Do What’s Right

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on November 4.

I have had the privilege and the honor of working with a lot of presidents. And I didn’t always agree with them. But I always believed that they were men of principle, that they were trying to do what was right by the country. They didn’t always get it right, but they were trying to do what was right. I don’t see that in this president.

– retired Admiral William H. McRaven
former commander of the U.S. Special Forces Operations Command
10-17-2019

This week’s featured posts are “A Liberal View of Intervention” and “The Leader or the Law?“.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

One of the featured posts looks at Trump’s defense strategy, which I see as a pure power play: Forget the law, forget the facts, forget the Constitution — are you with me or against me?

This week’s testimony to the impeachment inquiry didn’t have a standout moment, but a parade of foreign-service officers put a lot of detail into the picture: Trump didn’t just get a wild idea during a phone call and say something he shouldn’t. There was a months-long program to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrats, and a clear intention to withhold military aid until they did. Anybody who wasn’t down with that program (like recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovich) was pushed out.

On Fox News, John Yoo made the absurd point that the framers of the Constitution “would never have wanted an impeachment within a year of an election”. I’ve discussed this objection before, but Eric Columbus sums up the counter-argument very succinctly.

Any caution about not impeaching too close to an election makes no sense where the impeachable conduct is aimed at subverting that election.

Also worth pointing out: Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial before the Senate was in March of 1868, only eight months before a presidential election.

Thursday, retired Admiral William McRaven, famous as the architect of the Bin Laden raid, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times called “Our Republic is under Attack from the President“.

We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate. … President Trump seems to believe that these qualities are unimportant or show weakness. He is wrong. These are the virtues that have sustained this nation for the past 243 years. … And if this president doesn’t understand their importance, if this president doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, both domestically and abroad, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office — Republican, Democrat or independent — the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.

But if you are a Fox News viewer, you probably don’t know about this. Friday and Sunday mornings I searched for “McRaven” on the Fox News web site and turned up no articles since September 20.

More reason to believe that you’ll strike corruption in TrumpWorld anywhere you drill: Months ago, Michael Cohen claimed that Trump manipulated reports on the value of his properties, estimating high when he was looking for loans and low when he was paying taxes. This week, a new Pro Publica report fleshed that out.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. … A dozen real estate professionals told ProPublica they saw no clear explanation for multiple inconsistencies in the documents. The discrepancies are “versions of fraud,” said Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. “This kind of stuff is not OK.”

This is how they found out:

ProPublica obtained the property tax documents using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The documents were public because Trump appealed his property tax bill for the buildings every year for nine years in a row, the extent of the available records. We compared the tax records with loan records that became public when Trump’s lender, Ladder Capital, sold the debt on his properties as part of mortgage-backed securities.

Josh Marshall raises another corruption question: When you see how much trouble Trump was willing to go to to get illicit favors out of Ukraine, you have to wonder what he has gotten from far more pliable countries like the monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

Trump’s willingness has always been a given. That of crooked oligarchies looking for advantage is equally so. The question has been the acquiescence, if not necessarily the connivance, of high level advisors. That is clear now too.

In other words, there is every reason to think, the very strong likelihood that Donald Trump’s corruption and lawlessness has already infected relationships with numerous countries abroad. It’s now just a matter of finding out the details.

Wednesday afternoon at Trump’s press conference with Italian President Mattarella, the translator’s face expressed how a lot of us feel when we listen to him.

and Syria

In one of the featured posts, I take a step back and seek some consistency in my own positions. I oppose Trump’s running out on the Kurds. But I also want to limit America’s military interventions. How do those fit together?

Along the way, I look at the situation of the Kurds, and Mitch McConnell’s restatement of the post-World-War-II, pro-intervention foreign policy consensus.

Lapdog Lindsey Graham is back in his kennel. He now thinks Trump’s Syria policy can lead to “some historic solutions in Syria that have eluded us for years”. Whatever he said last week has gone down the memory hole.

Wednesday, Trump was supposed to present his Syria policy to a bipartisan collection of skeptical leaders from Congress, where the House had just voted to condemn it 354-60. The meeting quickly fell apart, with Democratic leaders walking out to report Trump’s “meltdown” into shouting insults at Nancy Pelosi.

Trump countered by claiming Pelosi had a meltdown — sort of like in the 2016 debate when Trump cleverly responded to Clinton’s accusation that he was Putin’s puppet by saying “No. You’re the puppet.” (Trump must have been a hell of a debater in second grade.)

Trump decided to back up his case by posting this historic picture, which otherwise we would never have seen.

Apparently Trump believed that it made Pelosi look “unhinged”. But just about everyone else thinks it makes her look badass. Pelosi herself is using the picture as her Twitter cover photo. If you look closely at the men (they’re all men) on Trump’s side of the table, most of them look ashamed, particularly General Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs, who sits to Trump’s right.

After Trump is finally gone, however that happens, somebody should turn this image into a oil painting and hang it in the Capitol.

BTW, this example points to a factor that makes me hopeful about removing Trump from office, despite the obstacles: Trump has bamboozled himself, as propagandists often do, and that will cause him to make mistakes — like imagining that this photo is a good look for him and a bad look for Pelosi.

I have treated with skepticism all Republican or conservative voices who have denounced Trump, wondering if they will nonetheless find some excuse to vote to re-elect him in 2020. Many of them knew what Trump was in 2016. (But her emails!)

