Just an update: There are currently 47 tickets remaining for TPM’s first live podcast taping, which will take place on January 15th in Washington, D.C. You can get your tickets here. Remember, tickets are $75 but if you are a Prime or Prime AF member, tickets are $50. If you are an Inside member, they are free. (You should have received a discount code via email. If not, feel free to email me directly Joe at talkingpointsmemo dot com.)
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The House Ethics Committee released a long-awaited report Monday, stating that it had found “substantial evidence” that former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) violated House rules and laws “prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
Continue reading “Ethics Committee Finds ‘Substantial Evidence’ That Gaetz Committed ‘Statutory Rape’”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
The Nixon administration’s enemies list inspired bipartisan revulsion. Its purpose was, in the immortal words of President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
The revelation of the list’s existence during the Watergate hearings of 1973 provoked conservative columnist and Nixon supporter William F. Buckley Jr. to use the f-word in print. Yes, Buckley called the enemies list “an act of proto-fascism. It is altogether ruthless in its dismissal of human rights. It is fascist in its reliance on the state as the instrument of harassment.”
But that was then. Now, Donald Trump has announced his intention to place in charge of the FBI someone who published an enemies list in a 2023 book.
Kash Patel’s “Government Gangsters” includes a list of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” which he describes as “a cabal of unelected tyrants who think they should determine who the American people can and cannot elect as president.”
Was hard for me to find the list of people Kash Patel included in his book “Government Gangsters” as Deep State officials who need to be targeted so here it is in one place. pic.twitter.com/j9I7FWNzoZ
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) December 2, 2024
Despite that description, the list does not include anyone who tried to keep Trump in office illegally after he lost in 2020. It does, however, include a number of high-level Trump appointees who chose not to help him in that effort to overturn democracy.
Targeting fellow Republicans follows Nixonian precedent. The top name on an early draft of Nixon’s enemies list was a Republican who worked in the Nixon White House on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.
The story of that aide, Morton H. Halperin, demonstrates the dangers of enemies lists to their makers as well as their targets. I tell this story in my book “Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate.”
Morton Halperin committed no crime.
To Nixon and Kissinger, however, he was the man who knew too much. They mobilized the police power of the state against him, because they feared what he could reveal about them.
Kissinger, as national security adviser, had told Halperin about the secret bombing of Cambodia. The waves of B-52 attacks on North Vietnamese infiltration routes was no secret to the Cambodians, but Nixon and Kissinger kept it from the American people. The New York Times, however, soon found out and ran a front-page story about the bombing campaign.
Looking for the leaker, Nixon had FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tap Halperin’s phone. The wiretap never produced any evidence against Halperin, but Nixon continued it even after Halperin resigned from the White House and became an adviser to the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie.
At that point, the Halperin wiretap became a way for Nixon to spy on top Democrats, including former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, who had served as an adviser to Democratic Presidents Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Hoover reported to the White House on a conversation Halperin had with Leslie Gelb, another Muskie adviser, about an article Clifford was writing for Life magazine criticizing Nixon on Vietnam.
There was nothing remotely illegal about criticizing the president, of course, but the FBI director sent the information to the White House anyway.
“This is the kind of early warning we need more of,” chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman wrote White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. “Your game planners are now in an excellent position to map anticipatory action.”
The FBI is not supposed to be a political intelligence operation, secretly helping the president plan moves against his critics. In this case, it was.
The keepers of Nixon’s enemies lists – there was more than one – added the names of Gelb and Clifford.
Nixon didn’t fully weaponize the state against Halperin until the 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, a top secret Defense Department history of America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Nixon persuaded himself that Halperin and Gelb were part of a conspiracy that was leaking the papers as a warmup to leaking Nixon’s own damaging secrets during his 1972 reelection campaign.
This wasn’t true. Halperin’s and Gelb’s involvement with the Pentagon Papers was innocent. Halperin oversaw the study as deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Johnson administration, and Gelb was the study’s day-to-day supervisor as director of policy planning and arms control.
They let Daniel Ellsberg read it in 1969, when he was doing work on Vietnam for the government, but they didn’t know he was going to leak it. Not even Ellsberg knew it at the time; he decided much later. Ellsberg leaked the papers without informing Halperin or Gelb.
None of this made a difference to Nixon. He hated Jews, intellectuals and Ivy Leaguers, and Halperin and Gelb were all three. So was Kissinger, of course, but Nixon made exceptions for those who continually demonstrated their devotion to him.
Having convinced himself that Halperin and Gelb were conspiring against him, Nixon resolved to conspire against them.
