There’s a new podcast from Atty. Preet Bharara, former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
I’ve embedded the first episode, below, and readers can subscribe to this and future episodes via iTunes or Stitcher.
On March 11, 2017 President Donald Trump fired US Attorney Preet Bharara. Preet tells the story in detail for the first time. Then, a conversation with former Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director Leon Panetta about how to clean up a chaotic White House, trade Russian spies, and stand up for what’s right, even if it means defying a president.
Common men and women can learn from the examples of great men and women. In this way, one can learn how to prioritize between concurrent challenges, applying lessons from a prior and intense conflict even to present but lesser conflicts. Some threats are worse than others, and so our it’s reasonable that one places more effort there.
It makes sense to me that the most intense focus should be on the most intense challenges, and that those challenges are national ones first, local ones embodying national ones second, and purely local ones third.
The national challenges of Trumpism (viz., authoritarianism, bigotry, nativism, mendacity, conflicts of interest, ignorance, and subservience and dependency on Putin’s dictatorship) are a greater threat to communities than purely local buffoonery and grandiosity.
In this way, one would, so to speak, prioritize the fight against bigotry over babbittry. (One sees well, to be sure, that years of local babbittry erode the standards of a community, making it more susceptible of national illnesses. Only scorn is owed to those who wasted a generation glad-handing through town.)
Three confident assumptions undergird my thinking —
First, Trumpism should go, consigned to a political outer darkness, and the ruin of that way will be a thorough good. The next generation will ask: What did you do to oppose Trump? Those who supported him will then be silent; those who were silent will then be ashamed. Those who openly defended centuries of liberty and constitutionalism on this continent, however small their own efforts, will enjoy settled consciences and the thanks of a free people.
Second, there will still be time, during this national conflict, to combat local embodiments of the national challenges that face us. There are, for example, lumpen nativists, local show-us-your-papers men, who deserve more criticism than they’ve yet received. That’s a fight worthy fighting, and one happily joined.
Third, most of those responsible for our local challenges have no future in any event — they were irreversibly in decline in Whitewater even before Trump came to power. If the pharaohs, with all their wealth poured into the pyramids, could not thereby prevent the decline of their way of life, then one can be sure that today’s local grandiosity and boosterism will not do the trick.
Fight and prevail through collective, nationwide efforts in the greater challenge, and the local challenge will be even more easily won.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:52 PM, for 12h 10m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 7 AM, her Community Development Authority Board at 5:30 PM, and there’s a scheduled Public Information Meeting on the relocation of the city’s dog park from 4-6 PM.
On this day in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien publishes The Hobbit. On this day in 1863, “1st Wisconsin Cavalry participated in an action at Dry Valley, and the 1st, 10th and 21st Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought in a skirmish at Rossville Gap.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Ben Collins, Gideon Resnick, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman report an Exclusive: Russians Appear to Use Facebook to Push Trump Rallies in 17 U.S. Cities (“‘Being Patriotic,’ a Facebook group uncovered by The Daily Beast, is the first evidence of suspected Russian provocateurs explicitly mobilizing Trump supporters in real life”):
Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned.
The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.
The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.
“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald”….
It’s been nearly a year since the US intelligence community publicly announced its determination that the Russian government took covert actions to sway the 2016 US election. We now know that Russia did so in part by buying Facebook ads and weaponizing bots, trolls, and other social media tools created by US tech giants. But there is still much that eludes the public about these attacks, as New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg pointed out on Monday: We don’t know what these Facebook ads looked like, we don’t know who they were targeting, and we don’t know how many millions of Americans may have been exposed to them. As the Washington Post reported, congressional investigators “have grown increasingly concerned that Facebook is withholding key information that could illuminate the shape and extent of a Russian propaganda campaign.”
We do know an elaborate plan for influencing the election reportedly was drawn up in 2016 by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank controlled by the Kremlin, according to reporting by Reuters. One document “recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” according to seven US officials cited.
Another document that came from that Russian think tank last October, according to Reuters, “warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency”….
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew. The next day, President Barack Obama alleged that the responsible parties were Russian-backed separatists seizing territory in the region following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Obama’s statement came amid a furious effort by Russian propaganda outlets to foster confusion about the act. In their telling, the tragedy had actually been a failed attempt by Ukrainians to shoot down President Vladimir Putin’s plane.
After Drudge propelled the RT story to his massive audience, it was picked up by right-wing U.S. conspiracy websites. (Others on the right warned that Drudge had gone too far by aiding a Russian disinformation campaign.)
