It is becoming clearer that there are currently two different versions of America. The White House and Trump supporters are trying to pretend that the world Trump continually tweets about is real, while the rest of the country is proving that reality doesn’t much care about the fictions Trump is peddling.
Today began with Trump frantic-tweeting, and those tweets were an impressionistic picture of how he hopes to win voters. He defended his performance in combatting what he called “new China Virus” cases, touted the strong stock market, and warned that “if you want your 401k’s and Stocks, which are getting close to an all time high…, to disintegrate and disappear, vote for the Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats and Corrupt Joe Biden. Massive Tax Hikes—They will make you very poor, FAST!”
He tweeted “China has caused great damage to the United States and the rest of the world,” then attacked Black race car driver Bubba Wallace for the discovery of a noose in his garage (it was not Wallace who discovered it) and NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag. He complained that “the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct. Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry right now.”
Then he defended his handling of the coronavirus, and once again insisted that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for Covid-19. He tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” and said that Democrats opposed reopening the schools “for political reasons, not for health reasons! They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!” Finally, he boasted that his border wall “is moving fast in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. Great numbers at the Southern Border. Dems want people to just flow in. They want very dangerous open Borders!”
This frantic tweeting offered racism, attacks on Democrats, hopeful economic news, and Trump’s signature border wall (which has cost more than $3.6 billion already, for about 120 miles of wall, most of it replacing older fencing). It was a narrative tailor-made for Trump’s base.
Looming over Trump’s portrayal of his version of America, though, was the coronavirus. While other advanced countries have gotten the virus under control and are cautiously beginning to reopen, we are moving the opposite direction. As of today, we have almost 3 million confirmed cases and more than 130,000 deaths. In a number of states, especially in the South, cases are hitting new highs. Europe has banned American visitors, and Mexico and Canada have both closed their border with the U.S. Rather than trying to stop the crisis, the White House is launching new messaging about the coronavirus: “Learn to live with it.”
Trump is doubling down on the idea that the United States must simply reopen, and take the resulting deaths as a cost of doing business. Three people who have been privy to administration thinking about the issue told reporters for the Washington Post that officials are hoping “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.” Advisors have urged Trump to try to avoid responsibility for the administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic by simply blaming China for it. Their goal is to try to repair the economy before the election, recognizing that economic recovery is the only way to make up the gap between Trump’s poll numbers and those of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, governors who reopened their states before cases had begun to decline significantly are now backpedaling. Texas governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order last Thursday requiring masks in more than half of the state’s hardest hit counties; Georgia Governor Brian Kemp asked Georgians to wear masks; Florida’s Miami-Dade County closed gyms, party venues, and ballrooms; and California closed beaches in Orange County over the holiday weekend. Washington state has stopped its reopening process for at least two weeks and is requiring face masks; Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have issued travel advisories requiring people coming from fifteen states experiencing Covid-19 spikes to self-quarantine for fourteen days.
But Trump is barreling ahead as if fears of the coronavirus are illegitimate. He is insisting that public schools must reopen for the fall on schedule, with no plan for doing so safely: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” Today, Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran called for this plan exactly, issuing an executive order for all Florida K-12 schools to reopen in August. Florida set the national record for the most new coronavirus cases in a single day—11,458—two days ago.
Today, just as colleges and universities are trying to figure out how to manage their fall classes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that foreign students have to leave the country if their universities go to on-line instruction in the fall. The decision appears to be designed to pressure schools to resume face-to-face instruction or lose their foreign students, who pay the full tuition that most American students do not.
Urging Americans to plow headfirst into a deadly crisis that is racking up horrific numbers of dead is an unprecedented abdication of presidential leadership. It is hard to imagine what the endgame is, because it seems unlikely that Americans will, in fact, become numb to rising numbers of dead. Trump has suggested that there will be a vaccine sooner than we think, and perhaps he hopes such a miracle will win him goodwill to overcome our horror at the national death toll (there is even some speculation that he will announce one falsely as part of his “October surprise” before the election).
But the observations of his briefers that he cannot hear anything that does not conform to his worldview have stuck with me as I thought about this today. Perhaps he doesn’t have an endgame at all; he is simply making a gamble that the virus will magically go away, as he has suggested. It strikes me that, until now, he has always been able to get away with ignoring reality in favor of his worldview. The coronavirus, though, can’t be bullied or flattered, and it certainly cannot be ignored.
-The Goat- 7/6
Today began with Trump frantic-tweeting, and those tweets were an impressionistic picture of how he hopes to win voters. He defended his performance in combatting what he called “new China Virus” cases, touted the strong stock market, and warned that “if you want your 401k’s and Stocks, which are getting close to an all time high…, to disintegrate and disappear, vote for the Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats and Corrupt Joe Biden. Massive Tax Hikes—They will make you very poor, FAST!”
He tweeted “China has caused great damage to the United States and the rest of the world,” then attacked Black race car driver Bubba Wallace for the discovery of a noose in his garage (it was not Wallace who discovered it) and NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag. He complained that “the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct. Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry right now.”
Then he defended his handling of the coronavirus, and once again insisted that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for Covid-19. He tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” and said that Democrats opposed reopening the schools “for political reasons, not for health reasons! They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!” Finally, he boasted that his border wall “is moving fast in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. Great numbers at the Southern Border. Dems want people to just flow in. They want very dangerous open Borders!”
This frantic tweeting offered racism, attacks on Democrats, hopeful economic news, and Trump’s signature border wall (which has cost more than $3.6 billion already, for about 120 miles of wall, most of it replacing older fencing). It was a narrative tailor-made for Trump’s base.
Looming over Trump’s portrayal of his version of America, though, was the coronavirus. While other advanced countries have gotten the virus under control and are cautiously beginning to reopen, we are moving the opposite direction. As of today, we have almost 3 million confirmed cases and more than 130,000 deaths. In a number of states, especially in the South, cases are hitting new highs. Europe has banned American visitors, and Mexico and Canada have both closed their border with the U.S. Rather than trying to stop the crisis, the White House is launching new messaging about the coronavirus: “Learn to live with it.”
