunately, her report is in Russian and doesn’t translate well, but here are some highlights:
    • The factory runs 24/7, including holidays, with a few hundred people on every shift.
    • Those who have the best English skills pose as Americans and develop online personas.
    • Her job at the factory was to spark anti-American sentiment among Russians.
    • The factory also employs bloggers to get their message out.
    • The messages they send out are nearly identical to the messages put out by state-run media.
    • Take a look at some of the rallies they held to pit us against each other.
  1. And thus it ends…or does it? Robert Mueller files his final report to Attorney General William Barr, and now it’s up to Barr what to do with the information. Mueller hasn’t recommended any more indictments, though there are several ongoing investigations in district attorneys’ offices, state offices, and the House. Here’s a recap of the entire investigation (as is known to the public) so far. It’s interesting how much we forget.
  2. Remaining open investigations include:
    • Southern District of New York: the hush money payments, Trump’s inaugural fund, campaign finance violations, and the activities of a pro-Trump Super PAC.
    • NY state: Trump Organization real estate deals and possible insurance fraud, Trump Foundation, undocumented workers at Trump’s golf course, and Trump’s taxes.
    • Maryland and D.C. Districts: emoluments clause violations.
    • DOJ: Still investigating at least 12 Russian intelligence agents believed to play a part in the hacking attacks against the DNC.
    • House committees: Russia meddling, obstruction, security clearances, Deutsche Bank’s loans to Trump Organization, tax returns, Saudi Arabian ties, the Trump Tower meeting, and emoluments clause violations.
    • There’s also the Summer Zervos defamation lawsuit, the lawsuit over his legal fees, and Roger Stone’s court case.
  1. By the end of the weekend, just two days after receiving Mueller’s report, Barr delivers a summary of Mueller’s main findings to Congress. Main points, according to Barr:
    • Mueller didn’t find coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the elections.
    • Russian individuals offered several times to assist the Trump campaign.
    • Mueller declined to decide on obstruction of justice charges against Trump (similar to what happened during both the Nixon and Clinton investigations). Mueller did lay out the evidence for both sides of that argument, though.
    • Mueller said his report doesn’t exonerate Trump of obstruction allegations.
    • Barr and Rosenstein won’t charge Trump, but Congress can still look into the charges.
    • Barr promises to release additional information. It’s notable that Ken Starr released his entire report on Clinton to the public.
  1. Trump claims that Barr’s letter proves Mueller’s report exonerates him. At the beginning of the week, though, he said that Mueller’s report is illegitimate because Mueller was never elected.
    • Then Trump says House Republicans should vote to make the Mueller report public, but he later says that there should be no Mueller report. Make up your mind, man!
  1. Trump wants Attorney General Barr to open investigations into Hillary, Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan.
  2. Devin Nunes tells Fox News the Mueller Report should be burned (I wonder why). In other Nunes news, he’s suing two parody Twitter accounts, @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow, because they were mean to him. And hilariously so.
  3. Leaked bits of a deposition from Christopher Steele show he used web searches and crowdsourced reporting to verify some of the information about Webzilla in his dossier. He wasn’t aware the CNN iReport is not associated with CNN journalists. But that’s only part of the story—he was unable to disclose other methods of investigation.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Judicial Watch releases an additional trove of Clinton emails received from the FBI as a result of a FOIA request.
    • Judicial Watch and Fox News claim the emails show that Clinton did the same thing as Michael Flynn by talking to Tony Blair in the days before Obama’s inauguration, that she shared classified information on her private emails, and that she had offers to establish a back channel of communication with Netanyahu.
    • I’m about halfway through reading them, and I don’t see the sharing of classified information, and it’s hard to tell if she overstepped by talking to Blair. It looks like she put off the serious talks until after the inauguration.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Senate Republicans prepare to propose a resolution that would make it easier to confirm Trump’s judicial nominations at the district level by reducing the amount of debate time required.
  2. A county judge in Wisconsin temporarily blocks a bunch of laws passed by last year’s GOP legislature and governor that would have curbed the power of their new governor. The judge says that the legislature convened under an “extraordinary session” which isn’t covered in their state constitution.
    • The ruling cancels 82 appointments made by former governor Scott Walker.
    • Immediately following the decision, Governor Tony Evers takes advantage of the reprieve to pull Wisconsin out of a lawsuit whose aim is to overturn the ACA.
    • Evers could move quickly to enact his own agenda, but he says they’re taking their time to make changes thoughtfully, not impulsively (probably to avoid the same pitfall the GOP fell into here).
  1. The Supreme Court appears split so far in hearings about gerrymandering in Virginia. A lower court already ruled that the gerrymandering there disenfranchises minorities and gives the GOP a boost. House Republicans appealed the case, but it’s not clear they have legal standing to do so.
    • The Court has two similar cases pending for North Carolina and Maryland.

Healthcare:

  1. A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that 14 states plus the District of Columbia aren’t in compliance with federal Medicaid laws covering abortion. They don’t cover the abortion pill in cases of rape, incest, or endangerment.

International:

  1. Mike Pompeo briefs the State Department on International religious freedoms. They deny access to all media except “faith-based” media, and refuse to release transcripts. They also refuse to release the list of faith-based media on the guest list and the criteria for being invited.
  2. Within six days of the mosque shootings that left nearly 50 people dead, New Zealand passes gun laws banning “military-style” assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. That’s how you get it done, folks.
  3. Trump declares that the U.S. should officially recognized Israel’s occupation of Golan Heights.
  4. Theresa May requests a delay on the Brexit deadline from the EU, and they grant her a short stay. Unless the Parliament can agree on a deal, they have until April 12 to exit.
  5. The ISIS caliphate is destroyed, marking the end of a four-year campaign to wrest control of the land back from the group. This means that they don’t hold any land in Iraq or Syria, but the threat isn’t gone. They’ve already moved to a more traditional terrorist group—a clandestine network running guerrilla attacks.
  6. Trump announces he’s withdrawing the sanctions against North Korea that he said were announced earlier that day. Except no sanctions were announced that day, leading some to believe that he’s referring to sanctions announced the previous day. However, the administration says he’s talking about sanctions that hadn’t even been announced yet and that were super secret. Whoopsies!
    • Fast forward a few days: According to five sources, it turns out that the “secret sanction” story was a cover. Trump was referring to the sanctions announced the previous day but was talked out of withdrawing them. There were no unannounced sanctions.
  1. The U.S. increases the number of troops that will stay in Syria to 1,000.
  2. The U.S. announces new Iran sanctions, this time against 14 people and 17 entities associated with Iran’s defense and research organization, SPND.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. Crime is rising in Tijuana, so some people who live there are stealing Trump’s new concertina wire off the fence at the border to put around and protect their own homes.
  2. The commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps says Trump poses a risk to combat readiness by sending troops to the border and by using military funding for the border wall. Already they’ve had to cancel several trainings and delay much-needed repairs to their bases.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro visits the White House, and says this (to which Trump vigorously nods in agreement): The U.S. and Brazil are together ”in their efforts to ensure liberties and respect to traditional family lifestyles, respect to God, our Creator, against the gender ideology or the politically correct attitudes, and against fake news.” No wonder they call him the Trump of the Tropics.
    • Bolsonaro has previously said he’d rather his son die than be gay and that parents should beat the gay out of their children. Nice guy.
  1. The Supreme Court rules that people with past criminal records can be detained indefinitely throughout the course of their deportation proceedings even if they’ve never committed another crime. This will likely cause more overcrowding in detention centers.
  2. In yet another desecration of a Jewish cemetery, vandals knock over 59 gravestones and mark them with antisemitic slurs, swastikas, and Hitler references.
  3. House Democrats reintroduce a bill that would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the list of groups protected in the Civil Rights Act. Why? Because most states don’t provide protections, and you can be kicked out of your apartment or fired from your job for being part of the LGBTQ community.
  4. The U.S. has denied travel visas to several women trying to participate in the UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women. Some of these women fell under the Muslim Ban, but the U.S. government technically isn’t allowed to prevent individuals from going to the UN headquarters in New York. The same thing happened last year.
  5. A flight attendant for Mesa Airlines out of Arizona put Mexico and Canada on her “no fly” list because she’s a DACA recipient and Trump’s new rules prevent her from flying outside the country. They put her on a flight to Mexico anyway, and not surprisingly she was detained. And even though she’s from Peru, they sent her back to Mexico. She was held for over a month before finally being released.
  6. A comparison of hate-crime incidents and Trump rallies shows that counties where Trump rallies were held had a 226% increase in hate crimes vs. counties that didn’t host Trump rallies. The study controlled for crime rates and active hate groups, among other things, and counties that held rallies were compared to similar counties that did not.
  7. Despite the Trump administration’s announcement last week that they’re moving forward on the ban on transgender troops, a judge blocks them from doing so. Apparently the administration says that a previous court order blocking the ban was lifted, but it wasn’t.
  8. As part of a court settlement, the state of Michigan says they’ll no longer fund adoption agencies that discriminate against LGBTQ couples.
  9. Indiana and New Mexico add non-binary gender options to official documents, and United Airlines adds the option for booking flights.
  10. Someone vandalizes a mosque in southern California with fire and graffiti referencing the New Zealand killing of nearly 50 Muslims in two mosques. What kind of person glorifies a mass killing? Geez.

Climate/EPA:

  1. The Midwest is hit with record flooding, and it’s not done yet. There’s still snowmelt coming along with spring rains. Floating ice in the floodwaters has only increased the damage.
    • Nebraska is largely under emergency declarations. Flooding also hit parts of Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Wyoming (and earlier this year, Michigan, Illinois, and California).
    • The flooding has killed livestock, destroyed grain bins, and closed businesses. A number of farmers aren’t expected to recover from this.
  1. A cyclone hits Mozambique, killing at least 750 people.
  2. A federal judge rules that the Department of the Interior (specifically the BLM) broke the law by ignoring climate impact studies in their decisions to open Wyoming lands to gas and oil drilling under Obama.
    • This could become a stumbling block to the Trump administration’s efforts to further expand gas and oil drilling.
    • The judge doesn’t block the drilling outright, but directs the BLM to perform climate impact evaluations again.
  1. Newly released audio recordings of a meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America show that shortly after David Bernhardt was appointed to the second highest position in the Interior Department, members laughed about their unprecedented access to the president and administration.
    • Bernhardt is currently nominated to become Secretary of the Interior, replacing Ryan Zinke.
    • So far, the Interior has granted the Independent Petroleum Association of America nearly all of their deregulation requests.
  1. California’s population grew by 11.7% since 2005, but gas consumption is down and the state runs on 33% renewable energy (two years ahead of schedule).
  2. Carbon dioxide emissions in the United Kingdom decrease for the sixth year in a row.
  3. Nevada joins the bipartisan U.S. Climate Alliance, making it the 23rd state to join.

Budget/Economy:

  1. February’s job report was dismal, with just 20,000 jobs added. Of those, nearly 3/4 were created in one state—California.
  2. The U.S. also had its largest monthly deficit ever in February, coming to $234 billion. The previous high was $231.7 billion in February of 2012.
  3. General Motors plans to idle five of their U.S. plants and lay off 14,000 workers. Trump pressures them to stay open or sell to another company that can use the factories.
  4. The Trump administration wants to cap federal student loan borrowing, saying that will cause schools to lower tuition fees. School administrators say that isn’t how it works.
  5. Betsy DeVos wants to stop subsidizing low-income students and wants to end loan forgiveness for public service workers.
  6. The Trump administration says that the tax cuts won’t create 3% growth after all. We also need to rollback labor regulations (I think businesses have already gotten a pretty decent break here), a $1 trillion infrastructure plan (yes!), and additional tax cuts (how’re we supposed to pay for the infrastructure then?).