Anyway, David Brooks is saying no to that, at least for now. He’s rooting for a moderate Democrat to win the nomination, but eventually comes around to this conclusion:

And yet, if it comes to Trump vs. Warren in a general election, the only plausible choice is to support Warren. … Politics is downstream from morality and culture. Warren represents a policy wrong turn, in my view, but policies can be argued about and reversed. Trump represents a much more important and fundamental threat — to the norms, values, standards and soul of this country.

He leaned the same way in his last column before the 2016 election.

Many of us disagree strongly with many Clinton policies. But any sensible person can distinguish between an effective operating officer and a whirling disaster who is only about himself.

But in that column he didn’t come out and say explicitly that he would vote for Hillary, or that other conservatives should.

and the Democratic debate

I’m ashamed to admit how little attention I’ve given this. It’s startling how the action in American politics has shifted to Congress and the courts recently, and away from the campaign trail.

You can watch the whole thing starting here.

and Brexit

For a moment it looked like this might all work out. Thursday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he had reached a Brexit deal with the EU. The deal is complicated, but essentially leaves Northern Ireland running by EU rules on trade.

In practice, that meant that, rather than putting a border on the island of Ireland, Britain would have to put one in the Irish Sea, and impose regulatory and customs checks for items passing from Britain into Northern Ireland.

Johnson’s allies representing Northern Ireland might not like that, but it was the best he could do.

Parliament was supposed to vote on the deal Saturday, but then things got interesting: Parliament decided to put off a final vote on the Brexit deal until after it passed all the implementing legislation. The point of that, as I get it, was to make sure that no last-minute stunt could throw the country into a no-deal Brexit on October 31.

Anyway, that meant that an October 18 deadline passed, requiring Johnson to request an extension from the EU. He did, but also told them he didn’t mean it. It’s not clear what they’re going to do about it. The BBC has a flow chart that explains all the possibilities.

and you also might be interested in …

Elijah Cummings died Thursday. He was 68 and had been in poor health for some time.

The State Department’s official investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server concluded in September and its unclassified report was released this week.

While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience, by and large, ‘the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations. … There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information. [italics added]

Well, I’m glad nobody made a big deal out it, then. [BTW, I will take credit now for having gotten this issue right at the time in “About Those Emails“.]

The details of Trump’s “tremendous” trade deal with China are already starting to unravel. The markets apparently don’t take seriously Trump’s claim that the Chinese have agreed to buy $40 or $50 billion of American agricultural products. The price of soybeans hasn’t budged.

It’s bad enough that US immigration officials are continuing to separate children from their parents. But it turns out that in some cases the separation may be permanent: Some states are letting Americans adopt children whose parents have been deported.

An important addition to the abortion discussion is “I Had a Late-Term Abortion. I Am Not a Monster.” by Lyndsay Werking-Yip in Saturday’s New York Times.

I ended my child’s life. At 23 weeks and six days into my pregnancy, I had a “late term” abortion. When people ask, “How could you?” I reply that allowing her to live would have been a fate worse than death. Her diagnosis was not fatal, not incompatible with the bare mechanics of a living body. But it was incompatible with a fulfilling life. … I know I made the best choice for my child. I do not regret it, and I will not hide it.

It is important to tell the stories of actual late-term abortions, because they almost never match the vicious portraits painted by the anti-abortion movement. More typically, late-term abortions are morally serious decisions made with great care and anguish.

The point of Werking-Yip’s essay isn’t that of course you would have done the same thing, but that you probably have no idea what it’s like to face such a decision.

You might swear up and down that you could never make the choice I did, but you never know for sure until the time comes.

What makes the abortion question so difficult to discuss is that it’s actually two questions:

  • What should be done?
  • Who should decide what to do?

Pro-life advocates focus on the first question, and their answer is that abortions should not be done, no matter the circumstances. Having come to that conclusion, they want the government to decide once and for all: no abortions.

Pro-choice advocates focus on the second question, and say that pregnant women should decide what happens to their pregnancies, in consultation with the people they trust and rely on: spouses, families, friends, doctors, religious advisors. They reject a one-size-fits-all government decision.

That’s why the two sides talk past each other: They’re answering different questions.

A Sandy Hook father won a defamation suit against an author whose book claims the father faked his son’s death as part of a government plot to impose gun control. The jury awarded him $450,000. Similar defamation suits against Alex Jones are still pending.

Responding to Attorney General Barr’s speech blaming all societal problems on secularism, never-Trump Republican columnist Jennifer Rubin lists the issues that she never wants to hear Trump Republicans lecture about again:

  • moral values. “If one spends years tolerating, supporting and defending a president whose character is lower than any president in modern memory, one loses the right to wag his finger.”
  • the rule of law. “As with morality, no more Federalist Society lectures on limited government and constitutional conservatism, please.”
  • foreign policy. “I never want to hear that Republicans are the strong-on-defense and pro-democracy party. Ever.”
  • deficits.

Years ago, Nike ran an ad campaign for Air Jordans with the slogan “It’s got to be the shoes.” It was intentionally ridiculous, because anyone could see that the difference between Michael Jordan and the rest of us wasn’t his shoes. But Nike’s new running shoes have people raising that issue seriously, and oversight organizations are wondering whether they should be banned from competitions.

and let’s close with puppies

I’m guessing we could all use some puppies about now.