This was not an anomaly. Drudge has for years used his site as a web traffic pipeline for Russian propaganda sites, directing his massive audience to nearly 400 stories from RT.com and fellow Russian-government-run English-language news sites SputnikNews.com and TASS.com since the beginning of 2012, according to a Media Matters review. Those numbers spiked in 2016, when Drudge collectively linked to the three sites 122 times.
Drudge’s increasing affinity for and proliferation of Russian propaganda comes amid what The New York Times calls “a new information war Russia is waging against the West”….
Last week, the Russian government-funded cable network RT announced that its American arm had been asked by the Justice Department to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Formerly known as Russia Today, RT was singled out this year in an intelligence community report on Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the report concluded.
Originally passed in 1938 to address the scourge of Nazi propaganda, FARA requires any individual or entity acting “at the order, request, or under direction or control, of a foreign principal” to register with the Justice Department. The agent must then periodically disclose the nature of its financial arrangements with the foreign principal and provide detailed, regular reports about the distribution of “informational materials” on its behalf. FARA does not in any way circumscribe what foreign agents may say or publish; the law merely requires that the information they disseminate be clearly labeled as originating from a foreign government.
The first entity convicted of failing to comply with FARA was a news service operated by the Nazi regime, and the law has remained relevant ever since. The New York bureau of the Soviet news agency TASS registered from the 1940s onward, as did a variety of other Soviet media outlets including Pravda and Izvestiya. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was recently made to retroactively register as a foreign agent on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party after failing to do so from 2012 to 2014. Applying FARA to RT (and possibly Sputnik, a Kremlin-funded Internet “news” service also being investigated by the FBI) is long overdue….
(RT would be free to speak, but identified candidly as the state-controlled tool of the Putin regime that it, in fact, is.)
In the video above, Morgan Freeman reminds Americans that Russian interference in our electoral process is ‘no movie script’; Vladimir Putin is a dictator, murderer, and inveterate enemy of America and our democratic traditions.
Nearly a year after Russia successfully interfered in the 2016 election, one thing remains abundantly clear: America can never let its guard down when it comes to the Russian threat to our democratic process. While we still don’t have definitive answers on much of what elapsed during the lead-up to the election — or, frankly, have a plan for what we can do to prevent this sort of thing going forward — what we do have is an issue that individuals on both sides of the aisle are desperate to get to the bottom of. It’s against this backdrop that the nonprofit, nonpartisan Committee to Investigate Russiawas launched on Sept. 19.
Whitewater’s full-service grocery closed in 2015, and then the UW-Whitewater Foundation bought the property. (Premier Bank, successor to Commercial Bank, has a 5% interest in the property.) A developer from Minnesota, having been unsuccessful in a project near the center of town, now proposes purchasing the former grocery building & lot, and constructing a Fairfield Marriott on the property, while renovating the existing (now empty) grocery building (meeting space, office space, etc.).
Because the developer wants two buildings on the lot, he (through the existing owners) sought conditional use approval for his plan. Conditional use approval leaves many details left unaddressed, but it was a necessary first step.
A few remarks.
1. City of Whitewater obligations. If it should be true that Whitewater will incur no expenses for studies, water main relocations, or other costs – that these will be borne by the parties – then the project is of limited concern. There is no reason that the residents of this city should subsidize a hotel, but if they’ve not the burden of subsidizing one, then let the private parties do what they want.
If the UW-Foundation and Premier bank want to sell, with the expectation of a donation of a portion back later, let them. They are not unsophisticated parties – they should be free to buy and sell as they wish. If the deal goes bad, the risk would be (and should be) theirs alone.
2. Building on the lot. The parties want two buildings on the lot, but if they should want three or thirty, I’d not stop them. Practicality is a greater constraint than law. Many uses are permitted, but only some succeed.
3. Building height. There’s a funny moment when the city planner recognizes that the planned height of the hotel is 45′ not 145′. It’s true that a project of this size would not be 145′ high, but that’s not what’s funny. What’s funny is the idea that a 145′ building would be too tall for Whitewater.
Why? There are much worse things than a tall, privately-constructed building.
4. Economic benefits. This session was about whether the applicants would be granted conditional use approval. Along the way, the developer included a supposed list of economic gains. Much of it is simply unsupported, and looks suspiciously like grandiose claims meant to impress gullible or over-eager residents.
If these parties are spending their own money, and not burdening this city, then the economic benefits are their private matter. There is something risible, however, about reading the same boilerplate used elsewhere that’s meant to impress, but impresses only the ignorant or weak-minded.
It would have been faster for the parties to call residents of the city gullible than to waste time typing unsupported economic claims. (Much faster: gullible is only one word, while the developer’s memo, beginning at memo paragraph three in the packet below, uses 325 words for its economic claims.)