Elections:

  1. Arizona pulls out of the controversial Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program. Crosscheck was founded to compare voter records across states to make sure people aren’t registered to vote in more than one state, and to purge voter rolls if they are. After Kris Kobach took over the program, false matches started coming to light and multiple lawsuits ensued (one claiming that the system falsely matches records in 99% of all matches).
    • Nine states have dropped from the Crosscheck program so far.
    • 26 states belong to a different program, the Electronic Registration Information Center, founded by Pew Charitable Trusts.
  1. Ever since voters in Florida passed Amendment 4 last year, restoring voting rights to ex-felons who’ve completed their sentence, the state government has been working on ways to stymie that effort. Their House just passed a bill that would make ex-felons pay fees and fines before getting their voting rights back.
    • There’s a question of whether this is constitutional (imposing fees or taxes on voting).
    • And why did so many voters vote for this issue and then go on to vote for officials that they knew would oppose it?
  1. A federal court orders legislators in Mississippi to redraw a State Senate district that they previously drew to dilute minority voting power. The judge says the district violates the Voting Rights Act.
  2. Trump says it’s Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s fault that the economy didn’t exceed 4% growth last year.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Paul Ryan will join the board of Fox Corp’s new organization after the sale of their film and TV assets to Disney.
  2. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump both use WhatsApp and personal email accounts for official government business. But her emails…
  3. Trump lays into John McCain and then blames the media for his outburst when he doesn’t get the audience response he was expecting. He did this during a speech in Ohio and on Twitter with no prodding from any members of the media.
  4. Within days of each other, two Parkland school shooter survivors commit suicide. We passed the year anniversary 5 weeks ago. In the same week, one of the parents who lost his child in the Sandy Hook shooting also commits suicide. He and his wife started a foundation to combat violence.
  5. Trump signs an executive order forcing colleges to comply with his standards of free speech in order to receive certain federal grants.
  6. The Trump supporter who sent pipe bombs to targets of Trump’s ire pleads guilty. He says he didn’t design them to blow up, though he knew they could’ve. He sounds pretty remorseful.
  7. The DoD Inspector General opens an investigation into whether Acting Secretary Patrick Shanahan showed favoritism to Boeing over other manufacturers.
  8. Teachers from an elementary school in Indiana sue the local sheriff’s office after the office conducted an active shooter drill where they took staff into a room in small groups at a time, lined them up on their knees, and shot at them from behind using plastic pellets.
 What could go wrong?

Polls:

  1. The U.S. drops to number 19 in the World Happiness Report, which is still pretty good when you consider they look at 156 countries. Finland is still the happiest country on earth.
  2. 78% of the Republican Fox News audience thinks Trump is the most successful president in history. 79% say U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to sabotage him. Only 49% of Republicans who don’t watch Fox News believe either of those things. Read into that what you want…

Week 112 in Trump

Posted on March 21, 2019 in Politics, Trump

ABC News: Brendan Esposito

Poor Trump got a three-fer this week. The House and Senate voted to stop supporting the Yemen war and they also voted to overturn the national emergency over the wall. The House then voted 420-0 in support of releasing Robert Mueller’s report to the public. On top of that, he was named as the face of white nationalism in the manifesto by a mass shoot at two mosques in New Zealand. His reaction is to appear to threaten us while minimizing the rise of white hate groups. Here’s what he says: “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad.” Who’s they? Who will it be very bad for?


Whatevs. Here’s what else happened this week…

Russia:

  1. For some reason, House Republicans leak Bruce Ohr’s and Lisa Page’s full testimony on the investigation into the investigations of Hillary’s emails and Russian interference in our 2016 election. I think they thought it would bolster Trump’s case, but from what I’ve read so far it hasn’t. (I’m working on summarizing that, but that’s a whole other post.)
  2. Paul Manafort receives his second prison sentence, this one for 73 months (we expected a maximum of about 10 years). 30 of those months are to be served concurrently with his previous sentence, so he ends up with a total of 7 1/2 years.
    • Some people feel like Manafort got off too easy, but this isn’t over. On the same day of his sentencing, New York state officials indict Manafort on 16 counts, including mortgage fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records. So much for an “otherwise blameless life.”
    • In direct contradiction to Judge Ellis’s “blameless life” statement, Judge Jackson says that Manafort “spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system.”
    • Sarah Huckabee Sanders says that Trump will make a decision on whether to pardon Paul Manafort. If Trump does pardon him, it won’t cover New York’s state charges.
  1. The House votes nearly unanimously (four voted ’present’) to urge the DOJ to release the final Mueller report to Congress and to the public. Mitch McConnell has blocked similar bills in the Senate, and Lindsay Graham blocks this one.
    • Graham tries to include a provision urging the DOJ to appoint a second special counsel to investigate the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails (again) and the FISA warrant obtained by the FBI to surveil Carter Page (again).
  1. Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff says that there is already enough evidence to support indicting Trump once he’s out of office.
  2. As part of a defamation suit against BuzzFeed, a court unseals documents that show how Russians hacked Democratic Party email accounts in 2016.
    • The suit was filed by Aleksej Gubarev, who sued BuzzFeed for defamation when they published the Steele Dossier.
    • The documents seem to show that the part about Gubarev owning the servers that were used to do the hacking is true.
  1. Well, there’s a twist. Oleg Deripaska sues the U.S. Treasury over the sanctions against his companies.
  2. Mueller requests a delay in Rick Gates sentencing because he’s still cooperating with several ongoing investigations. Gates already pleaded guilty to conspiracy and to lying to the FBI.
  3. Michael Flynn completes his cooperation agreement with Mueller’s investigation. However, Mueller still requests a delay in sentencing because Flynn is still cooperating with the federal investigation into Bijan Rafiekian.
  4. If you’re convinced that Democrats are all about impeaching Trump, Nancy Pelosi blows a hole in that by saying it would be too divisive for the country and Trump’s not worth it. There would have to be extremely strong evidence of impeachable activity.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Steve Wynn, the former RNC finance chairman, met with Steven Mnuchin about ways to reduce his taxes after he had to sell his stake in his casino business (which he was forced to sell after of 20 years of sexual misconduct accusations came to light).
  2. The New York attorney general’s office opens investigations into loans that Deutsche Bank made to the Trump Organization.
  3. The DOJ is looking into whether a $100,000 donation to the Trump Victory committee came from a Malaysian business person accused of embezzlement (and now a fugitive).
  4. An appellate court in New York rules that Summer Zervos can proceed with her defamation suit against Trump. Zervos was a contestant on The Apprentice who accused Trump of sexual misconduct, and when Trump called her a liar, she filed the suit.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A court rules that Betsy DeVos acted illegally when she delayed an Obama rule requiring states to handle racial inequities when it comes to special education. The judge calls her actions “arbitrary and capricious.”
  2. Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration’s policies at least 63 times over the past two years, and largely for being “arbitrary and capricious.” This means they were in such a hurry to implement their policies (mostly to overturn Obama policies) that they didn’t take the time to come up with a good reason or a solid basis for the changes.

Healthcare:

  1. Four states pass anti-abortion legislation on the same day.
    • Arkansas and Utah passed bans on abortions after 18 weeks.
    • Kentucky passes a law prohibiting abortion for reasons of “sex, race, color, national origin, or disability.” (I’m so curious why any parent-to-be would give race, color, or national origin as a reason. Especially national origin. I can’t find these reasons listed in any studies so far.)
    • Kansas passes a resolution condemning New York’s new abortion law that codifies the rights given under Roe v. Wade.
    • There are already legal challenges to Kentucky’s latest bill, and a judge just blocked the bill they passed the previous week that banned abortion after six weeks.
  1. The Trump administration reduces fines for nursing homes for endangering or injuring their residents. Previously nursing homes were fined for each day they were in violation. Now the administration issues a single fine. The average fine is now to $28,405, down from $41,260.

International:

  1. Despite Theresa May getting some concessions from the EU on a Brexit deal, the British Parliament once again defeats the proposal she brings before them. They also vote against holding a second public voter referendum to see if a majority of citizens are still in favor of exiting the EU (this sounds like a timing issue and could be brought up again later).
    • They’ve had two and a half years to work this out, and they can’t. Why? IMO, because it was such an abysmally bad idea.
    • One MP tweets that Theresa May voted against her own proposal.
    • The longer Brexit drags on, the more it drags on the economy; but a hard exit with no deal could be far worse for the UK’s economy.
  1. Israel’s Supreme Court overturned a decision by the Central Election Committee and will allow a joint Arab slate and a leftist candidate to run in the April election. The court also blocked a far-right leader of the Otzma Yehudit from running.
  2. The U.S. has always referred to Golan Heights as an area under Israeli control. Now, for the first time, a U.S. government agency refers to Golan Heights as occupied territory. Israel has been lobbying the Trump administration to recognize Israel sovereignty over Golan Heights.
  3. After two missiles are launched at Tel Aviv, Israeli military responds by striking over 100 targets in Gaza. It is believed that the two rockets were launched by Hamas and by mistake.
  4. The Senate passes a resolution to end unauthorized participation by the U.S. in the Yemen war, which is backed by Saudi Arabia. Now the resolution goes back to the House for a vote.
  5. A bipartisan group of congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, invite NATO’s secretary general to speak to a joint session of Congress. They’re looking at how they can honor NATO on its 70th anniversary while letting our allies know that the U.S. remains committed.
  6. North Korea threatens to withdraw from our ongoing denuclearization talks and resume their nuclear program unless the U.S. gives in to some of their demands. This comes after we found evidence that they rebuilt a supposedly decommissioned missile site.
    • North Korea says John Bolton and Mike Pompeo created an environment of hostility and distrust.
  1. Tensions between the Trump administration and the Afghan government intensify when Afghanistan’s national security adviser says that a deal between the U.S. and the Taliban would dishonor the American soldiers who have fought there. The U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan responds by accusing the Afghanis of corruption and misusing the resources we gave them. Notably, the Afghan government has been excluded from negotiations with the Taliban.
    • If you’re wondering which side to take here, remember that the Taliban want to prevent women from getting educations and to force them to wear burqas.
  1. Embattled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro uses paramilitary gangs on motorcycles to keep protestors in line.
  2. The U.S. removes all diplomatic personnel from the Venezuelan embassy.
  3. Foreign leaders, and especially strongmen like Kim Jong Un, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Vladimir Putin, take advantage of Trump’s preference for personal diplomacy and cut out the diplomatic experts in the middle. They talk directly to Trump, leaving advisers to wonder when he speaks with them and what they talk about. Officials say they never know what he’s agreed to.
  4. Intelligence reports show that Saudi Arabia’s plans to silence dissidents went way further than just murdering Khashoggi. They started a secret campaign more than a year before Khashoggi’s murder that included forcible repatriation, detention and abuse, and obviously murder.
  5. International hackers are all over the Navy, its contractors, and its partners. The hackers exploit weaknesses in our systems and there have been numerous breaches. The hacks affect other branches of our military as well.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. One unintended consequence of the shutdown over the wall is that it delayed the software fix for the Boeing 737 Max airplane fleet.
  2. The Senate votes to overturn Trump’s national emergency declaration, but Trump says he’ll veto it. 12 Republicans and every Democrat voted for it, but that’s not enough to override Trump’s veto. This is the first time both houses of Congress has voted to cancel a sitting president’s declaration of national emergency.
    • By the end of the week, Trump vetoes the bill. It’s not likely either house can muster enough votes to override his veto.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. House Democrats introduce the Dream and Promise Act of 2019, which would give immigrants currently protected under DACA and TPS (temporary protected status) a path to citizenship.
  2. The Pentagon announces a new directive to implement Trump’s transgender ban in the military. Anyone who joins after it takes effect must serve in the gender assigned at birth.
  3. The Trump administration plans to further restrict visas for applicants who they think use too many public services. As a result of Trump’s previous restrictions, visa denials are already up 40% over the past two years.
  4. The Trump administration plans to close all the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ international offices. This will likely cause even more slowdowns in family visa applications and foreign adoptions.
  5. A federal court halts Trump‘s policy that blocked visas for young immigrants who are fleeing abuse. A government program allows these immigrants to apply for special visas until they become 21 years old. Trump’s administration has been blocking applicants once they turn 18.
  6. Mexican officials and cartels are extorting asylum seekers at the border, including those who’ve begun the asylum process but who we now force to wait in Mexico for processing.
  7. 2,200 migrant detainees are quarantined because of a mumps outbreak in detention centers across the country. There are almost 240 confirmed cases.
  8. The Trump administration considers sending a volunteer force to help stop illegal crossings at the border.
  9. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross testifies to the House Oversight Committee about adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Ross has repeatedly told Congress that the DOJ requested the question, but according to email records, he was the one who made the request to the DOJ.
  10. White nationalists open fire in two New Zealand mosques during Friday prayers, and police find bombs attached to one of the shooters’ vehicles. At least 49 people are dead and another 48 injured.
    • This is New Zealand’s first mass shooting since 1997. They move quickly to tighten gun laws.
    • The shooter live-streams part of the shooting on social media and posts a white nationalist manifesto online. He wants to ensure a white future for our children.
    • The title of the manifesto is The Great Replacement, the same words used by white nationalists here in the U.S., most notably Representative Steven King. Also like King, the manifesto complains of the fertility rates of immigrants.
    • While the manifesto criticizes Trump’s leadership and policies, it also says that Trump is a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Again, I’m not saying I think Trump’s a bigot, but bigots think he’s a bigot.
    • Even though Trump is specifically named in the manifesto, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney claims it’s absurd to associate the attacks with Trump.
    • The next day, Trump talks about immigrants at our southern border as an invasion, the same description used in the manifesto and used by white nationalists/supremacists. Words matter.
    • Trump says that white nationalists make up “a small group of people.” I guess that depends on how you define small. The number and membership of white nationalist groups, the number of racist rallies, and the number of hate crimes are all rising sharply.
      • Over the last four years, hate groups increased by 30%. Last year alone, hate crimes grew by 17%.
  1. We’re all going to make up our own minds about whether Trump‘s rhetoric somehow contributed to these attacks, but just a reminder that Trump has (and often more than once):
    • Said we should ban all Muslims from the U.S.
    • Touted a debunked story about killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood.
    • Proposed creating a registry of Muslims.
    • Shared violent anti-Muslim snuff films.
  1. The Center for Investigative Reporting has identified 150 cases of harassment or violence where the perpetrator mentioned Trump.
    • Some of these hardly made a blip on most of our radar—the bombers of an Islamic Center in MN, the beating of a Boston homeless man by men who thought he was undocumented, the stabbing of two people on a train in Oregon, the shooting at a Montreal mosque, the foiled bomber in Oregon who put Obama on his kill list, the foiled bombers planning to bomb a Somali apartment building, and so on and so on.
    • Some of the major recent ones to name him include the terrorist who killed 49 Muslims as they worshipped in New Zealand, the Coast Guard terrorist who stockpiled weapons and planned a massive terror attack, and the Florida man who sent bombs to people conservatives tend to target (funders, journalists, and Democratic politicians).
  1. Prosecutors bring terrorism charges against five people who were arrested in New Mexico last year on what was found to be a training compound for would-be terrorists. The group, which was Muslim, isn’t associated with any known terrorist groups.
  2. The Supreme Court unanimously overturns an Alabama court’s refusal to recognize an adoption by a same-sex couple. The adoption occurred in Georgia.