October 21, 2019 – 11:17 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (13)

A Liberal View of Intervention

Trump has taken liberals’ no-endless-war rhetoric and gone somewhere ugly with it. How do we take it back?

Like many liberals, I was wrong-footed by President Trump’s abrupt decision to wash his hands of Syria. On the one hand, it sure looks like a dishonorable move that has led to an embarrassing defeat and opened the door to a humanitarian catastrophe.

On the other hand, I also want to see America stop policing the world. I was against invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, and I don’t see any achievable goal in Afghanistan that is worth our continued involvement. In general, I want to see American troops come home from war zones far from our borders. So what was my plan exactly for Syria?

I feel like Trump has stolen my own rhetoric about “endless war” and abused it. But what is the right use of it? And if I’m against Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds, is the only alternative to side with interventionists like Mitch McConnell?

I can’t promise a complete answer here, but let’s try to sort this out as best we can.

Betrayal and surrender. Let’s start with the Kurds , who are among the most persistently short-changed people on Earth. Something like 30-40 million of them live in a more-or-less definable area, but somehow the self-determination wave that swept the world after World War I passed them by. Bulgarians and Czechs got their own states, and by now even Croatia and Azerbaijan are countries, but the Kurds are still divided up among Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

And now we’ve screwed them over again. We enlisted them into our fight against the Islamic State, and something like 11,000 of them died in that war. They had managed to carve out an autonomous zone in northeastern Syria, one in which women played an unusually active role, but the connections between that zone and a sometimes-violent Kurdish independence movement in Turkey threatened the authoritarian Erdogan government, which has wanted for years to cross into Syria and crush the Kurdish forces.

What had been stopping them was the presence of a small number of US troops in the area, and the threat of American air power. The Kurds may not be a military match for the second-largest army in NATO, but they are real soldiers, and with control of the skies they could make Turkey pay an unacceptable price. After all, this wasn’t some kind of asymmetric guerilla war, it was an invasion — exactly the kind of thing the American military was built to stop.

And then Trump decided to stand aside. We don’t know for sure what happened on that Trump/Erdogan phone call, but I picture it the way Mitt Romney does: “Turkey may have called America’s bluff.” I imagine Erdogan saying: “We’re coming whether you like it or not” and Trump being cowed into submission.

Trump tried to spin his “ceasefire agreement” (Turkey refuses to call it that) into a victory:

I’m happy to report tremendous success with respect to Turkey. This is an amazing outcome. This is an outcome, regardless of how the press would like to damp it down, this was something they were trying to get for 10 years.

But Trump’s “tremendous success” looks a lot like surrender. The agreement calls for Turkish forces to remain in the territory they have captured, and for our Kurdish allies to turn over their heavy weapons, dismantle their fortifications, and remove their forces from the 20-mile buffer zone Turkey has claimed. The United States will remove its forces from Syria entirely and impose no sanctions on Turkey. So Turkey gets what it wants and pays no price. Turkey may have been trying to get to this point for ten years, but that’s not what the Kurds wanted — or us for that matter.

I also doubt that any of the American troops waiting to be evacuated from Syrian feel victorious. Russians have already occupied one of the bases they left behind, and we destroyed another one with an air strike. Those are the kinds of things that happen when you flee in desperation, not when you win.

McConnell’s internationalist critique.  Friday, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took the unusual step of publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post to denounce Trump’s Syria policy. Before looking at the content of his article, it’s worth considering what its mere existence tells us: McConnell doesn’t think Trump is listening to him. An influential player like McConnell doesn’t make a public argument if the President is taking his calls and paying attention. For McConnell, going public like this is a last resort, and points to feelings of both frustration and helplessness.

He’s also taking out insurance. If bad things happen because of Trump’s surrender, he doesn’t want to share the blame. So his article is a public marker that says, “I warned everybody.”

Also worth noting: He’s doing his best not to attack the President personally. In fact, the name “Trump” doesn’t appear (though “Obama” does). He focuses on the decision, not the man who made it.

Now to the content. First he makes an abstract defense of America’s military role abroad: Recalling 9/11, he predicts that the threat of ISIS or similar terrorist groups will not stay in the Middle East, and lays out a strategy where America provides strategic leadership, but has allies and so does not have to do all the fighting itself.

Then he assesses the current situation:

The combination of a U.S. pullback and the escalating Turkish-Kurdish hostilities is creating a strategic nightmare for our country. Even if the five-day cease-fire announced Thursday holds, events of the past week have set back the United States’ campaign against the Islamic State and other terrorists. Unless halted, our retreat will invite the brutal Assad regime in Syria and its Iranian backers to expand their influence. And we are ignoring Russia’s efforts to leverage its increasingly dominant position in Syria to amass power and influence throughout the Middle East and beyond.

And his prescription:

We need to use both sticks and carrots to bring Turkey back in line while respecting its own legitimate security concerns. In addition to limiting Turkey’s incursion and encouraging an enduring cease-fire, we should create conditions for the reintroduction of U.S. troops and move Turkey away from Russia and back into the NATO fold.

Finally, he worries that Trump’s desire to pull the US out of “endless wars” will strike next in Afghanistan.

We saw humanitarian disaster and a terrorist free-for-all after we abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990s, laying the groundwork for 9/11. We saw the Islamic State flourish in Iraq after President Barack Obama’s retreat. We will see these things anew in Syria and Afghanistan if we abandon our partners and retreat from these conflicts before they are won.