5. Gratitude. There’s an unfortunate moment midway in this discussion, when the council member on the Planning Commission tells the developer that “well, we’ve been hoping for a new hotel for a long time, so we’re grateful for, I would say, I’m grateful for the effort that you’re putting into this proposal…”
When one has told the developer that one is grateful for the effort, the developer understandably gets the signal that oversight will be minimal. Now, I’m not so concerned about oversight as long as this city’s residents aren’t paying for the project. Still, from a regulatory perspective – as required by law – expressions of gratitude are hardly a signal of scrutiny in the public interest.
6. Devil’s in the details. There’s another meeting of Planning Commission in October….
The 9.11.17 Plannning Commission packet, with agenda and relevant part (Item 9), appears below —
Midweek in Whitewater will be cloudy with a four-in-ten chance of afternoon thundershowers. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 6:54 PM, for 12h 13m 13s of daytime. The moon is new, with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Spencer Ackerman observes that Trump Uses Putin’s Arguments to Undermine the World (“If you liked the #MAGA speech that the American president just delivered to the UN, you’ll love the original version—the one spoken by the Russian president delivered in 2015”):
The leader stepped to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly, as close to a literal world stage as exists, and issued a stringent defense of the principle of national sovereignty.
“What is the state sovereignty, after all, that has been mentioned by our colleagues here? It is basically about freedom and the right to choose freely one’s own future for every person, nation and state,” he said, attacking what he identified as the hypocrisy of those who seek to violate sovereignty in the name of stopping mass murder.
“Aggressive foreign interference,” the leader continued, “has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions and the lifestyle itself. Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster.”
The leader was not Donald Trump on Tuesday, but Vladimir Putin in 2015. Whatever nexus between Putin and Trump exists for Robert Mueller to discover, the evidence of their compatible visions of foreign affairs was on display at the United Nations clearer than ever, with Trump’s aggressive incantation of “sovereignty, security and prosperity” as the path to world peace. “There can be no substitute for strong, sovereign, and independent nations, nations that are rooted in the histories and invested in their destiny,” Trump said, hitting his familiar blood-and-soil themes that echo from the darker moments in European history….
….Moscow’s attempts to inflame and exploit the emotions of some 4 million Russian-speaking German citizens have been obvious.
Victor Bashkatov, a 35-year-old politician, was astonished to see a crowd of far-right and Russian-German citizens protesting outside his office in the Bundestag last year. Hundreds of people came out on that chilly gray day with banners in Russian and German, furious about immigrants allegedly kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old girl—protesters demanded an investigation into the crime against “our Russian girl.”
The older generation of German citizens from former Soviet countries tend to watch Kremlin-controlled TV channels, and the story about “Lisa,” the little girl, eventually turned out to be fake. She had run away from home, stayed with an older male friend, and made up the story. But it inspired many of the Russian-speaking Germans to support the far-right populist party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which often is compared to France’s xenophobic National Front or Geert Wilders’ anti-Muslim movement in the Netherlands….
(Putin will choose either extreme right or extreme left, or both, so long as that choice undermines the constitutional order in his target country. So in America, both Trump and Jill Stein were good picks – both pro-Putin, both contemptuous of America’s democratic traditions in their own ways.)
U.S. President Donald Trump is using money donated to his re-election campaign and the
Republican National Committee to pay for his lawyers in the probe of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Following Reuters exclusive report on Tuesday, CNN reported that the Republican National Committee paid in August more than $230,000 to cover some of Trump’s legal fees related to the probe.
RNC spokesperson Cassie Smedile confirmed to Reuters that Trump’s lead lawyer, John Dowd, received $100,000 from the RNC and that the RNC also paid $131,250 to the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, the law firm where Jay Sekulow, another of Trump’s lawyers, is a partner….
While previous presidential campaigns have used these funds to pay for routine legal matters such as ballot access disputes and compliance requirements, Trump would be the first U.S. president in the modern campaign finance era to use such funds to cover the costs of responding to a criminal probe, said election law experts.
(If GOP donors want to fund a criminal defense of Trump, it’s lawful to do so. Trump’s the first man to proclaim himself worth ‘TEN BILLION DOLLARS‘ (his capitalization) who felt the need to bang a tin cup.)
Michael Flynn’s family has set up a legal defense fund and is now soliciting donations as multiple investigations scrutinize the actions of the former Trump national security adviser.
The family is setting up the fund because “[t]he enormous expense of attorneys’ fees and other related expenses far exceed their ability to pay,” according to a statement from Joe Flynn and Barbara Redgate, Flynn’s brother and sister, respectively.