Climate/EPA:

  1. A new report on the Arctic concludes that regardless of whether we take action to stop climate change, the Arctic is now in a cycle of temperature rise that will continue. The rise is locked in because of greenhouse gases already emitted and because of heat already stored in the ocean.
  2. Inspired by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, over a million students in over 100 countries walk out of school to push leaders for urgent climate change action.
  3. A court of appeals upholds a November decision blocking construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
  4. The Trump administration finalizes plans to loosen environmental protections for the sage grouse and its habitat with the goal of making it easier to drill for oil on those lands.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump proposes his new budget, which raises military spending, funds the border wall, and decreases domestic discretionary spending. The budget forecasts trillion-dollar deficits for each of the next three years, and expects the debt to reach $31 trillion in a decade.
    • The budget cuts funding for these departments and agencies: agriculture, state, interior, education, justice, energy, labor, health and human services, transportation, NASA, the Treasury, and environmental protection.
    • The budget also cuts social security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
    • The budget increases spending on commerce, national nuclear security, homeland security, the VA, and military.
    • The budget cuts funding for the USDA by 15%, because the administration says that current subsidies to farmers are “overly generous.” This at a time when tariffs and weather are hurting farmers and when we’ve just provided a $12 billion aid package to help them stay afloat.
  1. Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, says that federal revenues are up about 10%. In fact, revenues were down in fiscal year (FY) 2018 compared to FY 2017, and they’re down so far in FY 2019 compared to the same period in FY 2018.

Elections:

  1. Bernie Sanders wife and son suspend the Sanders Institute and will not accept donations as long as Bernie is a presidential candidate. They fell into the same old pitfalls, being accused of blurring financial lines between family, fundraising, and campaigning.
  2. Delaware follows 11 other states by signing a bill into law that would give all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote. This only goes into effect if enough states sign on to total 270 electoral votes.

Miscellaneous:

  1. After the Ethiopian Airlines crash, several countries ground their fleets of Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 planes. The U.S. does the same a few days later.
    • Afterward, Trump tweets about how planes are too complex for pilots. He’s basically complaining about the company he was just bragging about signing a billion dollar deal with Vietnam (Boeing).
    • Boeing grounds its global fleet of the Max airplanes. There are a total of 371 Max planes.
  1. The Kentucky student who became the face of the students accused of mocking a Native American elder in D.C. in January sues CNN. He’s already suing the Washington Post.
  2. Connecticut‘s Supreme Court says families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting can sue Remington. The shooter at Sandy Hook used a Remington Bushmaster rifle. The families’ argument is that the rifle was intended for military use and the company allowed civilians to obtain them.
  3. California Governor Gavin Newsom places a moratorium on death penalty executions. Most states have the death penalty, but very few states actually carry it out.
  4. Audio recordings surface of Tucker Carlson making racist, white nationalist, and blatantly sexist comments in a series of interviews. Carlson doesn’t apologize and doesn’t deny what he said. Instead, he issues a challenge: “Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.” This explains so much about his show.

Polls:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll finds (among other things):

  1. 60% of respondents think that journalists sometimes or often get paid by their sources.
  2. 41% of respondents are less likely to trust a story with anonymous sources.
  3. People with a college degree have more faith in the press than those without one.
  4. People who live in urban areas have more faith in the press than people in rural areas.
  5. People who are employed full-time have more faith in the press than retired, self-employed, or unemployed people (that’s a weird split there).
  6. Here’s their rankings of which sources are most trusted of the mainstream media (click the image to view a larger version).

    Columbia Journalism Review

Week 111 in Trump

Posted on March 13, 2019 in Politics, Trump

DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defends the family separation policy at the border. The two on the right likely disagree.

In case you’re keeping track (but seriously, who but a major media organization has the time to track this), Trump has lied over 9,000 times since taking office. He started out averaging around 6 lies per day in 2017, accelerated to around 16 per day in 2018, and in 2019 he’s already averaging 22 per day. You can read about them here.

Here’s what really happened last week in politics… Let me know if I missed anything.

Missed from Last Week:

While Trump was in Vietnam for the summit with Kim Jong Un, he announced a $20 billion deal with Vietnam to buy Boeing jets and engines.

Russia:

  1. Judge Amy Berman Jackson brings Roger Stone into court yet again to clarify the parameters of his gag order. This time, it’s over the re-release of a book where he calls Robert Mueller “crooked.”
  2. A judge finds Chelsea Manning in contempt of court and orders her to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury. Manning received a subpoena to testify in a sealed case, most likely the sealed case against WikiLeaks that was accidentally revealed in court documents.
    • Just a reminder: Manning received a 35-year sentence for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, and Obama later commuted her sentence.
  1. Judge T.S. Ellis sentences Paul Manafort to just under four years, much less than prosecutors recommended (19-24 years). He’s scheduled to be sentenced in one more case this month. Ellis says Manafort “lived an otherwise blameless life” (WTF?) and that he was a good friend and a generous person.
  1. Erik Prince admits to attending a 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., and George Nader to discuss Iran policy.
    • Nader said that during the meeting, Prince told them that the UAE and Saudi Arabia wanted to help Trump win the election.
    • Prince neglected to inform Congress of this during his testimony.
    • Prince also arranged a meeting with Don Junior, Israeli social media specialist Joel Zamel, and an emissary of two crown princes of the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The House Judiciary Committee launches an investigation into abuse of powers, corruption, and obstruction of justice. Committee chair Jerry Nadler emphasizes that they aren’t looking at impeachment at this time.
  2. The Judiciary Committee issues document requests to 81 people and organizations, including the White House, the Trump Foundation, Trump Organization, the transition team, the inauguration committee, 2016 campaign staff, long-time Trump associates, and Trump’s family.
    • The list of people receiving subpoenas reads like a summary of the investigation so far: Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Brad Parscale, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Reince Priebus, Don McGahn, KT McFarland, Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer, Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Tom Barrack, Allen Weisellberg, WikiLeaks, American Media Inc. (and its CEO David Pecker), the NRA, and Cambridge Analytica.
    • They’re looking for information on Michael Flynn’s firing, Jeff Sessions recusal from the Russia investigation, and James Comey’s firing.
  1. New York officials subpoena the Trump Organization’s insurer as part of an investigation into whether Trump was personally involved in inflating company assets.
  2. Jerome Corsi apologizes to the family of Seth Rich for pushing the baseless theory that Rich was the source of the DNC document leak during the 2016 campaign.
    • InfoWars follows suit, removing Corsi’s column about it from their website.
    • Fox News pushed this story hard, and was forced to retract it 2017.
    • The Washington Times was also forced to retract an op-ed by a retired Navy admiral, which was the source of the entire conspiracy theory.
  1. A district court orders the release of previously redacted details about plans to build a new FBI HQ. Trump intervened in the decision of where to build the HQ when it was decided to build a new HQ on the location of the old one, across from the Trump Hotel in D.C. Under Obama, the administration planned to build a new HQ in the suburbs, which was more expensive.
  2. Cohen sues the Trump Organization to cover his legal fees saying they aren’t meeting their indemnification obligations.
  3. Michael Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis says that Cohen’s legal team brought up the idea of a pardon with Trump’s legal team last year after Trump’s team “dangled” the possibility last year. It’s not clear whether Cohen knew of the request.
    • According to Rudy Giuliani, several people being scrutinized in related investigations have approached Trump’s legal team to talk about pardons.
  1. Michael Cohen provides documentary evidence of the hush money payments. So now we know that while president, Trump took the time to write him a check for the hush money. We also know that Don Junior signed off on two of those checks.
  2. I don’t even know what to make of this one, so I’ll just say what we know.
    • As part of a bust that shutdown 10 Asian day spas, Patriot owner Bob Kraft was arrested for soliciting sex.
    • The original founder of the spa, Li (Cindy) Yang, is a Trump donor and fundraiser. She’s been selling access to Trump and his associates at Mar-a-Lago to her clients. (She no longer owns the spas, btw).
    • Yang and Trump watched the Super Bowl together, but it’s not clear if he even knows her.
  1. The DOJ unearths a 2017 letter from Jeff Sessions to the DOJ Inspector General John Huber ordering a review of the investigations into the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One. The DOJ previously denied the existence of this letter.
  2. Trump’s inauguration committee received funds from shell companies owned by foreigners or with foreign ties. The donors were from Israel, Taiwan, and India.

Healthcare:

  1. Medical and reproductive rights groups, including Planned Parenthood and the AMA, sue the Trump administration over their recent abortion rule prohibiting organizations that receive federal funds from mentioning or referring for abortions. The rule primarily affects low-income women who receive health services through HHS programs.
  2. On top of lawsuits from advocacy groups, 21 states sue over the abortion rule.
  3. Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, starts looking into filing for bankruptcy in light of the nearly 2,000 lawsuits against them for contributing to the opioid crisis.
  4. A Republican State Representative in Tennessee introduces a bill that would require women to prove their U.S. citizenship before receiving prenatal care or government benefits for their U.S.-born children.
  5. He introduces another bill that would only allow birth certificates to be given to children born to parents who are in the U.S. legally. (I think that might contradict federal law.)
  6. Tennessee passes a bill that would prevent abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. No heartbeat bill has made it through the courts so far; this likely won’t either.
  7. A nationwide study in Denmark concludes that there is no relationship between MMR vaccines and autism or autism clusters. This is their second nationwide study to reach the same conclusion. Want details?
  8. The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the middle of their second largest Ebola outbreak, with nearly 600 dead. On top of mistrust from the communities they’re helping, aid workers also face violence—they’re in the middle of a conflict zone.