Trump is doubling down on the idea that the United States must simply reopen, and take the resulting deaths as a cost of doing business. Three people who have been privy to administration thinking about the issue told reporters for the Washington Post that officials are hoping “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.” Advisors have urged Trump to try to avoid responsibility for the administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic by simply blaming China for it. Their goal is to try to repair the economy before the election, recognizing that economic recovery is the only way to make up the gap between Trump’s poll numbers and those of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, governors who reopened their states before cases had begun to decline significantly are now backpedaling. Texas governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order last Thursday requiring masks in more than half of the state’s hardest hit counties; Georgia Governor Brian Kemp asked Georgians to wear masks; Florida’s Miami-Dade County closed gyms, party venues, and ballrooms; and California closed beaches in Orange County over the holiday weekend. Washington state has stopped its reopening process for at least two weeks and is requiring face masks; Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have issued travel advisories requiring people coming from fifteen states experiencing Covid-19 spikes to self-quarantine for fourteen days.
But Trump is barreling ahead as if fears of the coronavirus are illegitimate. He is insisting that public schools must reopen for the fall on schedule, with no plan for doing so safely: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” Today, Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran called for this plan exactly, issuing an executive order for all Florida K-12 schools to reopen in August. Florida set the national record for the most new coronavirus cases in a single day—11,458—two days ago.
Today, just as colleges and universities are trying to figure out how to manage their fall classes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that foreign students have to leave the country if their universities go to on-line instruction in the fall. The decision appears to be designed to pressure schools to resume face-to-face instruction or lose their foreign students, who pay the full tuition that most American students do not.
Urging Americans to plow headfirst into a deadly crisis that is racking up horrific numbers of dead is an unprecedented abdication of presidential leadership. It is hard to imagine what the endgame is, because it seems unlikely that Americans will, in fact, become numb to rising numbers of dead. Trump has suggested that there will be a vaccine sooner than we think, and perhaps he hopes such a miracle will win him goodwill to overcome our horror at the national death toll (there is even some speculation that he will announce one falsely as part of his “October surprise” before the election).
But the observations of his briefers that he cannot hear anything that does not conform to his worldview have stuck with me as I thought about this today. Perhaps he doesn’t have an endgame at all; he is simply making a gamble that the virus will magically go away, as he has suggested. It strikes me that, until now, he has always been able to get away with ignoring reality in favor of his worldview. The coronavirus, though, can’t be bullied or flattered, and it certainly cannot be ignored.
-The Goat- 7/6
It is becoming clearer that there are currently two different versions of America. The White House and Trump supporters are trying to pretend that the world Trump continually tweets about is real, while the rest of the country is proving that reality doesn’t much care about the fictions Trump is peddling.
Probably the truest most documented thing I’ve ever heard
Becoming VERY CLEAR for everyone who doesn’t have trumps dick in their mouth when they try to speak
Probably the truest most documented thing I’ve ever heard
Becoming VERY CLEAR for everyone who doesn’t have trumps dick in their mouth when they try to speak
Today’s news starts with the resignation of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the military after more than 21 years, citing the “campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” led by the president for his decision to leave the public service.
Vindman was a key witness in the House of Representatives impeachment hearing last year. A Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, he had been on the July 25, 2019 call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. After hearing the call, Vindman had reported to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, that the call was troubling, with Trump pressing Zelensky to deliver an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of potential rival Joe Biden, in exchange for promised military aid to Ukraine so it could resist Russian incursions. Eisenberg told Vindman not to tell anyone else about the conversation.
Vindman’s opening statement before Congress recalled the American dream. He explained that his father, who had brought Vindman and his twin brother Eugene from Ukraine when they were three, was afraid to have his son testify against the president. Vindman assured him it would be okay. “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth,” Vindman said he told his father, “because this is America, this is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”
After Vindman’s testimony, he was ousted from the National Security Council, and his twin brother Eugene, a senior lawyer and ethics official for the NSC who had not been involved in the impeachment hearings, was also fired, escorted off White House grounds “suddenly and without explanation,” according to Alexander’s lawyer David Pressman. The two men were fired on the same day Trump told reporters that he was “not happy” with Vindman’s testimony.
Vindman’s resignation is a poignant reminder of how much we are losing during this presidency.
The other big news of the day is the administration’s continuing pressure on states to reopen the schools in the fall, even as coronavirus infections climb. The U.S. has now had more than 3 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, and more than 130,000 deaths. Today, the U.S. reported more than 60,000 new cases, which was the biggest increase ever reported by any country in a single day. Florida reported nearly 10,000 new cases; Texas reported more than 9,500, and California reported more than 8,500 new infections.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said that Trump’s campaign rally there in late June “likely contributed” the recent dramatic surge in coronavirus cases in the state. Observers are already worried about the Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle rally in August, which usually draws about a half a million people, and which, as of today, is still going forward.
Just hours after Trump’s attack on the guidelines about school reopenings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today, the CDC announced it would issue new guidelines. “I disagree with [the CDC] n their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools,” Trump tweeted. Vice President Mike Pence later explained: "What the president was saying this morning is, that if there are aspects of the CDC’s recommendations that are prescriptive, or that serve as a barrier to kids getting back to school, we want governors and local officials and education leaders to know that we're here to work with them…. Every American knows that we can safely reopen our schools."
But, in fact, as coronavirus infections spike, most Americans are not convinced we can safely reopen our schools. The University of North Carolina today suspended football training after 37 players and staff tested positive for coronavirus, and today the Ivy League universities announced they will not hold fall sports this year. The latest coronavirus models suggest that the U.S. will have more than 200,000 dead by November.
The administration’s ferocious emphasis on school reopenings is so extreme that it looks increasingly to me like a distraction from something else. Just what that something else might be is unclear. The two top candidates are tomorrow’s decisions from the Supreme Court about whether or not Congress or a state prosecutor can subpoena the president’s financial records, or the Russia bounty scandal.
If I had to bet, I’d say it is the latter from which Trump has been trying to draw attention over the past week. Today, law professor Ryan Goodman of the national security website JustSecurity published evidence that the Trump administration looked the other way when it learned Russia was arming Taliban fighters, and has consistently pressed for more cooperation with Russia without getting anything in return. Goodman's is only the latest in stories linking this administration to Putin.
And for all this news, today was a dull day compared to what we expect tomorrow. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs will be holding a hearing on why the administration hasn’t responded to the story about Russian bounties on U.S. troops. The House Judiciary Committee will hear from ousted U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman behind closed doors, as they ask him about Attorney General Barr’s politicization of the Department of Justice.
And most significant, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision on two cases having to do with whether or not Trump’s finances can be subpoenaed while he is in office. Legal observers believe the cases will not go Trump’s way.
-HCR -7/8
Vindman was a key witness in the House of Representatives impeachment hearing last year. A Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, he had been on the July 25, 2019 call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. After hearing the call, Vindman had reported to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, that the call was troubling, with Trump pressing Zelensky to deliver an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of potential rival Joe Biden, in exchange for promised military aid to Ukraine so it could resist Russian incursions. Eisenberg told Vindman not to tell anyone else about the conversation.