He closes with “America’s wars will be ‘endless’ only if America refuses to win them.”

In essence, McConnell is restating what has been the conventional wisdom in American foreign policy since World War II. (It lapsed a bit after Vietnam but came back after 9/11.): The world will never leave us alone, so we can’t leave it alone. Threats can arise anywhere, and we need to be ready to oppose them while they’re small and tractable, rather than wait for them to get large enough to strike at our homeland.

My anti-war record. I’d like to stay in an objective-journalist role and quote other people making the case for bringing our troops home from overseas — maybe Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, as Atlantic’s Peter Beinart does — but that would be disingenuous: I’ve been making that case myself for years, and I can’t disown it now.

Back in 2005, when I was blogging on Daily Kos under the pseudonym Pericles, I wrote a piece called “Cut and Run” about pulling out of Iraq. At the time, even people who realized that invading Iraq had been a mistake were falling for Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Doctrine”: We broke Iraq, so now we had a responsibility to fix it before we left. They admitted that we needed to get out, but in six months or maybe a year or two, after we had stabilized the situation.

The case I made in “Cut and Run” was that we weren’t fixing anything by staying.

What are we fixing? What do we expect to get better if we stay for another year or five years or ten years? I do not intend that question to be rhetorical. If “we are making progress, “as President Bush claimed this week, we ought to be able to measure that progress somehow.

Elsewhere (the link has since died; I need to repost somewhere) I argued that the stay-a-little-longer caucus would never be satisfied: Whenever we left, disaster would ensue, and they would claim vindication. And that is what happened. We stayed another six years, but McConnell (and others) blame Obama’s withdrawal for the rise of ISIS. (If only we’d stayed seven or eight more years rather than six.)

That’s why I’m not satisfied by McConnell’s assurance that he doesn’t want to stay in Afghanistan forever, just until we “win”. I have the same fundamental objection I had many years ago: What does “winning” even mean? If someone would offer a compelling vision of a post-victory Afghanistan, and then describe a path for getting there, reasonable people could argue about whether the outcome is worth the cost.

Instead, we always get the same dystopian vision: If we leave now, something terrible will happen. So when can we leave? Sometime, maybe, but not now. So how many “not nows” make a “forever”?

Is it possible to thread this needle? On the one hand, I am disgusted by what I’m seeing in Syria. On the other, I still don’t want to join McConnell and most of the rest of the foreign-policy establishment in the post-World-War-II intervention consensus.

Looking back, I also find that I’m not against all interventions. I like what President Clinton did in Bosnia: We ended a genocide. And while we (but mostly our European allies) ended up with troops in the area for many years afterward, it was a peace-keeping mission rather than a war-fighting mission. Casualties were minimal.

I regret that we didn’t find some similar way to end the genocide in Rwanda. And I don’t know what to think about Libya. Things haven’t turned out well there, but I can’t feel bad about stopping Qaddafi from killing civilians by the tens of thousands.

So what kind of policy do I want exactly?

I warned you I wouldn’t have a complete answer. I don’t have a doctrine that spells out precisely when the US should or shouldn’t get involved in some distant conflict. (Senator Warren: If you have a plan for that, this would be a good time to reveal it.) All I can offer are some intuitions that I still trust, in spite of it all. Mostly they revolve around coming to a proper understanding of the scope of American power: Being the most powerful nation on Earth gives us some responsibilities. But at the same time we need to be realistic: There are things our military — or military power in general — can’t accomplish. If we try we’ll only make bad situations worse.

So here’s what I think:

We can’t end tyranny in the world, but we should try to prevent genocide. The world is full of bad governments, and sometimes overthrowing them just gets you a worse government, or a failed state that can’t fulfill the responsibilities of a government at all. You can’t create a good government at gunpoint.

What you can do at gunpoint, though, is stop one group of people from slaughtering another. Sometimes the mass murder is a mania that will pass if you can just interrupt it. Some groups will see that — as much as they still hate some other group — the world is not going to stand for a genocide, so they need to come up with some other plan. Other situations may require a longer occupation. But stopping genocide doesn’t require you to rule over people or teach them to govern themselves, just to put limits on them.

There’s hope for a peacekeeping mission, but nation-building hardly ever works. An amazing number of the world’s problem areas, particularly in the Middle East, are “nations” that were created by colonial powers drawing arbitrary lines on a map.

The people in those regions often feel no sense of national loyalty to each other, and the only way they have ever held together as “nations” is under the dominance of some strongman. You can’t turn such places into constitutional democracies just by writing a constitution and having elections.

Don’t misinterpret that: It’s not that some kinds of people aren’t ready for democracy as individuals. When they emigrate to the US or Western Europe, they often make fine citizens. The problem is that democracy requires a sense of mutual loyalty that the residents of places like Iraq and Afghanistan have never developed. And that’s something else you can’t instill at gunpoint.

What you can do at gunpoint, though, is stop them from killing each other.

We can’t kid ourselves about our good intentions. One mistake American interventionists often make is to whitewash our motives. We didn’t go into Iraq and Afghanistan because we wanted to bestow democracy on these oppressed peoples. We invaded Iraq for the oil and Afghanistan because we wanted to get Bin Laden. Building democracy was a story we told ourselves to salve our consciences.