International:

  1. A second minister resigns from Justin Trudeau’s government after testimony about a scandal where the attorney general claims to have been pressured to back off on charging a Canadian company with corruption.
  2. Contradicting previous statements, Trump says he’s 100% behind keeping some troops in Syria.
  3. According to recent satellite images, it looks like North Korea is reactivating a long-range rocket test site.
  4. Trump reverses Obama’s policy requiring U.S. officials to publish a summary of drone strikes that occur outside of areas where there is active conflict. He also revoked a law passed by Congress saying that the drone strike report must be released to the public.
  5. After 2021, U.S. citizens will have to register for a travel visa to travel to EU countries.
  6. Arron Banks, one of the largest funders in support of Brexit, denies having financial dealings with Russia. But documents show that one of the companies in which Banks is a major stockholder pursued an offer from the Russian ambassador to invest in Russian gold mines, going so far as to identify a shell company to use to facilitate the deal. Sounds familiar, no?
  7. Trump’s administration devises a formula to make our allied countries that host U.S. military bases pay the full cost of stationing troops there plus 50% more. Our allies call this extortion.
  8. Trump accuses India of shutting out U.S. companies, and announces he’ll remove India from a program that reduces duties on exports from certain countries. The program opens up access to U.S. markets for developing countries.
  9. It’s a big week in Israel news:
    • Israel’s electoral committee bans two Arab parties and one Jewish candidate from running in the upcoming elections. The committee was responding to petitions from three right-wing factions, and it comes after Netanyahu entered a deal with the far-right extremist (and allegedly racist) party Otzma Yehudit.
    • The leader of Otzma Yehudit previously led a party that the U.S. labeled as a terrorist group and that Israel outlawed.
    • Netanyahu gets into a war of words with an Israeli celebrity and says (emphasis mine), “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people—and only it.”
    • Just a reminder: Last year Israel passed a nationalistic nation-state law declaring Israel a homeland for Jews and prioritizing Jewish communities.
    • Israel’s attorney general agrees to Netanyahu’s request to wait until the day after the elections to hear evidence on his fraud and bribery indictments. His indictments haven’t hurt him in the polls yet.
    • A UN inquiry into the 2018 protests in Gaza finds that Israeli forces were not justified in using live ammunition to stop protestors. The skirmishes injured 10,000 Palestinians and killed 189, while also injuring four Israeli soldiers killing one. The commission calls for criminal investigations.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. After Michael Cohen’s testimony, former Rep. Trey Gowdy says in reference to it that we learned that public congressional hearings are “utterly useless.” I think he forgot that he called these hearings “political theater” a year or two ago, and he’s also the guy who held all those hearings on Benghazi.
  2. New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland becomes the first Native American woman to sit in the House Speaker’s chair when she presides over House debates.
  3. The House passes a sweeping campaign finance, voting rights, and ethics reform bill. I broke it down into a brief summary here.
    • Republican leadership says it’s a power grab by the Democratic party; Democrats say it’s a power grab by the American people.
    • Republicans also claim it doesn’t address the most recent problem we saw, which was ballot harvesting in North Carolina (it doesn’t; that’s a legit complaint).
  1. House Democrats introduce a bill to protect White House whistleblowers.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. The Pentagon says they’ll tap into $1 billion in leftover pay and pension accounts for military personnel to pay for Trump’s wall.
  2. Now that Congress ended the shutdown and Trump declared a national emergency over the wall, his draft budget will seek an additional $8.6 billion for the wall.

Family Separation:

  1. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testifies in support of asylum policy and family separation. For anyone who’s been to the border lately, it’s obvious she’s either lying about procedures and process there or she really doesn’t know what’s going on. She also either isn’t aware of or doesn’t care about the lifelong traumatizing effects of the family separation policy.
  2. The Trump administration has separated 250 children (that we know of) since a court ordered them to stop nine months ago.
  3. A judge rules that all families separated at the border are eligible to participate in the ACLU’s class action lawsuit against the government. The suit now includes families separated from July 1, 2017, to the present.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. There were 76,000 illegal border crossings in February. That’s the most in over a decade and almost double last year. So the problem is getting worse in some areas because of the tight restrictions on asylum seekers.
  2. A judge finds that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated the law and the constitution by trying to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. This is the second court to block the question.
    • And speaking of the Census, after the first judge blocked the citizenship question the Census Bureau proposed a plan to get comprehensive information about immigrants’ legal status from the Department of Homeland Security.
  1. A federal appeals court rules that asylum seekers can fully appeal their case in U.S. courts if they fail to pass the initial credible fear test to qualify for asylum.
  2. The Health and Human Services Department will funnel money away from health programs in order to house migrant children. There are sponsors in the states willing to take responsibility for so many of these minors. Detaining them is a waste of money.
  3. Former chief of staff General John Kelly defends NATO and also says that:
    • Migrants who cross our southern border aren’t criminals and don’t pose a serious threat.
    • A wall across the border would be a waste of money.
    • Trump can’t separate his personal views from policy issues.
  1. Someone from Homeland Security leaks documents showing that the Trump administration has a secret database of journalists, immigration advocates, and attorneys. The list is used by CBP, ICE, and the FBI.
    • Some of the targeted people have been denied entry into Mexico, have faced enhanced security screenings, or have even been arrested or detained.
    • Their profiles include information about their ties to migrant caravans (including reporters who are just covering the news).
    • People on the list had feared that they were being targeted but they couldn’t prove it until now.
  1. Seemingly bowing to GOP pressure to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar for her comments about Israel, Nancy Pelosi brings a resolution to the floor. But she turns it into a resolution condemning all hate speech, including antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Christian speech.
    • The resolution also condemns discrimination against minorities stemming from white supremacists, neo-Nazis, the KKK, and neo-Confederates.
    • The resolution passes with only 23 members voting against, all Republican.
    • And then Trump calls Democrats anti-Israel and anti-Jewish and calls the vote disgraceful.
  1. Fox News rebukes Janine Pirro for saying that Rep. Omar is against the constitution because she wears a hijab.
  2. Several stories hit the news this week about high school kids taking part in Nazi symbolism.
  3. A judge rules that the Trump administration can’t halt Obama’s rule requiring companies to disclose employee pay information by race, gender, nation of origin, and job title. The reason for collecting this information is to be able to address wage discrimination and disparity.
  4. Arizona Senator Martha McSalley reveals to the Senate Armed Services Committee that she was sexually assaulted by a senior officer. She says she didn’t report it at the time and that she felt ashamed. I believe her, just like I believe Blasey-Ford.
  5. A grand jury returns an indictment against Jussie Smollett on 16 felony counts for making a false police report and lying to the police about a hate crime he staged. Moron.
  6. On International Women’s Day, the U.S. women’s soccer team files a gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation. They argue that their highly successful team should be treated at least equal to the less successful men’s team.
  7. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Liberian refugees ends on March 31, which will deport people to Liberia who haven’t been to the country since they were small children. Courts already blocked efforts by Trump to deport TPS refugees from Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Lawsuits are ongoing for the remaining TPS countries.
  8. Since 2017, the FBI has worked more domestic terrorist cases (fueled largely by white nationalists and supremacists) than foreign-linked terrorist cases.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Trump finally has a science advisor who says mankind plays a significant role in climate change. Unfortunately, this same scientist says he’s not going say that to the president.
  2. Costa Rica aims for zero carbon emissions by 2050.
  3. Atlanta’s City Council votes to require all buildings in Atlanta to use renewable energy sources by 2035.
  4. FEMA says they’ll pay just over half of the $639 million needed for emergency repairs to the Orville Dam in California. After heavy rains damaged the dam’s main spillway last year, water overflowed the emergency spillway.
  5. Opponents of the Green New Deal have been claiming that a study shows it would cost $93 trillion, but that number appears nowhere in the study. Even the think tank behind the study say they don’t know how much it would cost.
  6. For comparison, a recent study actually did predict that global warming will cost $69 trillion (globally though, not just in the U.S.).

Budget/Economy:

  1. The U.S. deficit grew 77% in the first four months of fiscal year 2019 compared to the same four month in FY 2018 (our fiscal year begins in October). Tax revenue fell by $19 billion, corporate taxes fell by 23%, and spending increased by 9%.
  2. Our trade deficit with China also hit an all-time high, with a disparity of $419 billion (last week we learned that our overall trade deficit hit an all-time high as well).
  3. Americans have paid at least $12.3 billion in tariffs to the U.S. government as a result of the trade war.
  4. The job market added 20,000 jobs in February, about one-tenth of the typical number over the past several years. I expect that number to be revised, but it won’t come close to the norm.
    • The unemployment rate still dropped down a bit to 3.8% (it was 4% in January).
    • And wages had good growth—up 3.4% from the year prior.
    • This means it’s not likely we’ll see any interest rate hikes this year, or at least not many.
  1. The European Central Bank (ECB) lowered its economic growth forecast for the EU over trade uncertainties about U.S. actions on trade and tariffs.
  2. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also lowered their global growth forecast, so they think it’s not just Europe that’ll slow down.

Elections:

  1. The trial in the lawsuit against Ohio’s gerrymandered congressional map begins. The map creates a 12-4 district advantage for Republicans even though they only receive about 51% of the statewide vote.
  2. The right-leaning National Legal and Policy Center files a complaint with the FEC against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign. The complaint sounds like a pay-for-play scheme, but it turns out that the campaign likely only described services provided by their LLC incorrectly, a minor FEC infraction.
  3. After the New Yorker publishes an article about the symbiotic relationship between the Republican Party (specifically Trump) and Fox News, the DNC announces that they won’t let Fox News host any Democratic primary debates. Not really a BFD. Fox hasn’t hosted a Democratic primary debate in 15 years, and Republicans cut off debates on NBC in 2015.
  4. The House Oversight Committee opens an investigation into voter irregularities in the Georgia midterm elections.
  5. 80% of our election equipment comes from companies that have installed remote access software (like PCAnywhere) on the county-based systems that pull together precinct tallies.
  6. Despite shutting her company down last July, Ivanka obtains a patent for voting machines in China. Trademark requests are often very broad, but voting machines? She obtained trademarks for clothing and jewelry, but also for some random things like nursing homes and sausage casing.
  7. Remember the kerfuffle over Donna Brazile giving Hillary Clinton advance notice of one debate question? Well, it turns out that Rupert Murdoch did the same for Trump.
  8. Well, this is weird. It turns out that Trump and Ivanka have donated to six of the 2020 Democratic candidates for president at some point.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Trump promises A+ assistance to the great state of Alabama following devastating tornadoes. Pretty much the opposite of his response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico and the California wildfires.
  2. Last week we learned that Trump intervened to get Jared Kushner his top-secret clearance. Now we learn that he pressured John Kelly and Don McGahn to give Ivanka security clearance. They objected, and Trump ended up granting it himself.
  3. Meanwhile, the White House rejects the House Oversight Committee’s request for documents regarding the security clearance for Jared and Ivanka.
  4. Police arrest dozens of people in California who were protesting the decision not to charge the officers who killed Stephon Clark after mistaking his cell phone for a gun.
  5. Trump’s communications director, Bill Shine, resigns to start working on Trump’s 2020 campaign.
  6. An Ethiopian Airlines plane crashes on takeoff killing all 157 people on board. It’s the same Boeing model as the one that crashed last year in Jakarta.
  7. We learn that Trump directed Gary Cohn to push the DOJ to block the AT&T merger with Time Warner (which owns CNN).

Polls:

Here are some polling numbers from Quinnipiac:

  1. 64% of voters think Trump committed crimes before he became president. 45% think he committed crimes during his term.
  2. 59% say Congress should not begin impeachment, but about the same number say Congress should keep investigating.
  3. 50% of voters believe Michael Cohen over Trump.
  4. 36% of voters disapprove of how Democrats handled the Cohen hearing; 51% disapprove of how the Republicans handled it.
  5. 65% of voters think Trump is not honest.
  6. 22% think he’s a good role model for children.
  7. 66% disapprove of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job.
  8. 56% disapprove of the way Democrats in Congress are doing their job.