Vindman’s opening statement before Congress recalled the American dream. He explained that his father, who had brought Vindman and his twin brother Eugene from Ukraine when they were three, was afraid to have his son testify against the president. Vindman assured him it would be okay. “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth,” Vindman said he told his father, “because this is America, this is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”
After Vindman’s testimony, he was ousted from the National Security Council, and his twin brother Eugene, a senior lawyer and ethics official for the NSC who had not been involved in the impeachment hearings, was also fired, escorted off White House grounds “suddenly and without explanation,” according to Alexander’s lawyer David Pressman. The two men were fired on the same day Trump told reporters that he was “not happy” with Vindman’s testimony.
Vindman’s resignation is a poignant reminder of how much we are losing during this presidency.
The other big news of the day is the administration’s continuing pressure on states to reopen the schools in the fall, even as coronavirus infections climb. The U.S. has now had more than 3 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, and more than 130,000 deaths. Today, the U.S. reported more than 60,000 new cases, which was the biggest increase ever reported by any country in a single day. Florida reported nearly 10,000 new cases; Texas reported more than 9,500, and California reported more than 8,500 new infections.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said that Trump’s campaign rally there in late June “likely contributed” the recent dramatic surge in coronavirus cases in the state. Observers are already worried about the Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle rally in August, which usually draws about a half a million people, and which, as of today, is still going forward.
Just hours after Trump’s attack on the guidelines about school reopenings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today, the CDC announced it would issue new guidelines. “I disagree with [the CDC] n their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools,” Trump tweeted. Vice President Mike Pence later explained: "What the president was saying this morning is, that if there are aspects of the CDC’s recommendations that are prescriptive, or that serve as a barrier to kids getting back to school, we want governors and local officials and education leaders to know that we're here to work with them…. Every American knows that we can safely reopen our schools."
But, in fact, as coronavirus infections spike, most Americans are not convinced we can safely reopen our schools. The University of North Carolina today suspended football training after 37 players and staff tested positive for coronavirus, and today the Ivy League universities announced they will not hold fall sports this year. The latest coronavirus models suggest that the U.S. will have more than 200,000 dead by November.
The administration’s ferocious emphasis on school reopenings is so extreme that it looks increasingly to me like a distraction from something else. Just what that something else might be is unclear. The two top candidates are tomorrow’s decisions from the Supreme Court about whether or not Congress or a state prosecutor can subpoena the president’s financial records, or the Russia bounty scandal.
If I had to bet, I’d say it is the latter from which Trump has been trying to draw attention over the past week. Today, law professor Ryan Goodman of the national security website JustSecurity published evidence that the Trump administration looked the other way when it learned Russia was arming Taliban fighters, and has consistently pressed for more cooperation with Russia without getting anything in return. Goodman's is only the latest in stories linking this administration to Putin.
And for all this news, today was a dull day compared to what we expect tomorrow. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs will be holding a hearing on why the administration hasn’t responded to the story about Russian bounties on U.S. troops. The House Judiciary Committee will hear from ousted U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman behind closed doors, as they ask him about Attorney General Barr’s politicization of the Department of Justice.
And most significant, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision on two cases having to do with whether or not Trump’s finances can be subpoenaed while he is in office. Legal observers believe the cases will not go Trump’s way.
-HCR -7/8
Tonight’s news dump felt different to me, as if Trump has realized that he is in trouble in the upcoming election, and rather than trying to court the independent voters he needs to win reelection honestly, is focusing instead on doing all he can to protect himself from indictments and to charge up his base.
First, though, while there is much political news, the biggest story remains the coronavirus. Today the U.S. had more than 68,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day, the seventh single-day record in the last 11 days. Yesterday’s number—also a record—was 59,886. Our death toll has topped 136,000, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top advisor to the president on the coronavirus, says he hasn’t briefed the president in two months, and is not being allowed on television because of his dire warnings about the pandemic.
The Republican governors of Florida, Arizona, and Texas, where infections are spiking, are caught between the reality of the virus and Republican ideology.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has been refusing to release data on hospitalizations, but the state today revealed that there are almost 7000 Floridians in Florida hospitals, sick with Covid-19. Florida is now one of the world’s epicenters for the disease, but DeSantis says he will not slow the state’s reopening.
In Arizona, now leading the U.S. in the growth of new Covid-19 cases with 4,221 new cases today, Governor Doug Ducey has ordered bars, movie theaters, gyms, and water parks closed to stop the spread of the virus. Bar owners are suing him.
And in Texas, where Houston hospitals have run out of room for more patients and are turning them away, county Republican parties have voted to censure Governor Greg Abbott for requiring face masks to slow the spread of the virus. They say such an order is government overreach.
Now politics: Today Attorney General William Barr, who is packing the Department of Justice with his own loyalists, announced the appointment of a new U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Seth D. DuCharme will take over for Richard P. Donoghue, who will move to the main Justice Department to oversee investigations around the country. Both men are close to Barr. DuCharme has been working with John Durham, whom Barr has tapped to try to undermine the evidence in the Mueller Report. The EDNY has been investigating irregularities in the financing of Trump’s inauguration festivities.
In any normal era, this unusual change would be the day’s major story, but it was eclipsed today by the news that Trump has commuted the sentence of his friend and associate Roger Stone, who was supposed to surrender on Tuesday to serve a 40-month sentence. A jury convicted Stone of obstructing Congress, lying to investigators, and tampering with a witness. When Trump insisted that Stone was being persecuted for his politics, the judge in his case, Amy Berman Jackson, answered that Stone “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
Nonetheless, Trump continued to attack Stone’s conviction. First, Barr’s Department of Justice abruptly reduced its recommended sentence for Stone against the wishes of the career prosecutors who handled Stone's case. That led to a crisis in the DOJ, as the four prosecutors quit the case.
When Jackson handed down a 40-month sentence, Trump turned against the jury that had convicted Stone, insisting without evidence that the forewoman was a biased anti-Trump activist who had tainted the jury. The judge shot down that argument, pointing out that Stone’s lawyers had not challenged her status when they could have, but, identified by Trump supporters, the forewoman—who had, after all, been doing her civic duty-- became a target.
