;)
The Commentariat -- October 28, 2017
Trump Scandal Bonanza:
Pamela Brown, et al., of CNN: "A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter. The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are. A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment." ...
... Sharon LaFraniere & Andrew Kramer of the New York Times: "Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said.... But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia's most powerful officials, the prosecutor general Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika's office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim. The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya's account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner ... and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact -- not mere 'puffery,' as the president's son later said." ...
... Brandon Carter of the Hill: "A top donor to President Trump's 2016 election effort asked the campaign's data firm if it could help organize hacked emails released by WikiLeaks on Hillary Clinton, according to a new report. A source familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that Rebekah Mercer, a billionaire supporter of Trump, exchanged emails with Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix about the hacked emails." Mrs. McC: I'd have such a sad if a right-wing billionaire babe would up in jail for consorting with the enemy in a criminal enterprise. ...
... Ken Vogel & Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: "The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by a major Republican donor [-- hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer --] was the first to hire the firm that conducted opposition research on Donald J. Trump -- including a salacious dossier describing ties between Mr. Trump and the Russian government -- website representatives told the House Intelligence Committee on Friday. According to people briefed on the conversation, the website hired the firm, Fusion GPS, in October 2015 to unearth damaging information about several Republican presidential candidates, including Mr. Trump. But The Free Beacon told the firm to stop doing research on Mr. Trump in May 2016, as Mr. Trump was clinching the Republican nomination. In April 2016, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee also retained Fusion GPS to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia.... The Free Beacon has a history of employing so-called opposition research firms to assist in news articles critical of targets ranging from Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton." ...
... Callum Borchers of the Washington Post: "The Washington Free Beacon disclosed in congressional testimony on Friday that it is the mysterious client that initially paid for opposition research on Donald Trump performed by Fusion GPS, the firm that later worked with a former British spy to produce a dossier of claims about ties between Trump and Russia. Just three days earlier, the Free Beacon, a conservative news site founded in 2012, told its readers that before Democrats hired Fusion GPS in April 2016, the firm's work “was funded by an unknown GOP client while the primary was still going on.... President Trump and his allies have sought to cast Fusion GPS as a shadowy, illegitimate outfit that produced a 'fake' dossier. And the Free Beacon this week has published such characterizations unchallenged -- without noting that it considered Fusion GPS reliable enough to pay for its services." ...
... Michael Kranish of the Washington Post: "When Marc Elias, general counsel for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, hired a private research firm in the spring of 2016 to investigate Donald Trump, he drew from funds he was authorized to spend without oversight by campaign officials, according to a spokesperson for his law firm. The firm hired by Elias, Fusion GPS, produced research that resulted a dossier detailing alleged connections between Trump and Russia. While the funding for the work came from the campaign and the Democratic National Committee, Elias kept the information about the investigation closely held.... It is unclear who else was familiar with the arrangement [between Elias & Fusion GPS], or who knew that Fusion GPS hired a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, who wrote the dossier. Clinton has not responded to requests for comment. A spokesman for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), who was DNC chairwoman at the time Perkins Coie contracted with Fusion GPS, said the former chair was 'not aware' of the law firm's arrangement with Fusion.... Clinton campaign officials who said they were not aware of Elias's arrangement with the firm defended his decision to tap its resources.... Elias himself did not receive the dossier but was briefed on some of the information in it, according to his firm's spokesperson."
... Gloria Borger, et al., of CNN: "... Donald Trump has made it clear to the State Department that he wants to accelerate the release of any remaining Hillary Clinton emails in its possession as soon as possible, according to three sources familiar with the President's thinking. This latest move for disclosure from the State Department comes at the same time the President called upon the Justice Department to lift a gag order on a key FBI informant in an investigation into Russian efforts to gain influence in the US uranium industry during the Obama administration. The sources described the President's interest in the release of the emails -- and the testimony of the FBI informant -- as rooted in a commitment to 'transparency.'... Taken together, these two actions could accelerate recent efforts by congressional Republicans to investigate the previous administration -- new probes that they've opened as multiple Russia investigations into the Trump campaign continue on Capitol Hill." ...