Week 110 in Trump

Posted on March 5, 2019 in Politics, Trump

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

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

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

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

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

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

Russia:

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

Legal Fallout:

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

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

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

Courts/Justice:

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

Healthcare:

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

International:

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

Legislation/Congress:

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

Family Separation:

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

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

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

Climate/EPA:

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

Budget/Economy:

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

Elections:

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

Miscellaneous:

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

Polls:

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

Week 109 in Trump

Posted on February 25, 2019 in Politics, Trump

NC Board of Elections video

Last week, rumors about winding down the Mueller investigation proved to be unfounded. I think we’re all ready and maybe a little anxious for it to be done. The Associated Press wrote up a good summary about what we’ve learned so far. It’s a longish read, but pretty interesting. A few things to brace for if you’re looking for impeachment here:

    • It’s not likely to happen.
    • It could be that Trump didn’t do anything knowingly wrong.
    • It could be that he did, but there’s no evidence of it.
    • It could be that he did, but there is evidence of it. And that case, we might find out about it and we might not.
    • All that is to say, don’t get your hopes up too high.

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. At least sixteen states issue a legal challenge to Trump’s use of a national emergency to redirect billions in government funding to build his wall. The lawsuit claims that Trump doesn’t have the authority to override the funding decisions of Congress.
  2. Demonstrators at over 250 rallies across the country join to protest the national emergency declaration and the wall.
  3. Democrats in the House introduce a resolution to put an end to Trump’s national emergency for the wall. They’ll vote on it on Tuesday. If it passes, the Senate must take it up within 18 days.

Russia:

  1. The New York Times learns from documents and interviews that:
    • The Trump administration lied about the circumstances around Michael Flynn leaving.
    • Trump had private discussions with GOP Members of Congress about how to attack the Mueller investigation.
    • Trump called Matthew Whitaker last year when he was acting Attorney General and asked him to put Geoffrey Berman (or as Trump called him, “my guy”) in charge of the investigation into hush money payments to women. Berman is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and had already recused himself over conflicts of interest.
      • This puts Whitaker at odds with the testimony he gave to a Congressional committee. The chair of the committee gives Whitaker a chance to fix his testimony.
  1. Former FBI director Andrew McCabe says he briefed the bipartisan Gang of Eight congressional leaders on two FBI investigations they were opening into Trump in May of 2017 (one about Comey’s firing and one about campaign ties with Russia). He says none of them objected to it at the time.
  2. After James Comey was fired, the FBI developed a plan to protect evidence in the Russia investigation under concerns that more top-level officials would be fired.
  3. Roger Stone gets called back into court after he posts a picture of the judge in his case next to an image of a crosshairs. The judge places a strict gag order on Stone’s social media, radio, press release, blog, and media activities and says if he violates that order, “I will find it necessary to adjust your environment.”
    • The judge also extends the order to Stone’s spokespersons, family, and volunteers.
    • Stone says he’s having trouble putting food on the table and making rent. His previous income was $47,000 month. That’s $564,000 a year, in case you were wondering. How much does that guy eat?
  1. Rod Rosenstein plans to leave the DOJ in March.
  2. New York state prosecutors are preparing a case against Manafort in the event that Trump issues him a pardon. There is no double jeopardy because these are state charges as opposed to the federal charges he’s already pleaded guilty to or been convicted of. New charges would include state tax evasion and corporate accounting violations, among others.
  3. Mueller files a sentencing memo for Manafort on two charges of conspiracy to which Manafort pled guilty. You can read the memo here and the attachments here.
  4. Mueller is expected to deliver his final report next week and Barr is preparing to announce an end to the investigation… and then whoops! That was premature. It turns out that he’s not; it was just random speculation.
  5. Russia has already launched a coordinated disinformation campaign against 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Most action so far is against Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Beto O’Rourke.
  6. So far, every 2020 presidential candidate except for Trump has promised not to knowingly use any hacked or illegally obtained materials in the election cycle.

Legal Fallout:

  1. As recently as last week, the Trump administration was considering a proposal to sell nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia. Several Trump appointees had been pushing for the plan, which would have American companies build the plants. The administration has ignored legal and ethical warnings about the possibilities of spreading nuclear weapons technology in the Mideast.
    • Michael Flynn was one of the appointees pushing for this. He had been working on this for the company promoting it (IP3 International) before he was appointed, and kept at it after he was appointed.
    • Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster, tried to put an end to it.
    • One proposal included naming Trump’s friend Tom Barrack as a “special representative” to carry out the plan.
    • Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings brought this to the to the attention of the House Oversight Committee in 2018, but the Republican chair of the committee, Trey Gowdy, refused to follow up.
  1. A judge rules against Trump’s Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta, saying he violated federal law by not notifying Jeff Epstein’s victims about a plea agreement with Epstein. Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from underage girls.
  2. Trump’s pick to be ambassador to the UN withdraws her name from consideration because of her family after it comes out that she had failed to pay taxes on time and had hired an undocumented nanny.
  3. The Office of Government Ethics finds that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross violated his ethics agreement and submitted false information on his financial disclosure.
  4. Emails show coordination between Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao’s office and the office of her husband, Mitch McConnell. She held meetings with politicians and business leaders at the request of McConnell, and in some cases, the people she met with received grants and assistance with state funding.
  5. A grand jury has been convened in an investigation into whether Ryan Zinke lied to federal investigators who were looking into whether Zinke did not approve a casino application because of political pressure. Two tribes in Connecticut say that MGM lobbied to oppose the casino.
  6. Democratic lawmakers say they have correspondence that indicates the Education Department tried to influence an investigation into the recognition of ACICS as an accreditor. ACICS accredited two for-profit colleges that were shut down by lawsuits. Under Obama, ACICS was no longer recognized as an accreditor. Documents show that the department wanted to replace their inspector general who was investigating the certification.
  7. A former Trump campaign staffer files a class action lawsuit against Trump’s practice of forcing staffers to sign non-disclosure agreements. The aim is to invalidate all the NDAs. Under the NDAs, staffers can’t criticize Trump or talk about their work with him.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The Supreme Court rules that lower courts in Texas interpreted precedent incorrectly when they ruled that a death row inmate was mentally capable and could thus be executed.
  2. Trump picks Jeff Rosen to be the new deputy attorney general, replacing Rod Rosenstein in March. Rosen is new to the DOJ and has no prosecutorial experience (most deputy AGs work their way up through the department).
  3. Justice Clarence Thomas calls on the Supreme Court to take another look at the New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which he says makes it hard for public officials to win libel suits against news media.

Healthcare:

  1. The Trump administration issues a new rule that blocks any taxpayer-funded family planning clinic from providing abortion referrals. Clinics that provide abortions can’t receive funds from the federal family planning program. Trump will redirect some of that money to religious anti-abortion groups.
    • Just a reminder, these facilities provide general healthcare, STD testing and treatment, preventative treatments, and prenatal care mostly to poor women who don’t otherwise have access to healthcare.
  1. Students in Colorado take the lead in supporting a new bill that would ban abstinence-only sex ed, and would require teaching about safe sex, consent, and sexual orientation. Currently:
    • Eight states require teaching about consent.
    • 37 states require covering or stressing abstinence.
    • Only 13 states require teaching to be medically accurate.
    • Seven states prohibit teachers from showing same-sex relationships in a positive light.
    • Less than half of schools still require sex ed.

International:

  1. Three Conservative Party MPs in the U.K. quit the party over the handling of Brexit. This is on top of two defections from the Labour Party earlier in the week. They join forces and the group grows to 11. They want to see a public vote on a new referendum.
  2. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan (who has said he’ll carry out Trump’s wishes rather than perform the actual duty of his position, which is to advise the president), briefs members of the Senate on Trump’s Syria policy. It gets very contentious when Lindsey Graham presses him for details.
  3. Putin says that Russia will target the U.S. with their new missiles if new missiles are placed in Europe. I’m not sure what spurred that comment.
  4. Though Trump promised a full troop withdrawal from Syria, now he says they’ll leave around 200 troops there to coordinate a safe zone. And then he moves the target again and says they’ll leave 400 troops.
  5. Despite Trump urging European countries to accept back their citizens who left to join ISIS, the U.S. refuses to accept back Hoda Muthana, a woman from the U.S. who joined ISIS. They say her citizenship is in question because her parents were here on a diplomatic mission from Yemen, though she was born in the U.S. after her father was discharged from service and she has a U.S. passport.
  6. Venezuelan soldiers open fire on civilians who were trying to keep part of the border open to receive humanitarian assistance. Two are dead and several injured.
  7. Venezuela cuts diplomatic ties with neighboring Colombia.
  8. Mike Pompeo says that Trump and Kim Jong Un might need to have another summit after their upcoming one because they might not be able to accomplish all they want to at this one. Pompeo also contradicts Trump, saying that North Korea remains a nuclear threat.
  9. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cuts a deal with a racist anti-Arab party, bringing an extremist fringe group into the mainstream. The move draws criticism from liberal Jewish groups like J Street and more conservative ones like AIPAC.

Family Separation:

  1. The practice of separating families, deporting the parents, and keeping the children here has brought the welfare system into the process. Foster parents aren’t supposed to be allowed to adopt these children, but it has happened before and could happen now, separating these families forever.
  2. A judge is deliberating over whether to force the U.S. government to pour over all their records in order to find the thousands of families they’ve separated. Look for a ruling on this soon.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Texts between a police lieutenant and right-wing organizers indicate bias in the handling of an alt-right clash with Antifa. However, the officer says he has similar texts with members of both sides. The mayor calls for an independent investigation.
  2. I can’t even keep up with the developments in the Jussie Smollett hate crime story. It seems right now like he faked the whole thing. Smollett maintains his innocence, but his character was cut from the last few episodes of Empire. We’ll see what happens in trial, if it goes that far.
  3. Trump continues to warn about migrant caravans heading our way. He’s an alarmist, plain and simple. It’s his job to handle things like this without creating pointless fear.
  4. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the U.S. is at an all-time high.
  5. An editorial in an Alabama newspaper calls for a resurgence of the KKK.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Several government reports produced under the Trump administration have found that climate change is for sure one of our biggest national security threats. Our top brass has testified repeatedly that climate change is one of our biggest security threats. Despite this, the White House plans to create a Presidential Committee on Climate Security to assess whether climate change is indeed a threat. It’ll be headed by William Happer, who says carbon emissions are an asset, not a pollutant.
    • Interestingly, the administration says the previous reports weren’t subject to rigorous and independent peer review. In fact, they have been reviewed. The reports that are unable to be replicated under peer review are those that try to disprove climate change.
  1. The EPA announces an effort to restrict perfluoroalkyl and related compounds (PFAS), which have been contaminating water systems across the country, particularly those by military bases.
  2. The EPA has reached out to a scientist who claims that low levels of pollution, toxic chemicals, and radiation are good for us. His suggestions for how the EPA should assess these issues has been added to the Federal Register nearly word for word.
  3. In Tasmania, brush fires that have been burning out of control for a month could wipe out ancient species.
  4. The Trump administration ends talks with California over fuel economy rules for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The administration wants to end Obama’s mileage standards and they’ve threatened to end California’s ability to set its own mileage standards.
  5. Patagonia made an additional $10 million in profits due to the business tax cuts implemented by the GOP. The founder is putting all that money toward fighting climate change.
  6. When asked about climate change, the new U.S. ambassador to Canada says that she believes in both sides of the science. There aren’t two sides. There’s the proven side, and then multiple sides trying to explain away the proven side with a multitude of unprovable hypotheses.
  7. Last week, we learned that Trump pressured the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep open two aging coal plants. This week, the TVA votes to close those plants.

Budget/Economy:

  1. In 2018, retail jobs were cut by their highest number since 2009, largely because of online shopping.
  2. Teachers strike in Oakland, demanding smaller classes, more counselors and full-time nurses, and a 12% raise over three years.
  3. China agrees to buy 10 million additional tons of soybeans from the United States. Since they canceled all orders in December, but did buy around 8 million tons in 2018, I’m not sure if that means they’re buying 10 million tons or 18 million tons in total, but either way it’s much less than what they bought in 2017.
  4. The Trump administration has paid $7.7 billion of the promised $12 billion in relief to farmers affected by the trade war with China.
  5. Trump says they made great progress in trade talks with China, so he delays raising tariffs from 10% to 25% on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods.
  6. Most economists expect a recession by 2021 with about half of them expecting one this year or next.
  7. Illinois signs a bill to raise its minimum wage to $15 by 2025.