Stone’s legal troubles stemmed from his attempt to be the go-between who funneled stolen emails from Wikileaks, a front for Russian intelligence, to the 2016 Trump campaign. But his connection to Trump is much longer and deeper: the men have known each other for many years, and it was Stone who brought his former associate Paul Manafort onto Trump’s campaign in summer 2016. Manafort was fresh from advising the political career of a Russia-linked oligarch in Ukraine, and was present at the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016 when Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner met with Russian agents. Manafort turned the flagging campaign around, and if there are skeletons in the campaign closet, it is likely that Stone would know of at least some of them.
This afternoon, before the announcement, NBC news correspondent Howard Fineman tweeted “Just had a long talk with [Roger Stone]. He says he doesn’t want a pardon (which implies guilt) but a commutation, and says he thinks [Trump] will give it to him. 'He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.'”
This statement indicates, of course, that Trump is hiding criminal behavior, and that his commutation of Stone’s sentence is a bribe to keep him quiet. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) sure saw it that way: “This is, like, super simple, right? Stone had info that would have put Trump in jail. He told Trump he'd obstruct justice if he got clemency. Trump agreed. If you think it went down another way, you haven't been paying attention to the last 40 years of Donald Trump,” he tweeted.
It is interesting that Trump did not pardon Stone, but rather commuted his sentence. A presidential pardon takes away a person’s right to stay silent in court under the right established by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not to self-incriminate. It does so because there is no need to worry about conviction: you've been pardoned. A commutation does not take away that right, so Stone now cannot be compelled to testify.
There is widespread condemnation of this commutation, and yesterday even the DOJ said it supported Stone’s imprisonment. But Trump clearly doesn’t care. His long statement upon issuing the grant of clemency was a rehash of his usual accusations about “the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump presidency.”
It was red meat for his base, and that appears to be what’s on the menu these days. Today Trump hit at educators, a traditional target of the right: “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status… and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!” he tweeted.
And yesterday we learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to offer a six-day “citizens academy” course to train people in what ICE does, including the arrest of immigrants. “You have been identified as a valued member of the community who may have interest in participating in the inaugural class of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Chicago Citizens Academy,” read a letter from ICE Chicago Field Office Director Robert Guadian. The program will “serve as a pilot for nationwide implementation,” it said. The course will include training in “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization and targeted arrests,” according to the letter, although when asked about it, ICE spokeperson Nicole Alberico said “The goal is to build bridges with the community by offering a day-in-the-life perspective of a federal law enforcement agency.”
Finally, there was news about one of Trump’s favorite Fox News Channel shows, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Today, Carlson’s chief writer, Blake Neff, had to step down when it came out that for years he had been posting vile racist, homophobic, and sexist language on an online forum of like-minded fellow-travelers.
It appears there was at least some overlap between what Neff posted on the forum and what appeared on Carlson’s show.
-HCR - 7/10
First, though, while there is much political news, the biggest story remains the coronavirus. Today the U.S. had more than 68,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day, the seventh single-day record in the last 11 days. Yesterday’s number—also a record—was 59,886. Our death toll has topped 136,000, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top advisor to the president on the coronavirus, says he hasn’t briefed the president in two months, and is not being allowed on television because of his dire warnings about the pandemic.
The Republican governors of Florida, Arizona, and Texas, where infections are spiking, are caught between the reality of the virus and Republican ideology.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has been refusing to release data on hospitalizations, but the state today revealed that there are almost 7000 Floridians in Florida hospitals, sick with Covid-19. Florida is now one of the world’s epicenters for the disease, but DeSantis says he will not slow the state’s reopening.
In Arizona, now leading the U.S. in the growth of new Covid-19 cases with 4,221 new cases today, Governor Doug Ducey has ordered bars, movie theaters, gyms, and water parks closed to stop the spread of the virus. Bar owners are suing him.
And in Texas, where Houston hospitals have run out of room for more patients and are turning them away, county Republican parties have voted to censure Governor Greg Abbott for requiring face masks to slow the spread of the virus. They say such an order is government overreach.
Now politics: Today Attorney General William Barr, who is packing the Department of Justice with his own loyalists, announced the appointment of a new U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Seth D. DuCharme will take over for Richard P. Donoghue, who will move to the main Justice Department to oversee investigations around the country. Both men are close to Barr. DuCharme has been working with John Durham, whom Barr has tapped to try to undermine the evidence in the Mueller Report. The EDNY has been investigating irregularities in the financing of Trump’s inauguration festivities.
In any normal era, this unusual change would be the day’s major story, but it was eclipsed today by the news that Trump has commuted the sentence of his friend and associate Roger Stone, who was supposed to surrender on Tuesday to serve a 40-month sentence. A jury convicted Stone of obstructing Congress, lying to investigators, and tampering with a witness. When Trump insisted that Stone was being persecuted for his politics, the judge in his case, Amy Berman Jackson, answered that Stone “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
Nonetheless, Trump continued to attack Stone’s conviction. First, Barr’s Department of Justice abruptly reduced its recommended sentence for Stone against the wishes of the career prosecutors who handled Stone's case. That led to a crisis in the DOJ, as the four prosecutors quit the case.
When Jackson handed down a 40-month sentence, Trump turned against the jury that had convicted Stone, insisting without evidence that the forewoman was a biased anti-Trump activist who had tainted the jury. The judge shot down that argument, pointing out that Stone’s lawyers had not challenged her status when they could have, but, identified by Trump supporters, the forewoman—who had, after all, been doing her civic duty-- became a target.
Stone’s legal troubles stemmed from his attempt to be the go-between who funneled stolen emails from Wikileaks, a front for Russian intelligence, to the 2016 Trump campaign. But his connection to Trump is much longer and deeper: the men have known each other for many years, and it was Stone who brought his former associate Paul Manafort onto Trump’s campaign in summer 2016. Manafort was fresh from advising the political career of a Russia-linked oligarch in Ukraine, and was present at the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016 when Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner met with Russian agents. Manafort turned the flagging campaign around, and if there are skeletons in the campaign closet, it is likely that Stone would know of at least some of them.
This afternoon, before the announcement, NBC news correspondent Howard Fineman tweeted “Just had a long talk with [Roger Stone]. He says he doesn’t want a pardon (which implies guilt) but a commutation, and says he thinks [Trump] will give it to him. 'He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.'”
This statement indicates, of course, that Trump is hiding criminal behavior, and that his commutation of Stone’s sentence is a bribe to keep him quiet. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) sure saw it that way: “This is, like, super simple, right? Stone had info that would have put Trump in jail. He told Trump he'd obstruct justice if he got clemency. Trump agreed. If you think it went down another way, you haven't been paying attention to the last 40 years of Donald Trump,” he tweeted.