A source familiar with his legal representation said Flynn’s “core team” is seven attorneys from Covington — including partners, counsel, and associates — with “numerous” others involved at certain points. The fees will “certainly be into the seven figures,” according to the source.
Flynn, who played key roles in Trump’s campaign and is a retired Army lieutenant general, has been under scrutiny in the various investigations relating to Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Flynn tweeted out the news about the legal defense fund first thing Monday….
Be jealous of barn owls: Even in old age, they don’t lose their hearing, according to a new study. In the first hearing test of its kind, researchers trained the birds (Tyto alba) to sit on a perch and fly to a second perch only after hearing a sound cue. Then, they analyzed how young and old barn owls responded to sounds at different intensities, ranging from levels that would be completely inaudible to humans to sounds corresponding to soft whispers. Older owls showed little or no hearing loss compared with their younger brethren, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This is because, unlike mammals, birds can regenerate lost hair cells in the innermost part of the ear that is responsible for detecting sounds, the scientists say. Understanding how birds retain good hearing, they add, may lead to new treatments for humans.
Chris Cillizza, formerly of the Washington Post, presently of CNN, eternally a buffoon, wrote today that he thought Trump’s United Nations address was “much more poetic” than Trump’s prior speeches. From this, one can say that CNN wastes at least as much money as Cillizza’s salary & benefits.
(There are, probably, vile limericks that are more poetic than anything Trump has said. There are, with an equal chance, scribblings on bathroom walls more elegantly composed than anything thirty-something operative Stephen Miller has drafted for Trump.)
Lauren Duca, who would like more young women to write about politics, sees Cillizza’s remarks as an oppotunity to encourage others. Although I’m not much for the term idiot, in her observation about Cillizza, Duca’s on the mark…
To all the young women wondering if you have what it takes to be a political writer, I humbly present to you: this fucking idiot pic.twitter.com/KjGaJ6vDcW
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 6:56 PM, for 12h 16m 06s of daytime. The moon is new, with just 0.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fourteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Common Council meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1959, during a trip to the United States, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev becomes angry when he is told that he will not be allowed to visit Disneyland. On this day in 1832, the Sauk and Fox cede Iowa lands: “On this date Sauk and Fox Indians signed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War. The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands. (Some sources place the date as September 21.)”
CNN and the New York Times this evening published dueling scoops on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
As Jim Comey might put it: Lordy, there appear to be tapes.
First, CNN reported that U.S. government investigators wiretapped Paul Manafort, the onetime Trump campaign chairman, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. According to CNN, the court that provides judicial oversight for the administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized an FBI investigation into Manafort in 2014 focused on “work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine’s former ruling party.” Manafort’s firm, among notable others, had failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian regime. This first investigation was reportedly halted in 2016 by Justice Department prosecutors because of lack of evidence, but a second warrant was later issued in service of the FBI’s investigation into Russian influence of the election and potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
This story reports that Manafort was a target of collection and that Trump was talking with him at the time Manafort was under surveillance. It does not report that Trump Tower, where Manafort did have an apartment, was the location of that targeting.
Press reports have indicated for months that at least one, and potentially multiple, close associates of Donald Trump were subject to FISA warrants. It is possible now—as has been noted many times since Trump tweeted his accusation in March—that if the U.S. president was in communication with these individuals, his communications might have been incidentally collected. That isn’t the same as being wiretapped—and being subject to incidental collection as part of lawful collection against a third party really is not the same thing as being wiretapped by President Obama. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has already attempted to spin incidental collection into presidential vindication in a bizarre series of press conferences unveiling intelligence revelations—which later turned out to have been fed to him by the White House itself….
House and Senate investigators have grown increasingly concerned that Facebook is withholding key information that could illuminate the shape and extent of a Russian propaganda campaign aimed at tilting the U.S. presidential election, according to people familiar with the probe.
Among the information Capitol Hill investigators are seeking is the full internal draft report from an inquiry the company conducted this spring into Russian election meddling but did not release at the time, said these people who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters under investigation.
A 13-page “white paper” that Facebook published in April drew from this fuller internal report but left out critical details about how the Russian operation worked and how Facebook discovered it, according to people briefed on its contents.
Investigators believe the company has not fully examined all potential ways that Russians could have manipulated Facebook’s sprawling social media platform….
Ann Ravel writes How the FEC Turned a Blind Eye to Foreign Meddling (“For years, my fellow FEC commissioners refused to apply campaign finance rules to the internet. Now Russia is running amok on Facebook”) :
….policymakers for years have ignored or outright opposed the need to hold the internet advertising industry to the same standards the country has already agreed on for television and radio. Our campaign finance rules are outdated for the internet age, and rules on the books aren’t enforced. Now, with the revelation that Russia, too, sees the political value in America’s online advertising market, the chickens have come home to roost.