Nothing is as doomed to failure as a mission you didn’t really believe in from the start.

If we examine our real motives before we start an intervention, usually we’ll either realize that we shouldn’t do this at all, or see that the scope of our mission should be much smaller than taking over the whole country.

So what about the Kurds? Our troops in Syria got there because they were fighting ISIS. Once the territory of ISIS had all been retaken, there were two reasons to keep them there: to keep ISIS from reforming, and to prevent either the Turks or the Syrians from attacking the Kurds.

Both of those were peace-keeping missions. We weren’t trying to teach the Kurds how to be a people; they knew that already. They were building their own nation.

One way you can tell the mission was peace-keeping is that war broke out as soon as Trump ordered our troops to stand down.

The Kurds believe that the Turks intend an ethnic cleansing of the area or even a genocide. Trump thinks not, but I guess we’ll see.

Planning. One final note: Even if you believe that our mission in Syria wasn’t worth the cost any more, there’s no excuse for the way Trump handled it.

When we do decide to pull out of a country, we need a withdrawal plan rather than just a tweet announcing our departure. First, we need a plan to get our own people out of the country safely. And second, we need to do right by the people who have helped us, and who will likely be targeted for death after we leave. If nothing else, that means doing something Trump hates to do: welcoming refugees to the United States.

October 21, 2019 – 9:45 am Categories: Articles | Comments (15)

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The Leader or the Law?

The impeachment question is coming down to this: Will Republicans honor the Constitution, or usher in a new era of authoritarian rule?

More and more each week, the Trump strategy for avoiding impeachment looks to be a pure power play. He is barely even pretending any more that he hasn’t committed (and isn’t continuing to commit) impeachable offenses. Meanwhile his lawyers are making absurd arguments in court, demanding (and sometimes getting) blind loyalty from Trump-appointed judges.

It’s coming down to this: Will Republicans uphold their oaths of office, or get in line behind the Leader and let the American experiment in democracy end? The key question isn’t “What is right?” or “Who is guilty?” any more. It’s “Whose side are you on?” If there are five pro-Trump votes on the Supreme Court and 34 pro-Trump votes in the Senate, he wins.

And that’s the only way he wins.

In court, Trump’s lawyers are arguing that he has “absolute immunity” from every conceivable kind of legal jeopardy: not just indictments, but also investigations and subpoenas, state and federal alike. Ten days ago, that argument got laughed out of federal appeals court by two judges; the third, a Trump appointee, chose the Leader over the law. [1] Trump’s only hope for victory in his attempts to obstruct congressional investigations is that the five Republican judges on the Supreme Court do the same.

I refuse to believe that Trump’s lawyers can’t come up with any more plausible arguments than this sweeping claim of executive supremacy. Rather, it seems to be their intention to put the question to judges as bluntly as possible: Regardless of the law, are you with us or against us?

It’s not complicated.

Whether subpoenas allow Congress to gather more evidence or not, the rough transcript of the Ukraine phone call is by itself compelling evidence of abuse of power: Trump is using his office to demand a partisan political favor from a foreign leader. The only question at this point is whether that abuse is sufficient to warrant impeachment. [2]

But if the phone call represents a quid pro quo — Ukraine won’t get the weapons it needs to defend itself against Russia unless it does Trump a political favor — then all doubt about impeachability is removed: It’s bribery, which the Constitution specifically calls out as an impeachable offense. So “no quid pro quo” — implausible as that is, given the transcript — has been the mantra of Trump defenders.

But Thursday, acting Chief of Staff Mike Mulvaney openly admitted the quid pro quo. (In Mulvaney’s dual role as the head of OMB, he was responsible for holding up the Ukraine aid package.)

Did [the President] also mention to me the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about it. But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money … I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.

Reporters offered several follow-up questions to make sure that Mulvaney had really said what he said — some used the phrase “quid pro quo” in their questions — and he stuck by his claim. Only hours later, after he saw the firestorm his comments evoked, did he try to walk it back, blaming the media for “misconstruing” his confession, and basically telling the world that we hadn’t seen and heard what we saw and heard (and can watch again if we have any doubts).

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has embraced the claim Mulvaney disavowed. They’re selling a “Get Over It” t-shirt. That kind of Orwellian doublethink has become typical of Trump’s defenders: We didn’t say it, and we’re proud that we did say it.

At the same press conference, Mulvaney announced a blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution: Trump would host the next G-7 meeting at his privately owned resort. That decision got reversed Saturday, after another firestorm, but without any admission that the proposal was criminal. The problem, in Trump’s view, is that people objected to his attempt to enrich himself. [3] If no one objects to his next acts of corruption, he’ll go through with them.

It’s becoming clear that the House will eventually vote articles of impeachment, one of which will be about Ukraine. (Possible others concern the multiple examples of obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller Report, obstruction of the impeachment inquiry itself, and abundant additional examples of illegal emoluments.) Then the Republicans in the Senate will face a choice: Admit the now obvious fact that Trump has committed impeachable offenses, or choose the Leader over the law.