It is interesting that Trump did not pardon Stone, but rather commuted his sentence. A presidential pardon takes away a person’s right to stay silent in court under the right established by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not to self-incriminate. It does so because there is no need to worry about conviction: you've been pardoned. A commutation does not take away that right, so Stone now cannot be compelled to testify.
There is widespread condemnation of this commutation, and yesterday even the DOJ said it supported Stone’s imprisonment. But Trump clearly doesn’t care. His long statement upon issuing the grant of clemency was a rehash of his usual accusations about “the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump presidency.”
It was red meat for his base, and that appears to be what’s on the menu these days. Today Trump hit at educators, a traditional target of the right: “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status… and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!” he tweeted.
And yesterday we learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to offer a six-day “citizens academy” course to train people in what ICE does, including the arrest of immigrants. “You have been identified as a valued member of the community who may have interest in participating in the inaugural class of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Chicago Citizens Academy,” read a letter from ICE Chicago Field Office Director Robert Guadian. The program will “serve as a pilot for nationwide implementation,” it said. The course will include training in “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization and targeted arrests,” according to the letter, although when asked about it, ICE spokeperson Nicole Alberico said “The goal is to build bridges with the community by offering a day-in-the-life perspective of a federal law enforcement agency.”
Finally, there was news about one of Trump’s favorite Fox News Channel shows, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Today, Carlson’s chief writer, Blake Neff, had to step down when it came out that for years he had been posting vile racist, homophobic, and sexist language on an online forum of like-minded fellow-travelers.
It appears there was at least some overlap between what Neff posted on the forum and what appeared on Carlson’s show.
-HCR - 7/10
The big news today was the administration’s escalating insistence that our public schools must reopen on schedule for the fall. Today, on “Fox News Sunday,” Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told Chris Wallace (who is one of the Fox News Channel’s actual reporters), “We know that children contract and have the virus at far lower incidence than any other part of the population, and we know that other countries around the world have reopened their schools and have done so successfully and safely."
Wallace asked her if it was fair to compare countries that have as few as 20 new cases a day with the U.S., which is currently seeing 68,000. DeVos dodged the question.
She vowed to cut off federal funding for public schools that do not reopen. Wallace asked “Under what authority are you and the president going to unilaterally cut off funding, funding that's been approved from Congress and most of the money goes to disadvantaged students or students with disabilities?" “You can’t do that,” he continued.
Then DeVos said something interesting: "Look, American investment in education is a promise to students and their families. If schools aren't going to reopen and not fulfill that promise, they shouldn't get the funds, and give it to the families to decide to go to a school that is going to meet that promise,” she said.
This is the best explanation I've seen for why the administration is so keen on opening up the schools. DeVos is not an educator or trained in education or school administration. She is a billionaire Republican donor and former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. She is a staunch proponent of privatizing the public school system, replacing our public schools with charter schools, as her wealthy family managed to do with great success in Michigan, which has been flooded with low-performing charter schools, which have very little oversight.
It seems she is hoping to use the coronavirus pandemic to privatize education across the nation.
Indeed, the administration has responded to the pandemic by continuing its assault on the activist government Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats put into place in the 1930s, and on which we have come to rely.
FDR’s New Deal and, after it, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s similar Middle Way, used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, like roads and bridges. But that government has been under siege ever since it was built by men eager to get rid of government regulation and the taxes necessary to provide a social safety net and infrastructure. In their view, returning the government to the form it took before the 1930s will allow a few wealthy men to dominate society without government interference, thus protecting their liberty and permitting those who know best how to run the country to be in charge.
Since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office promising to scale back the federal government, Republican leaders have promised to cut regulation and taxes, and to return power to individuals to arrange their lives as they see fit. But they have never entirely managed to eradicate the New Deal government.
When he took office, Trump set out to do what those before him had not. He has left offices unfilled, slashed regulations and taxes, and did all he could to privatize the functions of the U.S. government.
The administration’s response to the pandemic highlighted the attempt to replace government functions with private efforts. Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of managing the crisis, and Kushner promptly created a task force of young people from venture capital and private equity firms. With no experience in emergency preparation and no contacts in the relevant industries, the volunteers on the task force were ineffectual, simply gumming up the efforts of the career officials whom they were trying to replace.
Notably, when states turned to the federal government to help direct the national response, Trump turned them away, telling them to manage on their own. At the same time, Project Airbridge, the new federal system designed to get critical supplies to the states, used the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to fly supplies to the U.S., but then turned them over to private distributors to get them to their customers. This public-private partnership, as the administration called it, frustrated state governors whose incoming supplies were sometimes confiscated for redistribution to places the administration deemed more urgent.
After the first coronavirus bills shored up the economy, Trump began to talk of tax cuts for businesses and investors, arguing—as has been Republican orthodoxy since Reagan—that tax cuts will stimulate the economy (although there is no evidence that this is the case). States and cities and towns are reeling from the loss of tax dollars, but Republicans have been reluctant to support them, apparently hoping to permit them to declare bankruptcy. This has been a long-term plan on the part of Republican leaders, for in a bankruptcy restructuring, the social safety nets of Democratic states like New York could be slashed.
Not helping local governments through this crisis will also cut public school funding.
And finally, with the support and encouragement of the administration, Republicans are downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus to urge children back to school and their parents back to work. Today, White House officials started trying to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the president’s leading advisors on the pandemic. Fauci has warned that the country is not doing enough to shut down infections, and that things will get worse if we don’t. Unless the economy regains traction, we are facing extraordinary economic dislocation that can only be addressed with the social safety net the Republicans want to get rid of altogether.
In all of this, the administration sounds much like that of President Herbert Hoover who, when faced with the calamity of the Great Depression, largely rejected calls for government aid to starving and displaced families, and instead trusted businessmen to restart the economy. To the extent relief was necessary, he wanted states and towns to cover it. Anything else would destroy American individualism, he insisted.
But by 1932, the same Americans who had supported Hoover in 1928 in a landslide recognized that his ideology had led the nation to catastrophe and then offered no way out. They rallied around Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who worked together with Congress to create an entirely new form of national government, one that had been unthinkable just four years before.