Nixon ordered his aides to break into the Brookings Institution, where Halperin and Gelb then worked, because he believed – mistakenly – that they were keeping classified documents there.
To commit this and other crimes, Nixon created the Special Investigations Unit, later known as the Plumbers. The Brookings burglary did not take place, but the Plumbers did break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist seeking evidence of a conspiracy. They came up empty-handed.
Being on Nixon’s enemies list did not break Halperin. He went on to testify as a defense witness in Ellsberg’s trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers and became director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office. If, as the saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, perhaps a civil libertarian is a Republican whose phone has been tapped.
Nixon’s illegal wiretaps and Plumbers operation ultimately became part of an article of impeachment against him. The House Judiciary Committee passed the article by 28 to 10, with seven Republicans joining the committee’s Democratic majority on July 29, 1974, less than two weeks before Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment and conviction.
Things are different now. In Trump’s first term, the vast majority of congressional Republicans proved unwilling to impeach or convict him. He will begin his second term armed with a Supreme Court decision declaring him immune from criminal prosecution for most “official acts.”
Almost all of Nixon’s abuses of power could be described as “official acts,” which should give everyone an idea what the Supreme Court has unleashed on the republic.
Though circumstances are different, Nixon’s enemies list does have a lesson to teach us today. An enemies list isn’t a weapon against “the Deep State.” An enemies list was a tool that a president used to create a deep state of his own.
Nixon’s Plumbers operated above the law, outside the U.S. Constitution, and beyond accountability to anyone other than him. Nixon used the government as a weapon against the targets of his hatred.
This is why conservatives like Buckley abominated the enemies list: “It is fascist in its automatic assumption that the state in all matters comes before the rights of the individual.”
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A 20-year-old woman in Collin County, Texas arrives at the emergency room to address severe bleeding. A health care provider tells the man she’s with that the woman had been nine weeks pregnant.
Continue reading “Anti-Abortion Officials Continue Deputizing Angry Men To Turn Over Their Partners In New Legal Foray”It’s five days before Christmas, and Elon Musk — the unelected billionaire who seems to lack even a Schoolhouse Rock! level of civics attainment — is trying to tank another government spending bill.
Continue reading “The Musk Who Stole Christmas”As of Friday evening it appears that the Trump/Musk GOP has managed to put out, or at least move to “controlled” status, the wildfire they lit for no particular reason earlier in the week. We will soon see that this three or four day drama is a microcosm for most of what is going to unfold over the next two and likely four years: an always chaotic and often destructive jostling between different versions of far-right state transformation. Here on the one hand is Trump’s autarkic and transactional MAGA, seeking to channel power, adulation and beak-wetting all toward the person of Donald Trump. There you have Elon Musk with his more chaotic and futurist/Randian version of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. What unites them is their personalist character, something Donald Trump and his politics brought to the national dance. We shouldn’t doll either of these variants up too much as ideologies. They’re just different versions of post-civic democracy America from the world of billionairedom, each guy’s particular wants and needs, etc., and also with some broader constituency beyond them personally.
Continue reading “Springtime for Billionaires”I admit I’ve been saying mostly the same thing in my last few posts on events on Capitol Hill. I must think that if I keep writing it it will finally be clear. Oh well. I just noticed someone say they were surprised that almost 40 House Republicans defied not only Trump but Elon Musk as well.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Was Musk for this Trump/Johnson clean up effort that went down to defeat last night? That doesn’t seem clear at all. It’s way over-literal, over-determined. He wasn’t really for it or against it. He blew the deal up and then just moved on to something else.
Here’s the chain of events I see.
Continue reading “State of Play on Capitol Hill”January 6 defendants and attorneys have caught on to a shift in Donald Trump’s statements about a pardon in recent weeks: he’s teased the idea that he may issue a blanket pardon to non-violent offenders, while leaving the fate of the rest unclear.
Continue reading “Violent or Nonviolent? January 6ers Try to Parse Trump Pardon Remarks”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The GOP chaos on the Hill isn’t about policy disputes or even strictly ideological differences. That makes covering which version of which bill contains which provisions a bit of a fool’s errand. This isn’t about spending or budget priorities or the debt limit or any of the other ostensible negotiating points that Republicans themselves can’t agree on or resolve amongst themselves in any meaningful way.
This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.
We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture.
It’s why the details of the negotiations, such as they are, barely matter. It’s why what’s on or off the table isn’t very illuminating about the underlying politics. I’d call it a disaster for Republicans, but they’ve done this over and over for more than decade and not paid nearly the political price you’d expect.