[1] The Slate article in the link lays out the scope of Judge Rao’s opinion:

there is another, even more disturbing aspect of Rao’s dissent. She wrote, ominously, that “it is unnecessary here to determine the scope of impeachable offenses.” Unnecessary here? It isn’t just unnecessary—it’s impermissible, because the federal judiciary has no constitutional authority to determine “the scope of impeachable offenses.” The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution assigns the power of impeachment to the House exclusively, denying the judiciary the ability to meddle in impeachment proceedings. Rao seemed to reject that precedent, instead suggesting that courts can “determine the scope of impeachable offenses” and, by extension, quash an impeachment on the grounds that the charges are not “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

[2] I argue that it is, using standards that I laid out long before the Ukraine affair, because the Ukraine call represents Trump’s attempt to cheat in the 2020 election. When the President’s corruption starts to affect the integrity of the next election, it is extremely cynical to argue that the voters rather than the Senate should remove him.

[3] Trump’s two defenses — that his Doral Resort is the best possible place to hold the G-7, and that he will host the event “at cost” and make no profit — are both absurd.

South Florida in June is a terrible place to be, which is why the Doral has such low occupancy rates then. (I know from personal experience, having attended a conference in Fort Lauderdale one June.) Plus, the Doral bears no resemblance to the kinds of places (typically remote, peaceful, and easily secured) where these events are usually held. It beggars the imagination to think that no place in, say, Hawaii or Maine would be better. For that matter, why not go back to the historic New Hampshire hotel where the Bretton Woods Conference was held in 1944?

And Stephanie Ruhle outlines the tricks Trump could use to funnel government money into his resort without reporting a profit.

October 21, 2019 – 8:56 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It hasn’t been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. The impeachment inquiry rolled on, hearing from a series of foreign-service officers about the subordination of America’s policy in Ukraine to Trump’s re-election. The testimony was behind closed doors, but several of the witnesses released their opening statements.

Meanwhile, the White House Chief of Staff virtually confessed, telling the press that military aid to Ukraine was held up so that it could be exchanged for Ukrainian commitment to investigate Democrats. It took a few hours for Mike Mulvaney to realize he’d given the game away, but then he came out and told the press they hadn’t heard him say what he said.

Trump sent Pence to Ankara to negotiate a “ceasefire” that looks a lot like a surrender. Elijah Cummings died. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally negotiated an agreement to leave the EU, but the drama goes on as the October 31 deadline approaches. Nancy Pelosi stood up to Trump in a photo for the ages. The State Department finally cleared Hillary in the notorious email scandal. And a bunch of other stuff happened.

Anyway, there are two featured posts this week, both of which should be out within an hour or so. The first is my projection of where the impeachment debate seems headed: The evidence against Trump is increasingly clear, and the arguments he’s making in court to obstruct the investigation are increasingly bizarre. So it looks to me like it’s going to come down to a pure loyalty argument: Republican judges and senators should ignore the facts and the law and support Trump as a pure power play. I describe that in “The Leader or the Law?”

The second featured post takes a step back from the Syria question to consider something harder: Is there room to be against Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds without embracing “endless war” and American interventions around the world? I try to square my disgust at what’s going on in Syria with my own history of opposing foreign military adventures in “A Liberal View of Intervention”.

The weekly summary covers everything else, before ending with a cute puppy picture. Because we need that sometimes.

October 21, 2019 – 8:42 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

American Rope

The saying “never get into a well with an American rope” is gaining currency. The impact will be long-lasting.

– Brett McGurk
former Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL

This week’s featured posts are “Backstabbing the Kurds is Just Trump Being Trump” and “The Ukraine Story Runs Deeper Than We Thought“.

This week everybody was talking about the chaos in Syria

I covered the unsurprising nature of Trump’s faithlessness to the Syrian Kurds in one of the featured posts. Max Boot makes some of the same points, and then asks: “Are you happy now, Trump supporters? Is all this worth a corporate tax cut?”

Now let’s talk about what’s happening on the ground.

After being deserted by their American allies, the Kurds in northern Syria cut a deal with the Assad regime to protect them from the Turkish invasion.

Syrian state media said units from President Bashar al-Assad’s army were moving north to “confront Turkish aggression on Syrian territory”. Unconfirmed reports said the deal between the Kurds and the regime would be extended to apply to the whole of north-east Syria. …

The deal is likely to be a bitter end to five years of semi-autonomy for Kurdish groups in north-east Syria, forced by Ankara’s offensive on the area. Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring started on Wednesday after Donald Trump’s announcement that US forces would withdraw from the region.

The Russia-brokered deal gives Assad control over a large chunk of the country that had been independent, but it’s hard to blame the Kurds for making it. Assad wants to be their dictator, but Turkey might be planning an ethnic cleansing.

No one knows what happens next. Maybe Turkey and Syria will fight a war. Maybe there will be a quick ceasefire, brokered by Russia — with the US more or less irrelevant. Maybe we’ll get our 1000 troops out of Syria without losing any of them, or maybe we won’t.

One thing is certain: No one in the US government looked this far ahead. Trump certainly didn’t, and his decision to OK Turkey’s invasion surprised everybody else.

As so often is the case when Trump does something that doesn’t seem to make sense, it will benefit Putin. Was that the plan, or just a happy accident?

Initially, American troops were just pulling back to let Turkey establish a buffer zone, but now that the Kurds are with Assad, there’s no real role for the US any more. So Trump has announced that all American troops will leave Syria.

How they’ll get out is still an issue, but I’m sure the Pentagon will come up with something. Defense Secretary Esper said yesterday:

We have American forces likely caught between two opposing, advancing armies and it’s a very untenable situation. I spoke with the President last night, after discussions with the rest of the national security team, and he directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria.