I warned that Vladimir Putin could meddle in our elections nearly three years ago, as vice chair of the Federal Election Commission, the federal agency charged with not only protecting the integrity of our election process, but ensuring disclosure of the sources of money in politics. Our vulnerabilities seemed obvious: The FEC’s antiquated policies refer to fax machines and teletypes, but barely mention modern technological phenomena like social media, YouTube and bots. The inadequacy of the FEC’s current regulations makes it practically impossible for both regulators and citizens to determine if the funding for a political advertisement online came from a domestic source or an enemy abroad. We had left the window wide open for foreign interference.
I suggested to the commission that the FEC consult with internet and tech experts to discuss how the agency’s current approach may or may not fit with future innovations. Starting this conversation should have been noncontroversial, especially at an agency whose very mission is to inform the public about the sources behind campaign spending.
But my comments were greeted with harassment and death threats stoked by claims by the three Republican commissioners that increased transparency in internet political advertising was censorship. Requiring financial disclosure, they argued, “could threaten the continued development of the internet’s virtual free marketplace of political ideas and democratic debate.” One commissioner went so far as to tell me that even talking about this subject at the commission would itself “chill speech”….
(American free speech concerns would not – and indeed should not – bar inquiry into a Russian dictator’s propaganda and electoral interference.)
They say a man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. President Trump isn’t representing himself, but sometimes it feels like he has a bunch of Donald Trumps on retainer.
While lawyers generally operate behind the scenes and try to keep their public comments limited and calculated, Trump’s lawyers have routinely done things outside the norm. They’ve gotten into spats with reporters and trolls, talked about internal deliberations and their odds of success and, most recently, discussed the Russia investigation within earshot of a New York Times reporter.
That last one is the most recent development in the increasingly strange saga of Trump’s legal team. The New York Times reported Sunday that they had overheard a conversation between Trump lawyers Ty Cobb and John Dowd last week at Washington’s popular BLT Steak restaurant, which is both near the White House and very close to the Times’s Washington bureau. Oops….
He later called the same reporter “insane” and mused about using a drone on her while unwittingly emailing with a prankster posing as a White House official.
Cobb described himself and Kelly as the “adults in the room” at the White House in emails with a Washington restaurateur. “I walked away from $4 million annually to do this, had to sell my entire retirement account for major capital losses and lost a s???load to try to protect the third pillar of democracy,” Cobb told Jeff Jetton.
When he took the job, Cobb told Law.com that he had “rocks in my head and steel balls.” He added that he took the job because it was “an impossible task with a deadline.” (Side note: So defending Trump from the Russia investigation is an “impossible task,” you say?)
Now-former Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz threatened a random stranger in an email exchange, telling her, “Watch your back, b—-.”
Jay Sekulow denied twice that Trump was involved in Donald Trump Jr.’s initial response to that Russia meeting, only to be directly contradicted by the White House itself.
Trump’s colorful longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, responded to his contradictory denials about being involved with Russians with plenty of bluster. “I feel great,” he told HuffPost. “Which picture did The Wall Street Journal use of me? Was it good?” Cohen added: “I am in many respects just like the president. Nothing seems to rattle me, no matter how bad the hate.”
(Some of these incidents would be difficult to accept even from a young lawyer, and these men – they’re all men from the examples – are not young. Encountering even one of these incidents or remarks would lead me to suggest intra-firm coaching & corrective action, including a written warning before possible dismissal, as well as a more careful review – sad but needed in cases like this – of the care with which the firm’s hiring committee was choosing new associates, if these were cases among young lawyers.)
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 6:58 PM, for 12h 18m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and there is also a meeting of the Birge Fountain Committee at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1759, the French formally surrender Quebec to Britain. On this day in 1942, a severe flood overcomes Spring Valley in Pierce County: “On the evening of September 17, 1942, after a day of heavy rain, water began rolling through the streets of Spring Valley, in Pierce Co. The village, strung out along the Eau Galle River in a deep valley, had been inundated before, but this was no ordinary flood. By 11:30p.m., water in the streets was 12 to 20 feet deep, flowing at 12 to 15 miles an hour, and laden with logs, lumber, and dislodged buildings. Throughout the early morning hours of Sept. 18th, village residents became trapped in their homes or were carried downstream as buildings were swept off foundations and floated away. One couple spent the night chest-deep in water in their living room, holding their family dog above the water and fending off floating furniture. The raging torrent uprooted and twisted the tracks of the Northwestern Railroad like wire, and electricity and drinking water were unavailable for several days. Miraculously, there were no deaths or serious injuries.”