Elections:

  1. The elections board hearing into election fraud in North Carolina’s 9th district takes a dramatic turn this week:
    • Lisa Britt testifies that McCrae Dowless paid her to illegally collect and complete mail-in ballots and applications for mail-in ballots. Dowless was hired by a consulting group hired by the campaign for Republican candidate Mark Harris. Britt is Dowless’s step-daughter.
    • Harris sobs in court when his son testifies that he warned his dad about the questionable practices employed by Dowless, contradicting Mark Harris’s earlier testimony.
    • The next day, Harris says that North Carolina needs to hold another election to settle this race. It seems his attorneys are eager to put an end to the proceedings as their client is already guilty of perjuring himself on the stand.
    • North Carolina elections officials order a new election, putting an end to the investigation. I’m not clear if any criminal charge will arise from this, but states attorneys and the State Bureau of Investigation are looking into it.
    • Dowless has done work for both Republicans and Democrats in the past, and is also a convicted felon (on unrelated charges of fraud).
  1. Trump says he condemns all election fraud whether it’s Democrat or Republican (good) and then follows that with his unsupported accusations of voter fraud in California, Texas, and Florida (bad). He says they found millions of fraudulent votes in California and offers the late counts that leaned Democrat as proof. Likewise, he says the late counts in Florida prove fraud. He says votes in Texas weren’t properly done, referencing the Secretary of State’s efforts to clean out the voter rolls.
    • There’s never been any kind of indication or proof that people voted illegally in CA.
    • After 2016, I think they found 2 or 3 cases in Texas, at least two of whom voted Republican. This is a separate issue from the 95,000 or so voters the state was looking into for being illegally registered to vote. That number has been drastically reduced because most of the people on the list are actually citizens.
    • And in Florida, they were just counting all the votes; no fraud was found.
    • I think North Carolina has shown that fraud raises red flags and can be proven. Instead, Trump focuses on things he made up to justify his popular vote loss.
  1. New Jersey’s State Senate passes a bill requiring all presidential candidates to release their taxes in order to be included on the ballot. The bill has to get through the Assembly and then the governor.

Miscellaneous:

  1. The Transportation Department cancels nearly $1 billion in funding for California’s troubled high-speed train project. They’re also trying to find ways to make California pay back the $2.5 billion they’ve already received.
    • California Governor Gavin Newsom had previously reduced the scope of the project.
  1. New York City’s transportation department defrauded FEMA out of $5.3 million in claims after Superstorm Sandy. They city agrees to pay it all back.
  2. The latest rumor is that Trump wants to replace his director of National Intelligence Dan Coates because of his testimony before Congress in January. I usually don’t report on rumors, but last fall all the staff turnover rumors came true. So we’ll see.
  3. Police arrest a Coast Guard lieutenant who plotted to kill a laundry list of Democratic politicians and what he considered “leftist” professors, judges, and journalists. He describes himself as a white nationalist and skinhead, and he calls the people on his list traitors.
  4. The NRA posts a picture of Nancy Pelosi and shooting victim Gabby Giffords with the headline “Target Practice.” Oops.

Polls:

  1. 61% of American disapprove of Trump using a national emergency to build his wall. About the same number don’t think there’s a national emergency there.

Week 108 in Trump

Posted on February 19, 2019 in Politics, Trump

These guys are so going to jail...

It’s a national emergency! I know he’s been threatening it, but I really didn’t think even Trump would declare a national emergency over something he’s been talking about for three years. On top of that, our allies in Europe sent us a clear message about what they think of us now after two years with this administration. At least Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia still like us though!

Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Border Wall/Shutdown:

  1. We started the week with another stalemate on DHS funding, but then negotiators in Congress agree on a deal that:
    • Provides $1.375 billion for 55 miles of new border fencing (Trump wants $5.7 million for over 200 miles).
    • Provides $1.7 billion for border security, including more staff, humanitarian aid, and more modernized technology.
    • Reduces the number of detention beds allowed for unauthorized immigrants to 40,520 beds, but funds over 45,000 beds until September to give ICE time to comply.
  1. Trump says he doesn’t like the deal, but he’ll sign it. Mitch McConnell tells the Senate that Trump plans to declare a national emergency to bypass the bill they agreed upon. This way, Trump can keep the government open and fund his wall. The White House is also looking at other ways to fund the border wall, like redirecting money from flood control projects, disaster relief funds, and DOD funds.
  2. Nancy Pelosi warns the president not to declare a national emergency because it sets a bad president. 

  3. As promised, Trump signs the bill and declares a national emergency so he can build his wall. It was one of the weirdest presidential speeches I’ve ever heard. Especially from 22:08 to 22:48 here.
  1. The DOJ warns Trump that ahead of time that his national emergency would be held up in courts. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) sues over the national emergency declaration. California, New York, and the ACLU (among others) prepare to do the same.
  2. The Trump administration is already being sued over their new policy of forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for a hearing and over their policy of extreme vetting of sponsors (which is basically holding immigrant minors hostage in order to be able to deport some of the sponsors).
  3. The House Judiciary Committee announces an investigation into the emergency declaration based on comments Trump made during his announcement of the national emergency. Trump said that he didn’t need to do this, but that he’d rather do it (build the wall) much faster.
  4. Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) says he’ll introduce a resolution to cancel the national emergency. Other House Democrats are on board. If the House passes such a resolution, the Senate has to vote on it as well. Trump says he’ll absolutely veto anything like that.
  5. Trump blocks back pay for contractors who worked during the government shutdown.

Russia:

  1. A federal judge rules that Paul Manafort did intentionally lie to federal prosecutors as alleged by Mueller’s team. He lied about:
    • His contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, an alleged Russian spy.
    • Certain financial transactions.
    • A business associate with suspected ties to Russian intelligence.
  1. His plea deal is effectively over, prosecutors can now prosecute him for crimes to which he’s already pleaded guilty, he’ll likely serve time for the crimes he already copped to and those he was already convicted of, and he could be charged on the additional crimes of lying to federal prosecutors.
  2. Manafort cannot retract his earlier guilty plea, and he still has to cooperate with prosecutors.
  3. Mueller recommends a sentence of 19.5 to 24.5 years for Manafort, because he “acted for more than a decade as if he were above the law” and deprived the government and banks of millions of dollars.
  4. Court documents show that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were meeting with Kilimnik in August of 2016. Prosecutors think they talked about Russia as it relates to Trump’s campaign, resolving the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and Trump campaign internal polling data.
  5. Trump quotes Rush Limbaugh in calling for investigators in the Russia probe, including Robert Mueller, to be put in jail. He says it’s unprecedented that they’re working with Obama intelligence agencies, though intelligence agencies don’t belong to any president.
  6. In a 60 Minutes interview, former FBI director Andrew McCabe says that he launched investigations into the administration’s ties to Russia because he thought there would be an attempted coverup and the case would disappear. He also says:
    • There were conversations about working with Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.
    • When intelligence officials told Trump that North Korea has missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, he responded, “I don’t care. I believe Putin.” Putin had apparently told him that North Korea doesn’t have such capabilities.
    • Mueller’s team has McCabe’s memorandums describing his transactions with Trump.
  1. After the interview, Trump accuses both McCabe and Rod Rosenstein of plotting treason against him and says they got caught.
  2. The judge in Roger Stone’s case issues a partial gag order. Attorney’s from both sides can’t talk to the media about the case, and Stone can’t talk to the media in the vicinity of the courthouse.
    • Stone requests a different judge, but is denied. Mueller designated Stone’s case as being related to the case indicting 12 Russian intelligence agents on charges of hacking and leaking Democrats’ emails in the 2016 election. Because these cases are related, they have the same judge.
    • It’s the same judge who oversees one of Paul Manafort’s cases as well.
  1. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-NC), says they haven’t discovered evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA), says the evidence is obvious and compelling. Maybe they have different definitions of collusion? Schiff does clarify that this does not yet prove criminal conspiracy.
  2. The House Judiciary Committee hires two lawyers to review Mueller’s investigation and allegations against Trump. They’re focused on ethics and corruption issues as well as possible obstruction of justice.

Legal Fallout:

  1. American Media, Inc., owner of the National Enquirer, asked the DOJ last year if they needed to register as a foreign agent for their work with and coverage of Saudi Arabia. Based on the limited information AMI provided the DOJ, they said AMI didn’t need to register.
  2. For the third time, Michael Cohen postpones a Congressional hearing, this time because of a recent surgery.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Jerrold Nadler invites former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker back to clarify his testimony because his previous responses are contradicted by the evidence.
  2. The Senate confirms William Barr as our next Attorney General. Barr is sworn in and takes office. Interesting side notes:
    • Barr’s daughter and a son-in-law both work in the DOJ (which Barr will be heading), but are moving on to different jobs. Another son-in-law works in the National Security Division of the DOJ.
    • His daughter is going from being the director of Opioid Enforcement and Prevention Efforts to working in the Treasury’s financial crimes unit.
    • His son-in-law (married to a different daughter than above) is going from the Virginia U.S. attorney’s office to the White House counsel’s office. It’s not clear yet what his responsibilities will be.
  1. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returns to the office for the first time since her surgery last December.

Healthcare:

  1. Teen children of parents who refused to vaccinate them are trying to get vaccines on their own without stepping on any parental landmines. This is difficult because parental consent is required in some states. These teens are also concerned for their younger siblings.
  2. Someone starts a fire at a Missouri Planned Parenthood Clinic and the FBI is investigating it as a hate crime.
  3. Even pediatricians who are publicly against vaccinations start to urge people to vaccinate their children in the midst of the latest measles outbreak. Even though these doc’s have long called measles a benign childhood disease, they know it can cause things like blindness, deafness, pneumonia, swelling in the brain, and even death. And new research says it makes you susceptible to other illnesses for years following an infection.
  4. Mississippi lawmakers pass a heartbeat abortion bill that could limit abortion after six weeks. It provides exceptions for cases where the mother’s life or health is threatened, but does not provide exceptions for incest or rape. The governor says he’ll sign it. A federal judge already found Mississippi’s previous 15-week ban from last year unconstitutional, so this is likely to be found the same.

International:

  1. A suicide bomber kills 27 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Iran blames the U.S. and Israel for the attack, but a militant Sunni Muslim group claims responsibility.
  2. The House passes a resolution to stop funding Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. This would force the administration to pull U.S. troops out.
  3. The Trump administration misses its deadline to provide Congress with full information about the role the Saudi Crown Prince played in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. A Republican lawmaker had requested the information under the Magnitsky Act.
  4. The Munich Security Summit highlights the growing split between the U.S. and its European allies.
    • German Chancellor Angela Merkel receives a standing ovation for:
      • Defending multilateral institutions.
      • Pushing back against U.S. demands that Europe pull out of the JCPOA (Iran deal), adding that the agreement is a step toward containing Iran that will lead to more cooperation.
      • Criticizing unilateral moves by the Trump administration.
    • Vice President Mike Pence is greeted with silence during what he expected to be applause lines in his speech. In contrast to Merkel’s message of working together, Pence addressed a list of U.S. demands in our own interest.
    • Joe Biden also speaks at the summit and reassures our allies that this will pass, though allies say that the damage done will not be fixed anytime soon, no matter who succeeds Trump.
      • Allies agree that Trump is more a symptom than a cause of what’s going on in the U.S.
      • Allies also take it as a given that the liberal world order led by the U.S. has collapsed, and they wonder who will pick up the pieces.
  1. Mike Pompeo begins his time in Europe for the summit by visiting the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban. He then moves on to Slovakia, where the journalist who exposed their government corruption was murdered last year. Finally he meets up with Pence in Poland at a forum to rally the EU and MidEast against Iran. Europeans weren’t going for that, so they were forced to add sessions on Syria, Yemen, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  2. Even though Trump is pulling our own troops out of Syria, he urges our allies to commit to sticking it out.
  3. One of the confusing things in Trump’s declaration of national emergency is when he says the Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace prize for his role is easing North Korea tensions. That turns out to be true, but it leaves out the fact that the U.S. government asked Abe to do so. It turns out that two Norwegian politicians nominated Trump for the same reason.
  4. The Trump administration has been accelerating a no-longer-secret program to cripple Iran’s military by sabotaging their weaponry. The program is also designed to isolate Iran’s economy. This program has been ongoing since the Bush (Jr.) administration.

Family Separation:

  1. The Trump administration still separates families at the border, removing young children from their parents even though a court ruled they could no longer do that. The administration formally ended the policy last summer. Annunciation House, one of many non-profit organizations near the border, receives one or two calls each week about new cases of separations (and that’s just in El Paso).