Last week, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden explicitly echoed the dynamic of the 1932 election, highlighting the economy and economic opportunity. His policy paper reads: “Even before COVID-19, the Trump Administration was pursuing economic policies that rewarded wealth over work and corporations over working families. Too many families were struggling to make ends meet and too many parents were worried about the economic future for their children. And, Black and Latino Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and women have never been welcomed as full participants in the economy.“
Biden’s economic plan for the country is, according to his campaign, the “largest mobilization of public investments in procurement, infrastructure, and R&D since World War II.” Called “Build Back Better,” the plan calls for investment in infrastructure and R&D to revitalize high-paying American industries and bring critical American supply chains back home. He calls for a revival of trade unions—gutted after 1981—and higher wages, as well as higher taxes on corporations (although not to the levels they were at before Trump’s tax cuts).
The document is a strong one politically, undercutting both Trump’s “America First” language and promising concrete policies for voters suffering in the Republican economy. But it is interesting as well for how clearly it marks a return to a vision of a government that stops privileging an elite few, and instead works to level the economic playing field among all Americans.
-HCR- 7/12
Wallace asked her if it was fair to compare countries that have as few as 20 new cases a day with the U.S., which is currently seeing 68,000. DeVos dodged the question.
She vowed to cut off federal funding for public schools that do not reopen. Wallace asked “Under what authority are you and the president going to unilaterally cut off funding, funding that's been approved from Congress and most of the money goes to disadvantaged students or students with disabilities?" “You can’t do that,” he continued.
Then DeVos said something interesting: "Look, American investment in education is a promise to students and their families. If schools aren't going to reopen and not fulfill that promise, they shouldn't get the funds, and give it to the families to decide to go to a school that is going to meet that promise,” she said.
This is the best explanation I've seen for why the administration is so keen on opening up the schools. DeVos is not an educator or trained in education or school administration. She is a billionaire Republican donor and former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. She is a staunch proponent of privatizing the public school system, replacing our public schools with charter schools, as her wealthy family managed to do with great success in Michigan, which has been flooded with low-performing charter schools, which have very little oversight.
It seems she is hoping to use the coronavirus pandemic to privatize education across the nation.
Indeed, the administration has responded to the pandemic by continuing its assault on the activist government Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats put into place in the 1930s, and on which we have come to rely.
FDR’s New Deal and, after it, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s similar Middle Way, used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, like roads and bridges. But that government has been under siege ever since it was built by men eager to get rid of government regulation and the taxes necessary to provide a social safety net and infrastructure. In their view, returning the government to the form it took before the 1930s will allow a few wealthy men to dominate society without government interference, thus protecting their liberty and permitting those who know best how to run the country to be in charge.
Since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office promising to scale back the federal government, Republican leaders have promised to cut regulation and taxes, and to return power to individuals to arrange their lives as they see fit. But they have never entirely managed to eradicate the New Deal government.
When he took office, Trump set out to do what those before him had not. He has left offices unfilled, slashed regulations and taxes, and did all he could to privatize the functions of the U.S. government.
The administration’s response to the pandemic highlighted the attempt to replace government functions with private efforts. Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of managing the crisis, and Kushner promptly created a task force of young people from venture capital and private equity firms. With no experience in emergency preparation and no contacts in the relevant industries, the volunteers on the task force were ineffectual, simply gumming up the efforts of the career officials whom they were trying to replace.
Notably, when states turned to the federal government to help direct the national response, Trump turned them away, telling them to manage on their own. At the same time, Project Airbridge, the new federal system designed to get critical supplies to the states, used the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to fly supplies to the U.S., but then turned them over to private distributors to get them to their customers. This public-private partnership, as the administration called it, frustrated state governors whose incoming supplies were sometimes confiscated for redistribution to places the administration deemed more urgent.
After the first coronavirus bills shored up the economy, Trump began to talk of tax cuts for businesses and investors, arguing—as has been Republican orthodoxy since Reagan—that tax cuts will stimulate the economy (although there is no evidence that this is the case). States and cities and towns are reeling from the loss of tax dollars, but Republicans have been reluctant to support them, apparently hoping to permit them to declare bankruptcy. This has been a long-term plan on the part of Republican leaders, for in a bankruptcy restructuring, the social safety nets of Democratic states like New York could be slashed.
Not helping local governments through this crisis will also cut public school funding.
And finally, with the support and encouragement of the administration, Republicans are downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus to urge children back to school and their parents back to work. Today, White House officials started trying to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the president’s leading advisors on the pandemic. Fauci has warned that the country is not doing enough to shut down infections, and that things will get worse if we don’t. Unless the economy regains traction, we are facing extraordinary economic dislocation that can only be addressed with the social safety net the Republicans want to get rid of altogether.
In all of this, the administration sounds much like that of President Herbert Hoover who, when faced with the calamity of the Great Depression, largely rejected calls for government aid to starving and displaced families, and instead trusted businessmen to restart the economy. To the extent relief was necessary, he wanted states and towns to cover it. Anything else would destroy American individualism, he insisted.
But by 1932, the same Americans who had supported Hoover in 1928 in a landslide recognized that his ideology had led the nation to catastrophe and then offered no way out. They rallied around Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who worked together with Congress to create an entirely new form of national government, one that had been unthinkable just four years before.
Last week, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden explicitly echoed the dynamic of the 1932 election, highlighting the economy and economic opportunity. His policy paper reads: “Even before COVID-19, the Trump Administration was pursuing economic policies that rewarded wealth over work and corporations over working families. Too many families were struggling to make ends meet and too many parents were worried about the economic future for their children. And, Black and Latino Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and women have never been welcomed as full participants in the economy.“
Biden’s economic plan for the country is, according to his campaign, the “largest mobilization of public investments in procurement, infrastructure, and R&D since World War II.” Called “Build Back Better,” the plan calls for investment in infrastructure and R&D to revitalize high-paying American industries and bring critical American supply chains back home. He calls for a revival of trade unions—gutted after 1981—and higher wages, as well as higher taxes on corporations (although not to the levels they were at before Trump’s tax cuts).
The document is a strong one politically, undercutting both Trump’s “America First” language and promising concrete policies for voters suffering in the Republican economy. But it is interesting as well for how clearly it marks a return to a vision of a government that stops privileging an elite few, and instead works to level the economic playing field among all Americans.
-HCR- 7/12
Media coverage of Trump’s commutation of his associate Roger Stone’s prison sentence has pushed the Russia bounty story out of the headlines. Knowing Trump’s skill at distraction, it’s hard to believe this is a coincidence.
It’s a big story. In late February, Trump’s Presidential Daily Brief (the “PDB”) informed him that Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, had offered cash payments to Taliban-linked fighters to kill American and allied soldiers in Afghanistan. The willingness of a foreign power, with whom we are theoretically not at war, to pay to have our soldiers killed is a huge deal.