I police word choice with some trepidation because rather than forcing hard thinking about precision it often gets turned into a new bright-line rule that is just as lazy as the bad practice it replaced. With that caveat, observe some of the headlines over the last day or two about the GOP chaos on the Hill. Do these really accurately describe what is happening, especially in a world in which the GOP has spent decades invested in making the broader public think government is inept, unreliable, and incompetent?
Those are literally true, but they fail to capture the true dynamic. Not all headlines were this opaque, and other stories from the same outlets had sharper headlines that reflected what is actually happening. The worst of all though was this laugher: “Biden is AWOL as Washington spirals into shutdown chaos”
Elon Musk’s outsized role in bullying the House GOP into abandoning the bipartisan deal on CR had Trump scrambling Thursday to assert that he’s still in charge. Trump himself did hastily scheduled phone interviews with reporters at ABC, CBS and NBC. The pushback was not subtle, as exemplified by this cheesy spin given to Politico:
It Musk is a “pawn in Trump’s chessboard, like everybody else,” said a person close to Trump who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak frankly. The media “really wants to paint Elon as this independent character. If it were a chessboard, [Musk would] be a bishop.”
Trump’s own spokesperson issued a clunky statement that belied Trump’s strength: “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
“President-elect Donald Trump had dinner Wednesday with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and the two were joined by billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump transition team spokesperson confirmed.”–WaPo
More than 30 House Republicans have sent a letter to President-elect Trump urging him to have his new attorney general call for the resignations of all 94 U.S. attorneys and handpick their acting successors rather than allowing the existing first assistant U.S. attorneys to ascend to the acting roles, Semafor was the first to report.
The sweeping resignations of all the U.S. attorneys would not be unusual or uncommon with a change in administrations, but handpicking each of the acting U.S. attorneys to make sure they are not an “ideological protégé” of their predecessor is out of the ordinary.
Here’s what caught my eye from the letter:
We believe your interim appointments ought to be current federal prosecutors. Your transition team, incoming Attorney General, and like-minded allies in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House should identify individuals within each office to elevate to Interim U.S. Attorney until your nominations for U.S. Attorneys are confirmed by the Senate.
That sounds an awful lot like a mechanism to identify loyalists – and by implication everyone who isn’t a loyalist – throughout the Justice Department. Stay tuned.
This is very inside baseball but it gives you a taste of the loyalty dynamic operating within the Republican Party right now: A MAGA power play roils Senate GOP campaign groups. I know it’s tempting to write this off as something the GOP brought on itself, but this is your occasional reminder that everything Trump does to America he first does to the Republican Party.
“When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime. I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January.”–Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), speaking on Greg Sargent’s podcast The Daily Blast
A major setback in the RICO case in Georgia as an intermediate appeals court found the trial judge erred in not disqualifying District Attorney Fani Willis once he found that her conduct had created a “significant appearance of impropriety.” That means Willis is off the case unless she succeeds in her appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Politico: Judges increasingly alarmed as Trump’s Jan. 6 clemency decision nears
Sherrilyn Ifill, on the Roberts Court: “More and more, the conservative majority’s approach has put the rules and norms that govern our system of litigation in the crosshairs as much as the substantive rights of marginalized groups.”
The Pentagon has maintained for months that there are 900 U.S. troops deployed in Syria, but yesterday revealed that the actual number is 2,000.
The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga will be recorded in front of a live audience for the first time on Jan. 15 in Washington, D.C.
Want to join us? Tickets are on sale here. If you are a TPM Prime member, you should have already received an invitation with a discount code. If not, reach out to us and we’ll get you one.
We’ll do a brief Q&A and a cocktail hour after the podcast. I’ll be there. I hope to see you there, too.
Tickets are limited and they’re going fast, so don’t wait. Buy now.
Morning Memo will be on hiatus next week. It will resume on Dec. 30.
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If you haven’t seen the details, the meltdown on Capitol Hill went from bad to worse this evening. Or awesome to awesomer, depending on your perspective. Let’s review. Donald Trump wanted a smooth ride to January 20th. He allowed the leaders of the congressional GOP to negotiate a government funding extension to smooth that ride. That was about to pass before Elon Musk stepped in with a tweet storm and blew up the whole thing. That sent Speaker Johnson and Trump back to the drawing board to come up with a new GOP-only plan to meet Musk’s objections. To get it through today it needed a 2/3rds vote in the House. It didn’t come close to 50%. For the next ten days or so the Senate is controlled by the Democrats. So the House isn’t even the only problem. Trump told House Republicans today they had to vote for this new plan. Then 38 House Republicans voted against. Now they’re barreling toward a government shutdown.
Continue reading “Musk Shows Trump That He’s the New Chaos in Town”
