At the risk of stating the obvious, we should take it as a given that if the 2020 presidential election ends with any plausible, colorable path to the US Supreme Court becoming involved in the outcome, the current majority will intervene and hand the president to President Trump. I don’t believe it is alarmist to say or hyperbolic to believe this. It is only to accurately set expectations. A far more legitimate, less corrupt court did as much in 2000. The current five are entirely different. Indeed, only one – Thomas – remains from the Bush v Gore majority.
After the release of the Mueller Report, we’re now in a welter of bad faith conspiracy theories about Deep State plots against then-candidate and now President Trump. Those smears are being operationalized in the hands of Attorney General Bill Barr who promises a personal investigation into these claims, accusations which have already been the explicit focus of an Inspector General’s report and implicitly the focus of the Special Counsel’s probe itself. There’s also a second Inspector General’s investigation into the same claims from an Inspector General who showed in his last exercise an extreme eagerness to find answers that would please the President. But I want to return to a more basic issue about the beginnings of the Russia probe that gets lost in criticisms both from Trump propagandists but also good faith and not unreasonable criticisms from Trump critics.
I don’t find this terribly surprising. But it is a highly notable, really key part of the broader debate about how the right-wing uses and distorts the debate over anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and religious diversity in the United States. The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding has a new public opinion report out on Islamophobia and Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims. The report covers a lot of ground and includes an easily accessible range of charts that makes it easy to dip into. I recommend it to you. What I want to focus on is one key finding: of all religious or ethnic groups in America, Jews have by far the most positive attitudes toward Muslims. Read More
I had a hard time knowing what to make of this profile of former racist and Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh in Buzzfeed. For a little background, McHugh was one of the countless racist provocateurs working at Breitbart or The Daily Caller in the early Trump years. Her claim to fame is that she got fired from Breitbart at a moment when it was repositioning from supporting journalists being 90% racist to only 70% racist. As the article explains, getting fired from Breitbart put her on the skids to more and more fringe outfits (a short run on holocaust denier Chuck Johnson’s site) and ultimately being out of work altogether. She now presents herself as reformed and no longer part of the alt-right.
I need to return to the fact that the country’s biggest paper reported this week that the President’s personal lawyer is conducting unofficial diplomacy abroad, apparently mixed with his own private business and investments, in which he offers friendly treatment from the President of the United States in exchange for those governments targeting the President’s political enemies. This was reported and it wasn’t the biggest story of the week. This is a far, far bigger deal than any other fears about future tampering in a US presidential election using Facebook ads. The stakes are much higher, the danger much greater, when the colluding candidate is also the President of the United States.
This is a classic case of refighting the last (2016) war, while the President is already on to entirely new kinds of corruption and bad acting made possible by holding the presidential bundle of powers. Read More
Hmmm. Yeah, someone needs to sit down with Rudy and arrange a deposition. From TPM Reader JB …
Just read your great editor’s brief on Barr’s lawlessness and Rudy’s efforts in Ukraine. I just wanted to point out that now that Rudy has acknowledged working on the Ukrainian prosecutor this Times article from last year on Ukrainian officials stopping their potential cooperation with the Mueller probe sure looks different.
There’s a key point to understand about this White House letter from Emmet Flood to Bill Barr about the Mueller Report. There’s a clear and consistent, if deeply wrong, through line connecting all of this. Most people – polls show this – have seen Mueller’s probe as something like an Independent Counsel investigation. It’s not simply a criminal probe. It’s a public exercise to determine – apart from the possible direct influence of the President and any conflicted appointees – what happened in a question of great and legitimate public concern: Did the President conspire with a foreign government during the 2016 election and did he obstruct justice or abuse his office during the subsequent investigation?
Below David notes that Benjamin Wittes (of Lawfare) is now saying Bill Barr’s handling of the Mueller Report was “catastrophic” – after earlier huffily vouching for his bona fides and integrity. James Comey yesterday penned a blistering OpEd arguing, in so many words, that Barr had sold his soul to Trump. This comes only a couple weeks after Comey insisted Barr deserved the benefit of the doubt in his handling of the report. Some of this is just the common story of giving the benefit of the doubt to members of your club, insiderism and credentialism, an old story. But there’s another dimension of this I want to focus on. Read More
Nicole Lafond reports that three weeks after he filed his defamation lawsuit against his hometown newspaper, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) still hasn’t served any of the defendants.
Benjamin Wittes calls William Barr’s handling of the Mueller report “catastrophic.”