But instead of retaliating, Trump actually worked more closely with Russia after he learned of the bounties, issuing a joint statement with Russian President Vladimir Putin about cooperation between the nations, trading coronavirus supplies, and urging that Russia should be readmitted to the G7, from which it was excluded after it invaded Ukraine in 2014.
When the story leaked two weeks ago, Trump first called it a hoax, then said he had not been “briefed,”—apparently suggesting that the report had not been delivered orally, so as far as he was concerned he had not been told—then said the information had not been verified, then went on a hunt for the leakers. But what he hasn’t done in all this time is denounced Russia for putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers.
On Sunday, Douglas London, a CIA veteran of 34 years who was the CIA chief for counterterrorism in south and southwest Asia from 2016-2018, wrote that Trump steadfastly refused to push back on Russian aggression in Afghanistan when London oversaw operations there. London noted that Trump retaliated against both Iran and Pakistan when they supported the Taliban… but he did nothing about reports that Russia was similarly involved.
"As any observer of Russia knows, neglecting aggression inevitably invites more of it — to expand Russian influence and power at American expense,” London wrote. “The president must explain to the American people, and especially to those who risk their lives for their country and our families, why he continues to abide Russian threats to our troops, our security and our democracy.”
London is not the only one worried about Trump’s defense of Russia. On Saturday, July 11, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally broke his silence about his investigation into the efforts of Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Mueller said he felt “compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.”
These charges are coming primarily from Trump and his aides.
Mueller revisited the findings of the Mueller Report, which proved that Russia hacked and dumped emails from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as managing an on-line social media campaign to hurt Clinton and help Trump. It found that a number of officials from the Trump campaign—including Stone-- had links to the Russian government. While it did not establish that the campaign conspired with Russian spies, it did conclude that the Russian government worked for a Trump victory. And the Trump campaign expected the stolen and leaked emails would help Trump win. (The actual report notes that if Mueller felt he could exonerate the Trump campaign from conspiring with the Russians, he would have.)
A jury later convicted Stone of lying to Congress. He lied about his contacts with an intermediary to Wikileaks, and lied when he denied telling the Trump campaign about the Wikileaks release of emails. Stone also demanded a witness lie to Congress. “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes,” Mueller explained. “He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
Today, the judge in Stone’s case, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, received the Justice Department’s documentation on Stone’s clemency. Trump’s commutation of his sentence not only wipes away his 40-month jail term, but also his two years of supervised release and his $20,000 fine. Stone told reporters today that he will do everything he can to get Trump reelected in November.
It feels like we are also seeing presidential distraction on the coronavirus pandemic. We learned today that 5.4 million Americans have lost their health insurance. At the same time, Trump has continued to insist that our spiking numbers of infections are due to more testing, and that guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) are “impractical” and “very tough & expensive.”
While undermining Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been one of the administration’s key advisors on the pandemic, Trump today retweeted a post from gameshow host and commentator Chuck Woolery saying that “Everyone is lying…. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it.”
Not all Trump’s loyalists buy this: former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who has remained loyal to the president, said today the economy cannot recover until Covid-19 is under control, and that the country’s current testing abilities are “simply inexcusable.”
Today, after repeatedly changing instructions, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services finalized new data reporting protocols for hospitals. The new system will eliminate the CDC as a recipient of data. Instead, health-care institutions will report information about infections to a federal contractor or to their state, which will turn the information over to the federal government. The argument for the change is that the data has been faulty, but hospitals maintain they are delivering the best information they can as the government keeps changing the reporting system.
But there is another layer to this change, as well. The administration wants the states to call out the National Guard, sending troops to hospitals to help with data collection. Originally, the request was going to be a demand, but it got watered down over the weekend. HHS general counsel Robert P. Charrow opposed the decision. He wrote in emails to an HHS official, “I believe that using National Guard troops to gather these data would be counter-productive…. As a practical matter, I cannot imagine how the National Guard would be able to collect data at the hospital itself nor the number of Guards who would be exposed to COVID-19 in the process.”
President of the American Hospital Association Rick Pollack told Washington Postreporters Lena H. Sun and Amy Goldstein, “Given our track record of being cooperative to evolving data requests, it’s perplexing that the possibility of using the National Guard has been suggested…. It makes no sense. Certainly the expertise of the National Guard can be used in a more productive way.”
For my part, I am leery of any unprecedented move on the part of this administration to use troops around the country. Last Saturday night, federal agents from Homeland Security, dispatched to Portland, Oregon under Trump’s order to protect monuments, shot a protester who was standing alone, across the street from them, holding speaker above his head. According to his mother, the “less-than-lethal” munition fractured his skull and broke the bones in his face, requiring facial reconstruction surgery.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) noted that Trump seems eager to escalate tensions. The deployment of federal officers to a U.S. city is unusual, and it brings “unnecessary violence and confrontation.” Local rules in Portland prohibit tear gas or less-than-lethal rounds unless lives are in danger, and Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler (D), demanded that the agents begin abiding by those rules. City Commissioners note they did not ask for the officers and do not want them. Portland Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis said it complicates things to have the federal officers in town because they do not coordinate with local police.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (D) said: “Trump & Homeland Security must now answer why fed[era]l officers are acting like an occupying army.”
On a lighter note, Tucker Carlson tonight announced that he was going on a “long-planned” vacation, trout fishing. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy noted that Carlson always seems to have long planned vacations in the middle of a scandal. Carlson is in trouble for the news that his senior writer, Blake Neff, had been posting racist, sexist, and homophobic posts on social media for years, and that the language of some of those posts made it onto Carlson’s show.
Neff stepped down, and now Carlson is going fishing.
-The Goat- 7/13
It’s a big story. In late February, Trump’s Presidential Daily Brief (the “PDB”) informed him that Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, had offered cash payments to Taliban-linked fighters to kill American and allied soldiers in Afghanistan. The willingness of a foreign power, with whom we are theoretically not at war, to pay to have our soldiers killed is a huge deal.
But instead of retaliating, Trump actually worked more closely with Russia after he learned of the bounties, issuing a joint statement with Russian President Vladimir Putin about cooperation between the nations, trading coronavirus supplies, and urging that Russia should be readmitted to the G7, from which it was excluded after it invaded Ukraine in 2014.
When the story leaked two weeks ago, Trump first called it a hoax, then said he had not been “briefed,”—apparently suggesting that the report had not been delivered orally, so as far as he was concerned he had not been told—then said the information had not been verified, then went on a hunt for the leakers. But what he hasn’t done in all this time is denounced Russia for putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers.