This points out an issue that isn’t getting nearly enough coverage: We know that Trump made his decision to greenlight Turkey’s invasion during a phone call with Turkish President Erdoğan, and that the entire defense and diplomacy establishment was blindsided by it. This means that the experts weren’t consulted in the decision-making process, but Trump supporters can (with some justification) point to past US mistakes as evidence that expert-approved decisions aren’t always that great anyway.

But here’s the side of the story that’s getting missed: It isn’t just the decision-making process that got cut short, it was the planning process too. There’s a crisis going on, and the whole US government is out there with no plan. The troops don’t know how they’re pulling out. Nobody has thought about the inevitable refugee crisis. Our other allies in Syria (like France) don’t know what they’re supposed to do with their people. (And don’t think they won’t remember this the next time we ask them to join a coalition.) Our ambassadors to allied countries don’t know how to answer the questions they’re getting. Nobody seems to have thought about how to secure the ISIS prisoners the Kurds were holding. And so on.

The Washington Post reports:

“This is total chaos,” a senior administration official said at midday, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the confusing situation in Syria.

Although “the Turks gave guarantees to us” that U.S. forces would not be harmed, the official said, Syrian militias allied with them “are running up and down roads, ambushing and attacking vehicles,” putting American ­forces — as well as civilians — in danger even as they withdraw. The militias, known as the Free Syrian Army, “are crazy and not reliable.”

If you believe in Trump’s intuition — I don’t, but some people do — you might be comfortable with him ignoring the normal policy-making apparatus and just going with his gut. But there still needs to be an implementation process, or else your evacuation plan might just be to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Here’s something somebody should have thought of in advance:

[O]ver the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials.

Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.

and impeachment

The NYT examines the public statements of Republican senators and finds 0 supporting an impeachment inquiry, 15 who have “expressed concerns or say they have questions”, and 38 who support Trump unequivocally.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sent Congress a defiant letter, claiming the House’s impeachment inquiry is unconstitutional. (The Constitution is actually silent about the impeachment process, saying only that “The House of Representatives … shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”) Consequently, the White House pledges to stonewall.

Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it. Because participating in this inquiry under the current unconstitutional posture would inflict lasting institutional harm on the Executive Branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers, you have left the President no choice. Consistent with the duties of the President of the United States, and in particular his obligation to preserve the rights of future occupants of his office, President Trump cannot permit his Administration to participate in this partisan inquiry under these circumstances.

The WaPo annotates that letter. I’ll add an annotation of my own: If it’s up to the President to decide whether an impeachment process is legitimate or not, then we’ve already lost the separation of powers.

One major claim of the letter is that Trump should receive all the due-process privileges of a criminal defendant at a trial: The right to have lawyers present, cross-examine witnesses, call his own witnesses, present evidence, and so on. As the annotations point out, this is the wrong point in the process for that: An impeachment inquiry in the House is like a grand jury investigation, not like a trial. The people under investigation have no official role in a grand-jury investigation. But if the House passes articles of impeachment, then the Senate (presumably) will hold a trial where Trump will have all these due-process rights.

In the Balkinization legal blog, Gerard Magliocca offers a novel interpretation of the White House counsel’s letter:

If an impeachment proceeding in the House can be unconstitutional as the President claims, then why can’t he say the same about the Senate trial? When the Senate trial begins … the President is bound to whine that he is being treated unfairly or that the Chief Justice is treating him unfairly. When, then, should he accept a guilty verdict from this “kangaroo court?” He can just say that the trial was unconstitutional and that he should remain in office. Maybe one object of the White House Counsel’s letter is to establish a predicate for that action.

At one point this week, Trump hinted that he might cooperate “if the rules are fair“. I was amazed by the number of media outlets that took this statement seriously: When has Trump ever admitted that he was being treated fairly? (He thinks it’s not fair that he hasn’t gotten a Nobel Peace Prize yet.)  If the House calls witnesses who say things Trump doesn’t like, that will be unfair in his eyes, because he deserves to have people say only good things about him.

From Ambassador Yovanovitch’s opening statement to the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees:

Today, we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership, with Congress, needs to take action now to defend this great institution, and its thousands of loyal and effective employees. We need to rebuild diplomacy as the first resort to advance America’s interests and the frontline of America’s defense. I fear that not doing so will harm our nation’s interest, perhaps irreparably.

That harm will come not just through the inevitable and continuing resignation and loss of many of this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants. It also will come when those diplomats who soldier on and do their best to represent our nation face partners abroad who question whether the ambassador truly speaks for the President and can be counted upon as a reliable partner. The harm will come when private interests circumvent professional diplomats for their own gain, not the public good. The harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system. In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U.S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.

Yovanovitch’s testimony was important not just for what she said. (We don’t know most of what she said.) It was also important because it happened at all. The State Department tried to stop her from testifying, and she ignored them. All the other subpoenaed government officials have to look at that and re-examine their options.

Next up: Trump’s former Russia advisor, Fiona Hill, who I believe is testifying right now behind closed doors. She left the administration just days before the Trump/Zelensky phone call, and is expected to describe the pressure to get rid of Yovanovitch, among other things.

