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
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 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
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.
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.
An advisor to Vladimir Putin suggests that Ukraine’s new President may cleanse the eastern portion of the country of ethnic Russians and repopulate the country with Jews. President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish by birth.
From the Moscow Times … Read More
Christopher Wray just confirmed, delicately, that in addition to the second Inspector General investigation, Bill Barr is personally looking into how the Russia probe began.
Wray: In addition to ongoing IG investigation "AG is seeking to understand better the circumstances at the department and the FBI relating to how this investigation started. And we're working to help him get that understanding. I think that's part of his job and part of my mine." pic.twitter.com/mrQhHCDuOc
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 7, 2019
Below I mentioned this article penned by one of Vladimir Putin’s advisors claiming that the incoming Ukrainian President might cleanse eastern Ukraine of ethnic Russians and repopulate it with Jews. TPM Reporter Josh Kovensky speaks Russian (before coming to TPM he worked at the English language Kyiv Post in Ukraine) and he’s written this piece which goes deeper into what the article says and translates key parts of it. Must read.
The Times is out with an extensive story based on newly obtained tax documents for President Trump … but they’re for 1985-1994, not more recent years. Still, it’s a key period in the making of the myth of Donald Trump, and far from being the dealmaking whiz of lore, he was declaring staggering losses, more than $1 billion over that stretch:
Let’s talk about this eye-popping story from Reuters which claims that back in 2015 Michael Cohen helped early Trump endorser and now-consummate supporter Jerry Falwell, Jr. make some embarrassing photos disappear. This is at least the third story Aram Roston has written on this saga (this one at Reuters, the earlier two when he was at Buzzfeed). Each has reported a series eye-popping or bizarre facts. But each also reads with the clear sense that Roston either knows more than he can write or believes there’s much more to the story than he can prove.