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. California Governor Gavin Newsom announces a withdrawal of National Reserve troops from the border. He’ll leave a couple hundred there to help CBP with trafficking problems, and the rest will be redeployed to help prevent wildfires.
  2. New Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar makes controversial comments about Israel, specifically around organized boycotts of Israeli companies and AIPAC funding of U.S. politicians. The Democratic House leadership rebukes Omar’s comments and call on her to apologize, which she later does.
    • Note, however, that pro-Israel lobbyists and donors spent more than $22 million on the last U.S. election cycle.
    • Trump calls on Omar to resign, saying we don’t have room for anti-Semitism. Which reminds me of that time when Trump said there were some fine people among the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!”
    • Representative Kevin McCarthy calls Omar out for anti-Semitism. Which reminds me of the that time he deleted a tweet about three Jewish businessmen trying to buy our elections (Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg).
  1. Trump holds a rally in support of his wall at the border in El Paso, and Beto O’Rourke holds as counter rally down the street. Both draw similar sized crowds, despite Trump’s claims otherwise.
  2. The Senate unanimously passes a bill making lynching a federal crime. They’ve been trying to pass something like this for 100 years. The Senate passed it last year, but the House didn’t take it up.
  3. Tennessee joins the list of states that have introduced bills allowing foster and adoption agencies to discriminate against potential LGBTQ parents and other groups that don’t comply with their closely held religious beliefs.
  4. The ACLU files a lawsuit against CBP on behalf of two American women who say that a border patrol agent detained them in a small town near the Canadian border in Montana because they were speaking Spanish. The agent told them that Spanish is very unheard of up there.
  5. The Supreme Court agrees to hear a case about whether a citizenship question can be added to the 2020 Census.
  6. A white supremacist gets a life sentence for stabbing a black man with a sword in order to start a worldwide race war. Crazy people out there…

Climate/EPA:

  1. California adopts a plan to convert all city buses to electric by 2040 (and hopefully by 2035).
  2. Mitch McConnell says he’ll bring the Green New Deal to a Senate vote. It’s not likely to pass there, where Republicans hold the majority. Both parties think this will force members of the other party to make uncomfortable choices.
  3. The Senate passes a huge land conservation bill that:
    • Designates over a million acres for wilderness preservation in Utah, California, New Mexico, and Oregon.
    • Permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses proceeds from offshore oil and gas drilling to fund onshore conservation efforts.
    • Protects millions of acres from mining and drilling.
    • Creates five new national monuments in Mississippi, California, Utah, and Kentucky.
    • Expands national parks in California and Georgia.
    • Protects some national parks in Montana and Washington from mining.
  1. The bill is likely to pass in the House as well. The bill has incredible bipartisan support, which makes me wonder how the administration was so successful at reducing the sizes of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante in order to allow mining and drilling.
    • And in case you were wondering, there are still ongoing lawsuits holding up development in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase.
  1. Trump wants the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep an aging coal plant open. The plant purchases coal from one of Trump’s leading donors, Robert Murray (of Murray Energy). This is one of two underused coal plants that the TVA is considering shutting down.
  2. The resolution that includes some funds for the border wall also creates a new national park: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan.
  3. A federal judge in North Dakota dismisses a lawsuit brought by Energy Transfer Partners against several DAPL protesters, including Greenpeace. It was a pretty crazy lawsuit, trying to make a RICO case against protesters.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The national debt surpasses $22 trillion for the first time. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it’ll keep growing and that by 2025 it will cost more to service the debt than what we’ll spend on defense.
  2. In evidence of a strong job market, employers posted a record 7.3 million job openings in December. There were just 6.3 million unemployed Americans.
  3. But then… retail sales fell dramatically in December—down 1.2% from November and the worst drop in nine years.
  4. Seven million Americans are delinquent on their car payments by 90 days or more. Previously the highest number was around six million and that was following the Great Recession. Economists say that this is a sign that even with low unemployment and a strong economy, low-income and working-class families are struggling to pay their bills.
  5. Following a series of teacher strikes across the country, teachers in Denver strike for better salaries, an end to exorbitant administrative salaries, and access to professional development.
  6. Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announce the creation of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board to help develop job training programs. The board is made up of prominent executive officers of major companies and it will work with the National Council for the American Worker, which was created last year.
  7. The House Finance Committee holds its first hearing of the session. It’s on the growing problem of homelessness in America.
  8. Trump signs an executive order to help increase development and regulation of artificial intelligence to make sure the U.S. stays ahead of the technology. The EO creates a new American Artificial Intelligence initiative that aims to improve education in the field, provide access to needed technology and tools, and promote international cooperation.
  9. As a result of the 2017 tax cuts, corporations spent $770 billion on stock buybacks in 2018. They expect to spend $940 billion on buybacks this year. In 2017, corporations spent about $150 million on employee compensation, mostly in the form of bonuses. No such employee perks have been announced yet for this year.
  10. Amazon had $11.2 billion in profits last year, but won’t pay any federal taxes this year. They didn’t pay last year either, and are actually looking at getting a $129 million rebate. It also looks like Netflix won’t pay any U.S. taxes either.

Elections:

  1. Trump downsizes two federal task forces that help safeguard our elections from foreign interference. The task forces were created in response to Russia’s meddling in our 2016 elections.
  2. A federal judge rules that a State Senate district in Mississippi is unfairly gerrymandered to dilute the African-American vote.
  3. We now have six women in the running for President of the United States. #YearOfTheWoman

Miscellaneous:

  1. Brock Long resigns his position as FEMA administrator. Peter Gaynor will serve as acting administrator.
  2. Sprint and T-Mobile come to Congress to defend their merger, and telecom companies end up getting an earful from lawmakers over spotty cell coverage in the U.S.
  3. The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Education issues a scathing report on the department’s handling of student loans. The report says that inconsistent oversight gives lenders a sense that noncompliance is OK. This lets lenders ignore the rules, cause harm to borrowers, and hold on to money they should be returned to the government.
  4. Remember how Trump’s doctor said last week that he’s in great health and will be healthy for the next two years and beyond? He forgot to mention that Trump also nudged up into the obese category.
  5. A gunman kills five people and wounds five police officers at the Henry Pratt Co. manufacturing plant near Chicago.
  6. Trump’s nomination to replace Nikki Haley as Ambassador to the UN withdraws her name from consideration. Heather Nauert, who IMO has done a bang up job as spokesperson for the State Department, cites concerns about her family as the reason.
  7. This is probably my favorite news tidbit of the week. Trump says he’d like to start a new 4th of July tradition… maybe a parade or gathering at the Capitol building. Except both are already a tradition.
  8. The White House security specialist who raised concerns about security clearance for certain administration officials (ahem, cough cough, Jared Kushner) asks for whistleblower protections.

Polls:

  1. 56% of Americans trust Mueller’s facts vs. 33% who trust Trump’s facts.
  2. 81% of Americans think Mueller’s report should be released in its entirety to the public.
  3. 33% of voters support another government shutdown in order to get Trump’s border wall; 60% oppose it (this was taken before the declaration of national emergency).
  4. The split for support of the wall is pretty even, with 47% of voters supporting it and 47% opposed.
  5. Trump’s approval rating bounced back up to it’s normal (around 41%) shortly after the shutdown ended (it tanked during the shutdown).

Week 107 in Trump

Posted on February 12, 2019 in Politics, Trump

In honor of the Green New Deal, let’s talk climate change. 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record, behind 2015, 2016, and 2017. This could lead some to think things are cooling down again; but if you look at the graph above, you’ll see many spikes followed by a few cooler years. But the trend is still up. Here’s some food for thought:

  • There were 14 weather and climate disasters in the U.S. in 2018 that cost $1 billion or more each.
  • Climate change and natural disasters cost the U.S. over $91 billion and 247 human lives in 2018.
  • 73% of Americans believe that climate change is real. That’s up 10 points from just three years ago.
  • The Trump administration concludes in the National Climate Assessment that global warming is “transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us.”
  • So climate change is no longer something we have to look forward to. It’s here now.
  • Global emissions are at their highest level.

Will the Green New Deal fix any of this? Time will tell.

Here’s what happened in politics last week…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. Correction: For several weeks I’ve been referring to Trump’s nominee for Attorney General as Andrew Barr. It’s actually William Barr.

State of the Union:

  1. Trump gives his “unifying” State of the Union address, but beforehand he lunches with a group of television anchors where he blasts a host of Democratic politicians.
  2. I won’t get into the whole address, but a few highlights are below. Here’s the full text, with the New York Times annotations.
    • He starts with a unifying message, but moves into some partisan issues like the Mueller investigation, the border wall, and late-term abortion.
    • He starts out fairly truthful, but the false statements increase as he goes on. I find this odd, because there’s no reason to fudge his economic numbers right now.
    • His two main points are the strong economy and the border crisis that he says necessitates the wall.
    • He says the economy will crash if the Russia investigations continue or if Congress blocks the withdrawal of troops from Syria.
    • He says there can’t be any legislation as long as there are also investigations.
    • He says he’ll end the HIV epidemic in the U.S. by 2030 and will include paid family leave in his budget.
    • He notes the increase in women in the workforce and in Congress, which elicits a huge response from the Congressional women, many of whom dressed in suffragette white.
  1. Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic candidate for Governor in Georgia, delivers the Democratic response. Her focus is voter rights.

Border Wall/Shutdown:

  1. The Trump administration continues to issue new waivers on environmental impact reviews to replace and add fencing at the border.
  2. The National Butterfly Center files an emergency restraining order against constructing the wall across their reserve.
  3. Mick Mulvaney blames Democrats for refusing to fund the wall… which Republicans have also refused to do for two years.
  4. Negotiations over border security are close to agreement, with funding for new technology, more border patrol agents, and fencing in certain border areas. Border security would be funded at around $2 billion, which Trump says he’ll accept. There’s no mention of a wall.
  5. And then what happened?? Budget negotiations to avoid another government shutdown are stalled. Again. We have until Friday to come to an agreement.
  6. And now they’re on track again.

Russia:

  1. Congress delays Michael Cohen’s testimony until February 28 “in the interest of the investigation.”
  2. Federal prosecutors in New York subpoena documents from Trump’s inaugural committee. They’re looking for info about donors (including foreign donors), vendors, contractors, payments, and bank accounts.
    • The subpoena includes documents related to fundraising activities. Rick Gates, who’s already pled guilty in a case related to Paul Manafort, headed up Trump’s fundraising operation.
  1. Federal prosecutors in New York request interviews with senior members of the Trump Organization.
  2. Adam Schiff, the new Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, announces new hearings into whether Russia or any other foreign government has leverage over the current administration, potential obstruction into investigations, and whether the administration has tried to influence U.S. policy in favor of foreign interests.
  3. The House Intelligence Committee sends Mueller transcripts of previous committee interviews in the Russia investigation. They had been unable to comply with Mueller’s request until Republicans finally seated all their members on the committee.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The South Dakota U.S. Attorney indicts Paul Erickson on charges of wire fraud and money laundering. Erickson was dating Maria Butina and helped her get access to the NRA and to political operatives in the GOP. These charges are unrelated to Butina’s espionage charges—it seems he was just bilking everyday people out of their money.
  2. The House Ways and Means Committee holds their first hearing on requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns. The committee plans to request Trump’s tax returns under an IRS provision that allows it.
  3. A federal judge orders the DOJ to release redacted versions of the search warrant for Michael Cohen’s home and office.
  4. This story oh-so-weirdly fits in this section. Jeff Bezos accuses American Media, Inc. (parent company of the National Enquirer) of trying to extort and blackmail him.
    • AMI releases texts that show Bezos was cheating on his wife.
    • So Bezos starts his own investigation into how AMI got his texts. He suggests it was politically motivated, but is also looking at his mistress’s brother as the culprit.
    • Bezos says AMI threatened to release nude photos and racy texts between him and his mistress if he didn’t drop his investigation.
  1. Some background:
    • Bezo’s Washington Post not only employed Jamal Khashoggi but has been relentless in reporting on the incident. AMI has been talking with Saudi Arabian financiers to help shore up their business.
    • AMI entered into a plea agreement with federal prosecutors last year in which they agreed to commit “no crimes whatsoever” for three years.
    • So now federal prosecutors are once again investigating AMI, this time to determine whether they violated the cooperation agreement by committing a crime.
  1. Federal prosecutors are investigating three major lobbying firms to determine if they should’ve been registered as foreign agents for their work with Paul Manafort for the former president of Ukraine.
    • This is major because of the high-profile players involved, both Democrat and Republican.
    • It has lobbyists anxious because the investigation underscores the crackdown on lobbyists who have lucrative deals with foreign entities.