... Nolan McCaskill of Politico: "... Donald Trump alleged Friday that Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia.... 'It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump,' the president wrote Friday morning. 'Was collusion with HC!' Republican lawmakers are nearing the end of their probes into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election, though it remains unclear whether they're close to concluding whether Trump associates colluded with Russians. The congressional panels plan to complete their probes by February." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Callum Borchers: "President Trump says Russia's 2010 acquisition of American uranium, approved by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and eight other agency heads, is 'Watergate, modern-age.' 'This is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair,' former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka said on Sean Hannity's Fox News show Thursday night. Hannity has dubbed the uranium deal 'the biggest scandal -- or, at least, one of them -- in American history.' Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said on CNN Friday morning that 'it's exactly what people hate about corruption and politicians and the swamp.'... The argument relies on spectacular oversimplification.... Critics are free to second-guess the [decision], but the fact that every other involved agency made the same determination as Clinton's State Department undercuts the notion that her vote was bought -- unless, of course, everybody was in Russia's pocket. That really would be one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Brian Beutler: "This week, House Republicans launched two joint investigations, spanning three congressional committees, aimed at sowing confusion about the nature of Russian influence over last year's election. This isn't liberal gloss on a series of news developments that muddy a clean scandal ensnaring ... Donald Trump. Rather, it describes a documentable, partisan effort to use the levers of government to confuse the public about a foreign conspiracy -- the subject of a federal criminal investigation -- to bolster ... Donald Trump's campaign and sabotage his rivals.... The purpose of the propaganda has changed from defaming Hillary Clinton to blurring the truth about Russia's subversion of the election, but the underlying content is the same. The facts of the matter are all out in the open, as are the ways and reasons the right manipulated those facts and has now returned to them a year later. But the press, once bitten, hasn't yet learned to be shy." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...
... Erik Wemple of the Washington Post (October 24) has the sordid details -- of the fake accusations against & phony "investigations" of Clinton. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Huh. Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post: "Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney from Virginia who gained national prominence when he took a temporary leading role in President Trump's Justice Department, has submitted his resignation. He plans to serve until a successor is confirmed.... Boente, a 33-year veteran of the Justice Department, was tapped earlier this year to serve as acting attorney general after Sally Yates was fired. He went on to serve as acting deputy attorney general. He is serving as acting assistant attorney general of the National Security Division and will remain in that post until John C. Demers, an attorney for Boeing who worked at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, is confirmed."
Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: President Trump "is conducting the most dramatic and drawn-out search for a Federal Reserve chairman in the long history of the stolid institution. Mr. Trump is very publicly deliberating between two candidates with strikingly different views about the practice and purpose of monetary policy: Jerome H. Powell, a Fed governor who has voted in favor of every Fed policy decision since 2012, and John B. Taylor, a Stanford economist who is among the Fed's most vocal critics. The president also continues to insist that he could decide to renominate the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, whose four-year term ends in February." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
** Jonathan Blitzer of the New Yorker has more on the Trump administration's attempts to deprive women of their Constitutional right to have an abortion. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Was He Lying Then or Is He Lying Now? Ella Nilsen of Vox: Sarah Sanders "is sticking by the president's assertion that the multiple women who have accused him of sexual assault and harassment over the years are lying.... On a recording taped in 2005, Trump admitted to kissing and groping women without their consent: 'I just start kissing them -- it's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy.' But Sanders's flat denial echoed one Trump made during a press conference in the Rose Garden last week, when he called the allegations 'totally fake news' and 'made-up stuff.'" ...
... Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post: "While the president dismisses this as 'fake news,' the problem for the White House is that some of these women have produced witnesses who say they heard about the incident at the time -- long before Trump made his political aspirations known."
