Last week I flagged this stunning and egregious story about Rudy Giuliani, the President’s private lawyer, going abroad to use to use the President’s power to enlist other governments to attack President Trump’s enemies. Giuliani has been globe-trotting like this for two years. In most cases, we don’t really know what he’s doing. In most cases he’s likely just collecting money. But in this case he’s using threat or inducement of the President’s power to target the President’s political enemies and then looping the corrupt Attorney General into the process.
This latest Trump/Giuliani gambit managed to get laundered into The New York Times via outlets like the propaganda chop shop at The Hill under John Solomon.
But here are some key new details.
I hear Trump toadies on Capitol Hill, now in full rage on Don Jr.’s behalf, may have reasons to worry.
In another impromptu White House appearance just now, President Trump went off on special counsel Robert Mueller all over again. In an especially bonkers moment, the President lamented the friendship between Mueller and fired FBI Director James Comey, citing a “picture file.”
“They were supposedly best friends,” Trump said. “You look at the picture file and you see hundreds of pictures of him and Comey.”
What is he talking about? A picture file?
We’re so thick into constitutional crises today. But you’ve got to read this piece by Josh Kovensky. It’s about how the NRA tried to save itself financially or at least open up a critical new revenue stream by hawking what is not unfairly called “murder insurance.” Basically, if you’re a good guy with a gun and you kill someone, who’s going to cover you expenses? It turns out that even on its own morally dubious terms it wasn’t very good insurance and not necessarily legal. But beyond that, the contractors who created the plans were branching out from old fashioned defending your home style ‘self-defense’ to more like free range out and about waiting for bad guys to show themselves sort of ‘self-defense’. Proactive self-defense. Call it George Zimmerman insurance. Anyway, it’s simultaneously hilarious and really horrifying and on top of all that the NRA seems to have lost some serious cash on it. Read the whole story here.
This to me is one of those classic TPM stories. In fact, the man at the center of the story, James Russell Bolton Jr., is an embodiment of the Trump Era. Bolton runs a militia. But on the side he was posing as a Mexican drug cartel allegedly kidnapping his wife in order to extort money from the dorks who had joined his militia.
If you’re still worried about the collusion described in the Mueller Report forgot about that because it probably means you’re not focused enough on how President Trump’s top advisors are already, more or less openly, trying to muscle Ukraine into targeting Trump’s political enemies in the US to throw the 2020 election in Trump’s favor.
I really cannot overstate how important this is.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone who joined us for our TPM congressional oversight event last night in Washington, DC. It was great to see all of you and I and all of my colleagues want to thank you for your dedicated readership and support of our work.
Last night at our DC event I picked up on a question someone had been asked on the panel: Basically, how bad can it get? To me it’s already gotten that bad and in a way and place that is at once front and center and yet oddly invisible. Virtually everyone closely involved in the origins of the Russia probe has either been fired, had their career ended or in key cases face real threats of imprisonment: Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Baker, Ohr … I could list off at least half a dozen other names. Some of these folks will be fine. And in most cases the criminal jeopardy is probably somewhat notional. But it’s not about the individual people. It’s the warning it sends to everyone else through the federal bureaucracy – law enforcement, intelligence and everywhere else – that the real law is power. This is how autocrats discipline and destroy civil institutions and the rule of law. One of these people, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker spoke out for the first time this afternoon at an event at Brookings. Tierney Sneed was there.
Rudy Giuliani has now canceled his trip to Ukraine in which he planned to pressure the new government to launch investigations into Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But this is irrelevant. It’s not 1810. Giuliani doesn’t need a personal visit to plot his schemes. We have phones, video conferencing, private jet transnational intermediaries. What’s more, this is a plot that goes back months. Indeed, Giuliani has peppered his cancelation with new threats, suggesting that the new government in Ukraine may be enemies of America. “I’m not going to go because I think I’m walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president, in some cases, enemies of the United States.”
It’s yet more of the same, leveraging the country’s foreign and national security power (which is of course immense and unparalleled in the world) to target political enemies at home, high crimes by any definition.
Doris Day died early this morning at age 97. Many people forget that before she became an avatar of 1950s Hollywood wholesomeness she was an acclaimed Jazz big band singer from a very different part of the entertainment world. Here she is at Aquarium, a New York jazz club in 1946, touring with Les Brown. Photographs by famed Jazz journalist and photographer William Gottlieb.