….At the heart of the clash is an issue that has challenged multiple presidents during high-stakes Washington investigations: how to handle the demands of investigators without surrendering the institutional prerogatives of the office of the presidency. Similar conflicts during the Watergate and Monica S. Lewinsky scandals resulted in court rulings that limited a president’s right to confidentiality.
The debate in Mr. Trump’s West Wing has pitted Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, against Ty Cobb, a lawyer brought in to manage the response to the investigation. Mr. Cobb has argued for turning over as many of the emails and documents requested by the special counsel as possible in hopes of quickly ending the investigation — or at least its focus on Mr. Trump.
Mr. McGahn supports cooperation, but has expressed worry about setting a precedent that would weaken the White House long after Mr. Trump’s tenure is over. He is described as particularly concerned about whether the president will invoke executive or attorney-client privilege to limit how forthcoming Mr. McGahn could be if he himself is interviewed by the special counsel as requested….
(A key question here is whether both Cobb and McGahn have the same information about Trump’s role. If one attorney – let’s say, McGahn – has more information about Trump’s role from emails & documents, then Cobb’s more liberal position on document production many be ill-informed.)
How is it that the Vogel of the times knows about a clash between Attys. Cobb and McGahn? Because, in part, Vogel sat near Cobb and another Trump attorney – John Dowd – while Cobb and Dowd discussed the matter outside on the patio of a public restaurant:
Here’s a photo of Ty Cobb & John Dowd casually & loudly discussing details of Russia investigation at @BLTSteakDC while I sat at next table. pic.twitter.com/RfX9JLJ0Te
Astonishingly, truly. Cobb started his role with Trump with a good reputation, but he’s since accused a reporter of taking drugs (in a written accusation Cobb leveled at 1:30 AM in the morning) and now a NYT reporter catches him loud-talking about Trump’s case at a public venue.
In early February, in a high-profile meeting with black leaders in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump promised to make historically black colleges and universities an “absolute priority.” Leaders of HBCUs left that meeting, the culmination of weeks of frequent communication with the incoming Trump administration, feeling enthusiastic. But then Trump unveiled his budget proposal in May: HBCUs got none of the financial boost leaders anticipated. Moreover, Trump planned to cut key grant programs that help a majority of HBCU students. And now, Trump has yet to make good even on the promises contained in an executive order he signed in February, including moving an HCBU liaison into the White House and convening an advisory board for the schools.
Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), a leader on the issue for the Congressional Black Caucus, offered a blunt assessment to Mother Jones of what the Trump administration has done to date for HBCUs: “Nothing.”
Beyond Trump’s unfulfilled promise to relocate the HBCU office from the Department of Education into the White House, his administration hasn’t even announced a pick to lead the office. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the White House has had difficulty finding someone willing to take the job. The advisory board, which would guide Trump on issues important to the HBCU community, has yet to convene, says Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund. “And we’ve had no real consistent communication with the White House or the Department of Education since the meeting in February,” he adds. (The White House declined to respond to questions from Mother Jones)….
….A U.S. intelligence community report on Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential race concluded in January that Sputnik and RT, as Russia Today is known, were part of a multi-faceted Russian intelligence operation aimed at discrediting democracy and helping Trump win in November.
Some former employees of the Russian media organizations, which operate from separate offices several blocks from the White House, agree with that assessment.
Sputnik “is not a news agency. It’s meant to look like one, but it’s propaganda,” said Andrew Feinberg, a former White House correspondent for Sputnik. He said FBI agents interviewed him for two hours last month about the Russian government’s influence over the operation.
Feinberg said that during his five months at Sputnik, his editors were interested almost exclusively in stories about political conspiracies, and made clear that the organization took orders from Moscow.
“They always wanted to make the U.S. government look stupid,” he said. “I was constantly told, ‘Moscow wanted this or Moscow wanted that.’”
The question of who dictated editorial decisions was of particular concern to the FBI agents who questioned him, Feinberg said….
(Those who work at RT – Russia Today – or Sputnik are worse even than fellow travelers who walk the same path ideologically, so to speak, at Putin. Those who work at RT and Sputnik are fifth columnists, actively engaged in a coordinated foreign enterprise to undermine American institutions.)
Constitution Day in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 6:59 PM, for 12h 21m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twelfth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1787, a majority of the delegates to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia sign the proposed United States Constitution. On this day in 1862, at the Battle of Antietam, the “2nd, 6th and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments were in the thickest of the fighting. The 6th Infantry led a charge that killed or wounded 150 of its 280 men. Of the 800 officers and men in the Iron Brigade who marched out that morning, 343 were wounded or killed.”
