Good morning.
February in Whitewater ends with cloudy skies and a high of twenty-two. Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 5:43 PM, for 11h 12m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred forty-first day.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1862, Battle of Island No. Ten, Missouri, begins (the 8th and 15th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 5th, 6th and 7th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries fought in the battle):
The Union victory marked the first time the Confederate Army lost a position on the Mississippi River in battle. The river was now open to the Union Navy as far as Fort Pillow, a short distance above Memphis. Only three weeks later, New Orleans fell to a Union fleet led by David G. Farragut, and the Confederacy was in danger of being cut in two along the line of the river.
Recommended for reading in full:
The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Cohen Hearing: The Aftermath:
Here are some of the day’s big takeaways related to the Russia probe:
TRUMP SPOKE IN CODE
At least when it came to covering up a business deal in Russia.
Cohen testified that Trump “in his way” communicated that he wanted his former lawyer to lie to Congress about a Trump Tower Moscow deal he was negotiating during the 2016 presidential campaign.
But Cohen said the president was careful not to directly tell him to do so.
(…)
NO ‘DIRECT’ EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION
Cohen says he isn’t aware of direct evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. But he does have “suspicions” about it.
Cohen testified that Trump was told in advance that WikiLeaks planned to release emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House campaign. Cohen recounted a phone call in Trump’s office days before the Democratic National Convention when Trump adviser Roger Stone told Trump that WikiLeaks would be releasing a “massive dump” of emails harmful to the Clinton campaign in the coming days.
(…)
THERE’S MORE TO COME
Cohen says prosecutors in New York are investigating conversations that Trump or his advisers had with Cohen after the FBI raided his hotel room and office in April 2018.
About two months later, Cohen says he had contact with Trump or one of his representatives. But Cohen declined to say more because he says the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York is investigating the matter.
(…)
ENTANGLING THE TRUMP CHILDREN
Trump’s children emerged as key figures in a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and as their father’s top defenders.
Cohen said he had briefed Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. approximately 10 times about the business deal. Cohen’s testimony may pose a problem for Trump Jr., who told Congress in 2017 that was only “peripherally aware” of the proposal.
I watched the whole Shit-Show yesterday, with the exception of a bit of nap time during some of Johnson’s or Meadow’s fulminations about the sanctity of telling the truth. I wonder if Jim Johnson’s truth telling “values” extend to him having claimed to know nothing about how his team doctor molested all those wrestlers Jim was coaching for all those years?
It was striking that exactly none of the R-Teamers spent even a sentence defending Trump. There was only one Republican question to Cohen even related to the substance of the hearing. The rest was hour after hour of beating up on him for pleading guilty to lying to protect Trump, by peddling the same bullshit Trump was. The implication is that even though Cohen was parroting Trump’s lies, at least implicitly on Trump’s command, Trump’s lies don’t matter because he is the president, and Cohen isn’t. Surreal… Watching all the GOP-bots march in lockstep was instructive.
I can sure see why the likes of Meadows, Johnson, Ginny Foxx, and that Gomer, Gosar, have driven two speakers of the house out of congress in the last couple of years. Wisco-World’s own Glenn Grothman managed to add exactly nothing to the event. Can’t say as I am surprised..
Meanwhile, in SE Asia, Trump pulled the plug and came home, after it became clear that his grand plan of distracting everyone from the Cohen hearing with some sort of diplomatic coup was not distracting anyone. Every network, with the understandable exception of FOX (and oddly CSPAN) had the hearing on live. Nobody was watching him.
Trump took a severe trolling from Kim. The master negotiator has now completely fumbled his last two negotiations, getting Mexico (or anybody else) to pay for the wall, and getting Kim to give up his Nukes. When your entire skill-set for negotiating consists of throwing stampede-moves, you are hanging out naked. The thing about stampede moves is that both the cows and the cowboys have to agree to have a stampede. If one side just looks over its shoulder and says “meh”, there is no stampede, and therefore no deal.
The most chilling part of the hearing was right at the end, in Cohen’s losing statement, where he opined that Trump would not give up power voluntarily. If you are a Republican, at one on the committee, you will dismiss that as just another of Cohen’s lies. I’m not so sure, and have been wondering about that very subject for some time. As we saw yesterday, the Republicans, at least all of those remaining in the party, are foursquare behind Trump. When he orders them to repel the Barbarians storming his castle/tower/golf-club gates, they will salute and do what he wants. There are substantial numbers of the local police forces that are in his camp, as he is every racist cops dream come true. Even the Coast Guard has white supremacist officers, as we have seen recently. Add to that the very well-armed, and locked-and-loaded, “Super Patriots”, and there are the parts to put together a significant insurrection. It might not succeed, but it clearly would not be pretty.
The House majority had the more important task yesterday – advancing a serious inquiry – and they were successful. They have meaningful lines of inquiry to pursue. The minority’s work reminded America why they are the minority: strident, insular, and appealing only to the monochromatic of demographics and ideology.
Tump did himself no favors in Asia, and that’s even accounting for the low expectations that reasonable and knowledgeable people have of his work. Rick Wilson is right: ETTD. His claim to fame is as a deal maker, but a successful deal maker would not have praised Kim’s letters as a cause of the two – in Trump’s words – falling in love. What’s not criminal or bigoted in Trump is nevertheless risible.
Will he unlawfully stay or rightfully go, when the time comes? The worthy Sarah Kendzior would likely say he will try to stay. I don’t know, but I am receptive to her (and your) concerns. There are few autocrats, including nascent ones, who accept electoral setbacks. Indeed, to be an autocrat is to reject that rightful constraint on perpetual power.
Trump will go, of course, but to think he’ll go quietly is wishful thinking.