Mark Halperin Is Seriously Creepy. Oliver Darcy of CNN: "Two days after CNN first reported that five women said 'Game Change' co-author and journalist Mark Halperin sexually harassed or assaulted them during his time at ABC News, the number of accusers has grown to at least a dozen women, including four who are now sharing their accounts for the first time. Another woman, who shared her account in CNN's initial article on the condition her name not be published, is now speaking out on the record. The new accusations from the four women include that Halperin masturbated in front of an ABC News employee in his office and that he violently threw another woman against a restaurant window before attempting to kiss her, and that after she rebuffed him he called her and told her she would never work in politics or media. The alleged incidents occurred while Halperin was in a position of significant authority at ABC News, while the women were young and had little power." ...
Andrew Kirell & Asawin Suebsaeng of the Daily Beast: " Halperin's apparently fake interest in young women's careers and very real interest in getting in their pants also extended to undergraduate students he was supposed to be enlightening.While the star pundit issued a contrite statement Friday evening claiming the misconduct ended after he left ABC News, one woman recounted to The Daily Beast a particularly uncomfortable run-in with Halperin at her alma mater in February 2011 -- years after Halperin left ABC. Katharine Glenn was then a student at Tulane University when she was a 20-year-old junior.... [Glenn allegests that a dinner party held in conjunction with his appearance at Tulane, Halperin put his hand on her upper thigh & invited her to his hotel room to 'discuss her career.'] According to two sources who were present at the time, Halperin made such inappropriate overtures to at least two female students during his swing through Tulane -- not just Glenn. In one instance, an adjunct professor .. 'intervened,' as one ex-student described, while Halperin was making unwanted advances towards a female student." ...
... ** Dana Milbank confesses his self-serving ignorance of the sexual harassment going on around him when he worked at the New Republic's boys' club. Marie: No point in coming down on Milbank. Millions of men & women -- including victims (#MeToo) -- have kept quiet, even when they were fully aware of a grossly hostile work environment. CBS News fired me when I objected, not to CBS management, but to the aggressor -- when he closed the door to his office & pulled out his penis. My harasser "told on me" to the network, & a woman from the network came to my office & fired me. When I told her what happened, she nodded & said she understood but, "You can't upset the talent." I learned my lesson, & when a male employee tried to rape me at my next job at ABC network, I escaped with help from another male employee. Neither of us told. Hostile work environment? They were all hostile when I was young. All of them.
Deficit Hawks Gone Extinct. Niv Elis of the Hill: "The GOP's tax plan would cause revenue to drop between $2.4 trillion and $2.5 trillion over the course of a decade, even after economic growth is taken into account, according to an analysis from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center." Update: See safari's comment below.
Senator Mitt? McKay Coppins of the Atlantic: "Senator Orrin Hatch has privately told allies in Utah that he is planning to retire at the end of his term next year, and if he does, Mitt Romney intends to run for his seat, according to five sources familiar with the situation."
Tim Egan: "We are retreating to our tribal, ethnic and primitively prejudicial quarters. Everything is about race and identity. We come from privilege, or oppression. We choose politicians based on whether they help our tribe or hurt People Like Us. This is President Trump's legacy. He has shattered the idea, eloquently expressed by President Barack Obama, that we are not 'irrevocably bound to a tragic past.' In the Trump era, we are neck-deep in that tragic past.... Trump opened the door to overt expressions of hatred."
Steve Schmadeke of the Chicago Tribune: "Former President Barack Obama has been called for Cook County jury duty -- and plans to serve next month, the county's chief judge said Friday. Chief Judge Tim Evans told county commissioners during a budget hearing that Obama, who owns homes in Washington, D.C., and Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, will serve next month."
Beyond the Beltway
AND Justice for All. The South Is Still Officially the Confederacy: Radley Balko of the Washington Post reports on a horrifying story of the Mississippi "justice system": a judge took the infant child of a young mother of color from her & ordered that the mother have no visitation rights because she had "abandoned" her child when she was incarcerated for nonpayment of minor fines after a car in which she & the newborn were passengers (the baby was in a carseat) in a car stopped for a traffic violation. The MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi intervened on behalf of the mother. "The good news is that the judge has now resigned and the youth court in Pearl, Miss., has been closed. But this clearly goes beyond a single judge. A police officer detained someone, causing her to be separated from her newborn, over unpaid misdemeanors. The officer then claimed she had abandoned the baby, despite the fact that it was the officer's actions, not hers, that left the child without a parent." (Also linked yesterday.)