….But all of this [prior incidents of Russian propaganda] paled in comparison with the role that Russian information networks are suspected to have played in the American presidential election of 2016. In early January, two weeks before Donald J. Trump took office, American intelligence officials released a declassified version of a report — prepared jointly by the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency — titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.” It detailed what an Obama-era Pentagon intelligence official, Michael Vickers, described in an interview in June with NBC News as “the political equivalent of 9/11.” “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” the authors wrote. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency.” According to the report, “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
The intelligence assessment detailed some cloak-and-dagger activities, like the murky web of Russian (if not directly government-affiliated or financed) hackers who infiltrated voting systems and stole gigabytes’ worth of email and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. But most of the assessment concerned machinations that were plainly visible to anyone with a cable subscription or an internet connection: the coordinated activities of the TV and online-media properties and social-media accounts that made up, in the report’s words, “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”
The assessment devoted nearly half its pages to a single cable network: RT. The Kremlin started RT — shortened from the original Russia Today — a dozen years ago to improve Russia’s image abroad. It operates in several world capitals and is carried on cable and satellite networks across the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. RT and the rest of the Russian information machine were working with “covert intelligence operations” to do no less than “undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order,” the assessment stated. And, it warned ominously, “Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies and their election processes.” On Sept. 11, RT announced that the Justice Department had asked a company providing all production and operations services for RT America in the United States to register as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a World War II-era law that was originally devised for Nazi propaganda. Also on Sept. 11, Yahoo Newsreported that a former correspondent at Sputnik was speaking with the F.B.I. as part of an investigation into whether it was violating FARA….
(Putin’s Russia – ruled by a murderous imperialist – is an enemy of the United States. Americans who favor Putinism are fellow travelers, Americans who cooperate with Putinism are fifth columnists.)
A watchdog group is threatening to renew a legal fight against the Trump administration following the White House’s decision Friday to withhold the names of thousands of people who have visited the president’s exclusive Florida club since January.
Back in July, after Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington first filed a lawsuit to obtain the Mar-A-Lago records, the administration seemed surprisingly agreeable, voluntarily promising to release something by September 8. That deadline was pushed back at the last minute, but at noon on Friday, the administration turned over its list of visitors: There were just 22 names, all of them members of the Japanese prime minister’s entourage. CREW and other ethics experts immediately cried foul.
At issue is the fact that the US Secret Service keeps careful track of everyone who enters the Mar-A-Lago club, dubbed the “Winter White House” by the administration. Trump has stayed there dozens of nights since he took office, holding court in the public areas, greeting members (who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in initiation and membership fees), and crashing weddings in the rented-out ballroom. The Secret Service keeps a similar set of records for visitors to the actual White House—a set of names that the Obama administration released regularly, but which the Trump administration so far has not. In January, watchdogs filed a Freedom of Information request for the Secret Service records, and then in April, CREW filed a subsequent lawsuit demanding that the Secret Service respond to the FOIA the way the Obama administration had. In July, the administration agreed that it would, at least, release any records that were “responsive” to CREW’s request….
In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, when his soon-to-be national security adviser Michael Flynn was reportedly pushing a multibillion-dollar deal to build nuclear reactors in Jordan and other Middle East nations, Flynn and two other top Trump advisers held a secret meeting with the king of Jordan.
The meeting — details of which have never been reported — is the latest in a series of secret, high-stakes contacts between Trump advisers and foreign governments that have raised concerns about how, in particular, Flynn and senior adviser Jared Kushner handled their personal business interests as they entered key positions of power. And the nuclear project raised additional security concerns about expanding nuclear technology in a tinderbox region of the world. One expert compared it to providing “a nuclear weapons starter kit.”
On the morning of Jan. 5, Flynn, Kushner, and former chief strategist Steve Bannon greeted King Abdullah II at the Four Seasons hotel in lower Manhattan, then took off in a fleet of SUVs and a sedan to a different location….
….Maybe it’s because the Republican Party, the group that claims to represent them, their ideas, and their interests, is no longer their party, what it calls conservatism is just an angry hodgepodge of grievances and scapegoating, and its leader is a shiftless, amoral populist whose political career is just a publicity stunt that spiraled completely out of control. Even worse, its base seems to display an almost cultish devotion to him, hanging on his every word, ready to turn obvious missteps into tales of victorious triumph over their many enemies. And conservative leaders warning fellow Republicans of this are in denial of how it got this way and just how angry and entitled their base has become at its core….
Now, it would be one thing if this was just the opinion of a fringe. Every political movement in every nation on Earth has a small group of extremists who are very vocal, but whose votes hardly steer national policy, if they can even make a dent in their local political landscape. But there’s a disturbingly large number of voters in the Republican base which are totally fine with this and believe Trump is doing a fantastic job.