On Sunday, Douglas London, a CIA veteran of 34 years who was the CIA chief for counterterrorism in south and southwest Asia from 2016-2018, wrote that Trump steadfastly refused to push back on Russian aggression in Afghanistan when London oversaw operations there. London noted that Trump retaliated against both Iran and Pakistan when they supported the Taliban… but he did nothing about reports that Russia was similarly involved.
"As any observer of Russia knows, neglecting aggression inevitably invites more of it — to expand Russian influence and power at American expense,” London wrote. “The president must explain to the American people, and especially to those who risk their lives for their country and our families, why he continues to abide Russian threats to our troops, our security and our democracy.”
London is not the only one worried about Trump’s defense of Russia. On Saturday, July 11, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally broke his silence about his investigation into the efforts of Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Mueller said he felt “compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.”
These charges are coming primarily from Trump and his aides.
Mueller revisited the findings of the Mueller Report, which proved that Russia hacked and dumped emails from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as managing an on-line social media campaign to hurt Clinton and help Trump. It found that a number of officials from the Trump campaign—including Stone-- had links to the Russian government. While it did not establish that the campaign conspired with Russian spies, it did conclude that the Russian government worked for a Trump victory. And the Trump campaign expected the stolen and leaked emails would help Trump win. (The actual report notes that if Mueller felt he could exonerate the Trump campaign from conspiring with the Russians, he would have.)
A jury later convicted Stone of lying to Congress. He lied about his contacts with an intermediary to Wikileaks, and lied when he denied telling the Trump campaign about the Wikileaks release of emails. Stone also demanded a witness lie to Congress. “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes,” Mueller explained. “He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
Today, the judge in Stone’s case, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, received the Justice Department’s documentation on Stone’s clemency. Trump’s commutation of his sentence not only wipes away his 40-month jail term, but also his two years of supervised release and his $20,000 fine. Stone told reporters today that he will do everything he can to get Trump reelected in November.
It feels like we are also seeing presidential distraction on the coronavirus pandemic. We learned today that 5.4 million Americans have lost their health insurance. At the same time, Trump has continued to insist that our spiking numbers of infections are due to more testing, and that guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) are “impractical” and “very tough & expensive.”
While undermining Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been one of the administration’s key advisors on the pandemic, Trump today retweeted a post from gameshow host and commentator Chuck Woolery saying that “Everyone is lying…. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it.”
Not all Trump’s loyalists buy this: former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who has remained loyal to the president, said today the economy cannot recover until Covid-19 is under control, and that the country’s current testing abilities are “simply inexcusable.”
Today, after repeatedly changing instructions, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services finalized new data reporting protocols for hospitals. The new system will eliminate the CDC as a recipient of data. Instead, health-care institutions will report information about infections to a federal contractor or to their state, which will turn the information over to the federal government. The argument for the change is that the data has been faulty, but hospitals maintain they are delivering the best information they can as the government keeps changing the reporting system.
But there is another layer to this change, as well. The administration wants the states to call out the National Guard, sending troops to hospitals to help with data collection. Originally, the request was going to be a demand, but it got watered down over the weekend. HHS general counsel Robert P. Charrow opposed the decision. He wrote in emails to an HHS official, “I believe that using National Guard troops to gather these data would be counter-productive…. As a practical matter, I cannot imagine how the National Guard would be able to collect data at the hospital itself nor the number of Guards who would be exposed to COVID-19 in the process.”
President of the American Hospital Association Rick Pollack told Washington Postreporters Lena H. Sun and Amy Goldstein, “Given our track record of being cooperative to evolving data requests, it’s perplexing that the possibility of using the National Guard has been suggested…. It makes no sense. Certainly the expertise of the National Guard can be used in a more productive way.”
For my part, I am leery of any unprecedented move on the part of this administration to use troops around the country. Last Saturday night, federal agents from Homeland Security, dispatched to Portland, Oregon under Trump’s order to protect monuments, shot a protester who was standing alone, across the street from them, holding speaker above his head. According to his mother, the “less-than-lethal” munition fractured his skull and broke the bones in his face, requiring facial reconstruction surgery.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) noted that Trump seems eager to escalate tensions. The deployment of federal officers to a U.S. city is unusual, and it brings “unnecessary violence and confrontation.” Local rules in Portland prohibit tear gas or less-than-lethal rounds unless lives are in danger, and Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler (D), demanded that the agents begin abiding by those rules. City Commissioners note they did not ask for the officers and do not want them. Portland Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis said it complicates things to have the federal officers in town because they do not coordinate with local police.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (D) said: “Trump & Homeland Security must now answer why fed[era]l officers are acting like an occupying army.”
On a lighter note, Tucker Carlson tonight announced that he was going on a “long-planned” vacation, trout fishing. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy noted that Carlson always seems to have long planned vacations in the middle of a scandal. Carlson is in trouble for the news that his senior writer, Blake Neff, had been posting racist, sexist, and homophobic posts on social media for years, and that the language of some of those posts made it onto Carlson’s show.
Neff stepped down, and now Carlson is going fishing.
-The Goat- 7/13
When the story leaked two weeks ago, Trump first called it a hoax, then said he had not been “briefed,”—apparently suggesting that the report had not been delivered orally, so as far as he was concerned he had not been told—then said the information had not been verified, then went on a hunt for the leakers. But what he hasn’t done in all this time is denounced Russia for putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers.
And this is who the klannies call “American” and who they follow religiously step by step word by word. This is who you guys are.
And this is who the klannies call “American” and who they follow religiously step by step word by word. This is who you guys are.
Lying cock sucking pieces of shit. This is who you admire. His policies 
Loser!@#0
Very bright.
Putin and Russia have information that Trump fucked two little boys. This is what you idiots elected for us. A little boy rapist. This is WHY he condones Roy Moore and all the other sick fucks. Because he is one of them.
Loser!@#0Very bright.
Putin and Russia have information that Trump fucked two little boys. This is what you idiots elected for us. A little boy rapist. This is WHY he condones Roy Moore and all the other sick fucks. Because he is one of them.
And do you know what Russia does to people who fuck little boys? Probably cut your dick off and kill you slowly. So if it is true that trump was fucking little boys. This explains a lot. Got to wonder I mean if this was just some teenage girl that Epstein had recruited, then Russia wouldn’t give a fuck. The fact that it’s some gay shit is what they are holding over his head. Putin himself fucks little girls. I highly doubt they are holding that over his head even though they should as well. That’s disgusting. But to fuck some little boy is what the Russians would find disgusting.