Courts/Justice:

  1. The number of federal appeals court judges nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate is more than any other president at this point in their term, with 30 so far.
  2. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker testifies to the House Judiciary Committee. He says he hasn’t spoken to Trump about Mueller’s investigation. Not surprisingly, it was another nutty hearing with lots of grandstanding.
    • While he’s being questioned by the committee Chair (Jerry Nadler), Whitaker tells the Nadler that his five minutes are up.
    • Whitaker didn’t want to testify without a guarantee that he wouldn’t be subpoenaed. He testified anyway.
  1. Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes her first public appearance after her recovery from surgery.
  2. Missouri’s Supreme Court orders new limits on how long a suspect can be held without a hearing and the amount of cash bail they can be charged. The effects of the cash bail system are onerous and lasting, especially for low-income people.
  3. William Barr makes it through the Senate Judiciary Committee so now the full Senate can vote on his nomination to Attorney General.

Healthcare:

  1. The Supreme Court temporarily blocks a new Louisiana law that placed tight restrictions on clinics that perform abortions. If left in place, the restrictions will close most abortion clinics in Louisiana.
  2. Though Trump pledges to stop the HIV epidemic in the U.S. within ten years, already in his term he’s cut almost $1 billion in global funding to fight HIV/AIDS, he’s rolled back patient protections for people with [the pre-existing condition of] HIV, and has cut health benefits for the LGBTQ community that were put in place under Obama.
  3. Ironically, just this week the Department of Heath and Human Services announces new proposals that would allow medical practitioners to withhold treatment based on closely held religious or moral beliefs, which is likely to affect the LGBTQ community.
  4. Utah’s State Senate passes a bill to override the vote of their residents and replace the Medicaid expansion plan that voters approved last November. According to the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, the voters’ plan would add coverage for about 150,000 low-income residents; the Senate plan would add coverage for about 100,000 and would cost $50 million more in just the first two years. Idaho’s GOP legislature is trying something similar. Maine’s Governor did the same a year ago.
  5. The Massachusetts lawsuit against Purdue Pharma alleges that the company devised a strategy to become the end-to-end provider of pain relief. The plan, called Project Tango, was that they’d sell both addictive opioids AND the drugs to treat the addiction.
  6. The board members of Purdue Pharma, mostly members of the Sackler family, netted over $4 billion in profits in the process.

International:

  1. Gen. Joseph Votel, head of US Central Command (in the MidEast), testifies that Trump didn’t consult with him before making the decision to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.
  2. A new report from the Pentagon’s Inspector General asserts that ISIS will likely take back lost territory if the US withdraws from Syria. ISIS will also use our withdrawal as part of a PR campaign declaring victory against us.
  3. Trump says that officials will soon announce that we have taken back 100% of the ISIS-claimed lands in Syria and Iraq. ISIS still holds territory in Afghanistan, Libya, Africa, and the Sinai.
    • His plan is to remove all U.S. troops from Syria by the end of April, and to move a couple hundred troops from Syria to Iraq to keep an eye on Iran.
  1. The Trump administration refuses to release a report to Congress on whether Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince was responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
  2. Rep. Michael McCaul (TX), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, releases a statement criticizing the administration’s handling of Saudi Arabia and the Khashoggi murder. He says they failed to meet the requirements of the Magnitsky Act and calls on them to comply.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The House holds its first gun violence hearing in eight years. What’s happened in those eight years? The Seal Beach salon shooting, Aurora theater shooting, the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, the Empire State Building shooting, the Sandy Hook shooting, the Washington Navy Yard shooting, the Charleston church shooting, the Waco motorcycle shootout, the Harris County shooting, the Roseburg shooting, the San Bernardino terror attacks, the Pulse nightclub shooting, the Dallas police shooting, the Mississippi shooting, the Plano football shooting, the Las Vegas shooting, the Sutherland Springs church shooting, the Parkland school shooting, the Santa Fe school shooting, the Pittsburg synagogue shooting, and the Thousand Oaks country bar shooting.
    • These are just the ones where eight or more people died (and I think I missed a few).
    • There’ve been 31 mass shootings so far this year (defined as 4 or more people shot in one incident).
    • There were 323 mass shootings in 2018.
  1. During the gun violence hearing, Freedom Caucus member Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tries to switch the conversation to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Two fathers of murdered Parkland children protest. So Gaetz tries to have them thrown out of the hearing.
    • For the record, mass shootings by undocumented immigrants are extremely rare. In fact, I haven’t been able to find one conviction yet, but I’m still looking.
  1. The House Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change holds the first hearing on climate change in over five years. During those five years, the military has called climate change one of our greatest national security threats.

Family Separation:

  1. A senior Health and Human Services official tells the House Energy and Commerce Committee that he warned three Trump appointees about the health risks of their plan to separate migrant families at the border. He first learned of the plan in February of 2017.
    • Now the administration says that taking children away from their sponsors to reunite them with their families would be too traumatic. You know what’s really traumatic? Being taken away from your family in the first place!
    • The HHS Deputy Director of Refugee Resettlement says this about why kids shouldn’t be removed from their sponsors:
      “Disrupting the family relationship is not a recommended child welfare practice.”
      I don’t even know how to dissemble that. These people are monsters.
    • The administration says it would be impossible to find all the separated children because it would be too hard and cost too much.
  1. Currently, there are thousands of children separated from their families (we’ll never know exactly how many because they kept no records), and these children might not ever be returned. Can you imagine that? How far would you go to get your child back?

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The governor of New Mexico, Lujan Grisham, orders a withdrawal of most of the National Guard troops deployed at New Mexico’s southern border. She says they’re only here on a “charade of border fear-mongering” by Trump.
  2. Our troops at the border have been stringing concertina wire just along the top of existing fencing, but now they’re also putting it along the entire height in some areas.
    • Nogales, Arizona adopts a resolution that condemns using concertina wire as a deterrent at the border. They say it’s an indiscriminate use of lethal force, and demand that it be removed.
    • The mayor of Nogales sits down with CBP officers to discuss why he wasn’t notified this was going to happen. CBP says there are rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and lots of fence jumpers. This was news to the police chief.
  1. Even though CBP is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the world, they are only able to process about 10 asylum seekers a day at each port of entry. With 5,100 waiting in Tijuana alone, people could be stuck there until summer.
    • Mexican border cities like Tijuana don’t have the resources to handle the influx, which is creating dangerous conditions. American relief agencies are down there helping out, so no matter how you look at it, Americans are paying for this.
    • In Tijuana, they moved the migrant camps so far from the border that they can’t walk there—it’s a 30-minute drive.
    • Several lawsuits are pending against CBP because they’re illegally turning away asylum seekers at ports of entry.
  1. There are seven lawsuits against the administration for their attempts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. In one case, a federal judge blocked the question and that case is awaiting Supreme Court consideration. In another case, a district judge declined to block the question.
  2. Tennessee legislators introduce the Natural Marriage Defense Act again. It’s failed twice before, and would cost the state around $9 billion. The act would void the Supreme Court decision to allow gay couples to marry.
  3. Tampa has a ban on gay conversion therapy for minors, but a judge rules that it violates the first amendment rights of therapists.
  4. A federal judge says the Trump administration is discriminating against Puerto Ricans and violating their equal protection rights.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ed Markey (D-MA) announce the outline for their Green New Deal. It’s vague on details but calls for a 10-year national shift away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy, upgrading buildings to be more energy efficient, working with farmers to reduce methane gases, and overhauling our transportation systems (including more high-speed trains and fewer planes).
  2. Trump nominates David Bernhardt to succeed Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior. Bernhardt is currently the deputy chief, and is a former oil lobbyist.
  3. The EPA appoints several new Science Advisory Board members. One is a climate change denier, one denies the dangers of formaldehyde, one criticizes efforts to minimize radiation leaks at nuclear facilities, and one is skeptical about the dangers of lead to children.
  4. 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record.
  5. A new assessment says that at least a third of the Himalayan ice cap will melt by 2100 if we curb emissions now. If we don’t, two-thirds will melt.
  6. Scientists discover a growing cavity about 2/3 the size of Manhattan in a West Antarctic glacier. Most of that ice has melted in the past three years.
  7. Michigan’s governor becomes the 20th to join the U.S. Climate Alliance (New Mexico and Illinois also recently joined).

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump nominates David Malpass to lead the World Bank’s board. Malpass is an outspoken critic of the agency who says it creates “mountains of debt without solving problems.”
  2. The GOP promised higher paychecks as a result of their 2017 tax reform bill, so the Trump administration pressured the IRS to change withholding rules so that less was taken out of paychecks rather than more. This was especially important to them in the run-up to the midterm elections. Now, people are surprised to find out they owe more at the end of the year than expected or that they’re getting a smaller refund. Because of all the obfuscation, I can’t tell yet whether taxes went up or down for most people.
  3. The 30-year-old founder and CEO of Quadriga dies, taking his password with him. Around $137 million in cryptocurrencies are frozen and can’t be accessed. The founder’s poor widow has been searching for the password to repay the 115,000 affected people.
  4. Trump tells upstate New York residents who are unhappy with the local economy to move somewhere else.
    • New York officials say tax collections are down about 50%, and that the GOP tax plan hit New York hard because of the limits on SALT deductions.
    • Trump says those limits shouldn’t hurt upstate New York because it only affects the wealthy. Reporters have to clarify for him the effects of limiting SALT deductions.
  1. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposes weakening the rules that protect consumers from payday lenders. Just a reminder, the APR on these loans can end up being more than 1,000%.

Elections:

  1. The Clark County Commission appoints two women to vacant state Assembly seats, making Nevada the first state to have a majority-female legislature.
  2. A federal judiciary panel denies Ohio their request to delay a gerrymandering lawsuit that could force them to redraw their districts by 2020.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Only 54% of Trump’s civilian executive branch nominees have been confirmed. On top of that, these are all only acting positions: Chief of Staff, Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Interior, Office and Management and Budget director, and EPA Administrator. The administration has yet to fill more than half of the positions in the Departments of Labor, Justice, and Interior.
  2. Ugh. What’s going on in Virginia? We have racist photos of the Governor, two accusations of sexual assault against the Lt. Governor, and the Attorney General said he dressed up as his favorite rap artist in the 80s and darkened his skin. And then it turns out the Majority Leader in the State Senate was the editor of a yearbook that contained a bunch of racist material. No one’s stepped down yet. Calls for Governor Northam’s resignation seem to be waning, calls for Lt. Governor Fairfax to resign are still strong, but I haven’t heard calls for Attorney General Herring’s resignation.
  3. The Trump administration issues new rules on exporting weapons outside the U.S., making it easier to sell semi-automatic weapons, flamethrowers, and grenades, among others. These changes were originally considered under Obama, but were shelved after the Sandy Hook shootings.
  4. A federal court rules against Ajit Pai and the FCC in their attempt to gut the Lifeline program, which brings high-speed internet to rural areas.
  5. Where does Trump find these guys? Trump’s doctor performs a physical and writes a letter that concludes with “I am happy to announce the President of the United States is in very good health and I anticipate he will remain so for the duration of his presidency, and beyond.” This leads doctors across the country to wonder where they can get training in this kind of predictive medicine.
    • Last year his [different] doctor said he has incredible genes.
  1. In the midst of a polar vortex last week, the heat and electricity goes out at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. It doesn’t get turned back on until crowds protest outside the center in the freezing cold for days.
  2. And what’s wrong with sports fans? Police arrest over 30 people for sex trafficking during the Super Bowl in Atlanta. They also rescue four victims.
  3. We receive another leak of Trump’s schedule. Mick Mulvaney is working hard to root out the leaker(s).
  4. So far, Trump has appointed eight people to senior administration positions who are or were members at Mar-a-Lago.

Polls:

  1. 34% of Americans think it’s OK to wear blackface as part of a costume.