That might be surprising enough, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Some 6 in 10 of them say that no matter what he does, they will never, ever stop approving of him, and after all we’ve been through so far, 96% of them say they’re satisfied with their vote. Far from reflecting on Trump’s job performance as his overall approval ratings keep sliding month after month, they’re doubling down, digging in their heels, and maintaining they didn’t make a mistake and that it’s the world that’s mistaken instead….
In the 1960s, Paul Spong was a young neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia. Then, part of his job was to study orcas (or killer whales) at an aquarium. But Spong quickly understood how badly these highly sentient, intelligent creatures suffered in captivity. So he moved to a remote island six hours north of Vancouver and founded OrcaLab—a scientific outpost committed to studying orcas in the wild without disturbing them. Using hydrophones and video cameras, Spong and his team can listen to and track orcas within a 31-mile radius. Over the course of almost 50 years, Spong has learned a great deal about these wondrous ocean dwellers. It has given him a sense of inner peace. To help others understand more about orcas, OrcaLab broadcasts its audio feed live through its website, which you can see here: http://www.orca-live.net.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 7:01 PM, for 12h 24m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eleventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Facebook Inc. has handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller detailed records about the Russian ad purchases on its platform that go beyond what it shared with Congress last week, according to people familiar with the matter….
(Key points: how extensive was the Russian campaign, and was there coordination with any Americans?)
….On a weekend in early March, during one of seven trips by Trump and his White House entourage to the posh Palm Beach property since the inauguration, the government paid the Trump-owned club to reserve at least one bedroom for two nights.
The charge, according to a newly disclosed receipt reviewed by The Washington Post, was $1,092.
The amount was based on a per-night price of $546, which, according to the bill, was Mar-a-Lago’s “rack rate,” the hotel industry term for a standard, non-discounted price.
The receipt, which was obtained in recent days by the transparency advocacy group Property of the People and verified by The Post, offers one of the first concrete signs that Trump’s use of Mar-a-Lago as the “Winter White House” has resulted in taxpayer funds flowing directly into the coffers of his private business…..
(Trump has many vices, but even among so many greed is prominent.)
President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission came under fire earlier this month when a lawsuit and media reports revealed that the commissioners were using private emails to conduct public business. Commission co-chair Kris Kobach confirmed this week that most of them continue to do so.
Experts say the commission’s email practices do not appear to comport with federal law. “The statute here is clear,” said Jason Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.
Essentially, Baron said, the commissioners have three options: 1. They can use a government email address; 2. They can use a private email address but copy every message to a government account; or 3. They can use a private email address and forward each message to a government account within 20 days. According to Baron, those are the requirements of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, which the commission must comply with under its charter.
“All written communications between or among its members involving commission business are permanent records destined to be preserved at the National Archives,” said Baron. “Without specific guidance, commission members may not realize that their email communications about commission business constitute White House records.”
On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel interrogated one of the first of the refugees, former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, on his ABC late-night show. It was a very gentle vetting, not “extreme” at all. And yet the encounter raised all kinds of red flags about whether these entrants will ever appreciate and accept democratic norms. As former Trump staff seek to integrate themselves into American civic and business life, it will be important to evaluate which of them can be rehabilitated—and which have compromised themselves in ways that cannot be redeemed.
The Spicer-Kimmel interview offers some important guidance, especially this core exchange:
Spicer: Your job as press secretary is to represent the president’s voice, to make sure that you are articulating what he believes, his vision on policy, on issues, and other areas that he wants to articulate. Whether or not you agree or not isn’t your job. Your job is to give him advice, which is what we would do on a variety of issues, all the time. He would always listen to that advice, but ultimately he’s the president ….
Kimmel: And then you have to march out there and go, ‘Yeah, he had a bigger crowd everybody.’”
Spicer: He’s the president, he decides, that’s what you signed up to do.
That’s one interpretation of White House service: to serve the president as the president wishes to be served, to tell the lies that the president wishes to have told. Spicer is not the only Trump veteran to have that view of the job. So does his successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. So do Kellyanne Conway and the former White House staffer Sebastian Gorka. They work for the president, they follow his orders—whatever their own interior misgivings—and they say whatever he tells them he wants said, just as his attorneys and accountants do.
(Trump surrounds himself with amoral misfits, third-tier men and women, who will do whatever he wants. His administration is a kakistocracy.)
Opponents can first hold fast against Trump, and then at suitable moments push against him forcefully, compelling his retreat. Those who band together as powerful counter-parties can overwhelm Trump and his ilk.