Way Beyond
Raphael Minder & Patrick Kingsley of the New York Times: "In a major escalation of Spain's territorial conflict, the Spanish Senate on Friday authorized the government to take direct control of the fractious region of Catalonia, just after Catalan lawmakers declared the region's independence. The dueling actions set up a potential showdown over the weekend, as Spain careened into its greatest constitutional crisis since it embraced democracy in 1978. The Senate voted 214 to 47 to invoke Article 155 of Spain's Constitution, granting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy a package of extraordinary powers to suppress Catalonia's independence drive. The measure will go into effect after it is published in the government register, which is expected to happen Friday night."
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Reader Comments (12)
Re: "Deficit Hawks Gone Extinct"
I believe it's much more likely, "Deficit Hawks Go Into Hibernation Until Next Democratic Administration".
@safari: Right you are.
Not a peep about Mueller or indictments on the WaPo or NYT websites. Maybe it really is too good to be true.
@Rockygirl: The Wall Street Journal seems to have an independent story -- i.e., not one not based on CNN's reporting -- so I'm guessing it's true. I'd also guess the indictment doesn't touch Trump.
Sexual harassment is so rampant on Capitol Hill that the U.S. treasury has paid out millions to settle complaints:
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/145538/course-congress-huge-sexual-harassment-problem-too
@Marie: Your own story was hard to read–-infuriating. Sorry you had to experience what evidently millions of women have.
Bea - baby steps ...
“Journey of a thousand miles” and all that ...
I'm confused. Accusations of sexual misconduct have resulted in men, all over the place, losing jobs. But on a case with a whopping 16 accusers and and a recording of admission of guilt, nothing.
Cowardice made easy by misogyny.
And now that the Border Patrol has locked up a 10 year old with cerebral palsy, America is safe. And just think of that job she could have stolen.
Today's Egan nicely follows Lilla's argument in "The Once and Future Liberal" which I mentioned earlier this week.
Thank goodness for reasonable people. Just once quibble with Egan. He seconds Gingrich's observation that the Pretender "intuits how the can polarize."
This gives the Pretender far too much credit. The Pretender is not thinking and not intuiting. He's not calculating. All the lies and nastiness he spouts rise naturally from his urge to win, to dominate and from the bottomless store of resentment he feels for all those millions who question or are unwilling to acknowledge his superiority.
I'm guessing he truly hates every one of us. It's all personal with the Pretender, and that's what makes him very dangerous.
Marie: I'm so sorry about your experiences with men at the networks. I don't know that I remember having experiences like that-- I would be a mess. I still remember an obscene phone call I received in the early 70s, and I'm sure I was a random victim. I was younger and stupid-- I probably made it possible for him to pretend to be someone I knew-- but it was just a phone call. I was flashed one time on the U of I campus, the classic open-the-raincoat thing, but he ran when I didn't ooh and aah, so I went on about my business. I can't imagine how I would have coped with experiences like yours. Hooray for your stalwartness...
Dunno if I was oblivious or just plain lucky, but while I did encounter certain creeps during my working days among corporate types...not one of them ever sunk to the level of bad behaviors that I read about now.
WTF did/do these harassers think they had a right to do...actions so despicable and disgusting that it is stunning it has taken so long for all this to emerge. Over the years I knew of certain 'womanizers,' but never heard of anything that even hinted at someone masturbating publicly/privately (did the jerk consider that it would be a turn on?) or what gives with massage crap?
One jerk who I observed was a grandfatherly type who often paraded his daughter and adorable grandkids in front of co-workers, and he had always had a fake, jokey sexual patter going on with the women who worked there...but, it was his subconscious (was it?) habit of publicly adjusting his manhood that was especially despicable. Jeebus. The admissions from Halperin; et al, indicate the Male Chauvinist Pig from the 70's never went away.
On another subject, will be watching for the indictments to be announced. Who comes first? Manafort? Flynn?