Ms. Hill took her objections to the treatment of Ms. Yovanovitch, who was targeted by Mr. Giuliani and conservative media outlets, to John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, as well as others. Mr. Bolton shared her concerns, according to the person, and was upset at Mr. Giuliani’s activities, which she viewed as essentially co-opting American foreign policy toward Ukraine.

Tomorrow: Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the EU who somehow wound up overseeing much of the Ukraine scheme. No one is too sure what Sondland is going to say: He’s a Trump donor rather than a career foreign-service guy, but he may not be willing to go down with the ship.

An appeals court says Trump’s accountants have to turn his tax returns over to the House Oversight Committee.

and the trade war

Friday afternoon, I felt like I was watching news reports from two different universes. CNBC was showing delayed video from the Oval Office, where President Trump was announcing a big trade deal with China. As I listened, though, the “deal” seemed more and more ephemeral: It’s a deal in principle, whose actual text isn’t worked out yet. Given how trade diplomacy goes, that could mean it all evaporates, the way that Trump’s agreement to denuclearize North Korea evaporated.

The video dragged on and on with no analysis from CNBC’s experts, so I flipped to MSNBC and CNN, neither of which was talking about it at all. On one channel it was breaking news worth interrupting regular coverage for a considerable length of time. On two others, it wasn’t worth mentioning.

So anyway, the markets seem unthrilled this morning. Here’s some analysis from The Street’s “Real Money” blog:

If Trump claims this to be a “substantial” deal … I am not sure if Trump has any adjectives to use if ever an actual deal were to be signed, [and] one wonders what a real deal would sound like. After all the fuss about the thirteenth round of U.S./China trade talks on October 9, all that came out was the U.S. has agreed to postpone an increase of tariffs from 25% to 30% on $250 billion worth of Chinese imported goods, and that China would purchase between $40 billion and $50 billion worth of U.S. agricultural products.

The hard pressing, game changing issues that Trump always beat his chest about, like Intellectual Property Theft and Technology Transfers, were not even discussed or finalized. The market cheered that tariffs were postponed, but let’s not forget 25% tariffs are still in place. There is no truce and China and U.S. companies are still being penalized. We all know how many times Trump has decided to throw a random curve ball at China days after any negotiation, only to shock the market once again.

and you also might be interested in …

So there’s another Democratic presidential debate tomorrow. It’s the first one since the Ukraine story broke and impeachment became an immediate possibility. It’s also the first one since Bernie Sanders’ heart attack, since Republicans started smearing Joe Biden on a daily basis, and since Elizabeth Warren started topping the polls.

With the way that Syria and impeachment have sucked up attention, I find myself looking at the other candidates in the race and asking, “Are you still running?” I can’t remember the last time I had a thought about Cory Booker or Amy Klobuchar.

I will warn Warren supporters not to get too carried away by the recent polls. To me, Biden’s candidacy in some ways resembles Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Several times during the primary campaign, some other candidate briefly passed Romney in the polls before falling back.

Warren continues to be interesting. She was asked what she would to say to someone who believes marriage is between one man and one woman, and her answer went viral:

I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that, and I will say, then just marry one woman. … Assuming you can find one.

Conservatives (like Marco Rubio) took offense, but it’s hard to feel sorry for them, given how mild that put-down was. They can dish out the hostility, but they’re such snowflakes when the slightest disapproval is turned back on them.

Warren also showed some mettle in going after Facebook. Facebook has allowed Trump to post anti-Biden ads that have been rejected by most networks because they make provably false claims about his “corruption” in Ukraine. Biden has protested, but Facebook replied that “when a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third party fact checkers”.

Warren decided to take this one step farther than just a protest. Instead, she boomeranged their policy back at them, running an ad headlined:

Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election

That claim isn’t true, and the text of the ad admitted as much. But then it got to the real point:

But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.

So Mark, how do you like when people use your platform to lie about you?

There was another attempt to gin up an anti-Warren scandal. This time the claim is that she “lied” about being fired from her teaching job when she got pregnant. The evidence for this is that at different times she has emphasized different aspects of the story. The school district records just show that she quit.

If the goal was to smear Warren as a liar, it has backfired spectacularly. All over the country, women have spoken out to say yeah, this is how pregnancy discrimination works. There’s not a paper trail. There is plausible deniability, and there is the shame and fear that comes with losing a job. And back when Warren was pregnant, firing pregnant teachers was standard practice across the country – it was unusual to not be let go if you were having a baby.

There’s going to be a lot of this. I expect some new pseudo-scandal every week or two until Warren either becomes president or falls in the polls.

Brexit is steaming toward another deadline. There’s an EU summit on Thursday and Friday. Saturday is Parliament’s deadline for Prime Minister Johnson to either submit the deal he has negotiated with with the EU, or to ask the EU for another extension. If neither a deal nor an extension is worked out, the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal on October 31.

Poland had a chance to reverse its slide towards authoritarianism, but decided not to. It looks like the ruling Law and Justice Party increased its majority slightly. Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs. Democracy, comments:

As the example of many other populist governments, from nearby Hungary to faraway Venezuela, show, it is often in their second term in office that populist leaders manage to take full control, intimidating critics and eliminating rival power centers. In this election, the chances of the opposition were already somewhat restricted by a deeply hostile media environment. With the government now holding enough power to institute further anti-democratic reforms, it is likely that it will become ever harder for the opposition to do its work.

and let’s close with something bouncy

I know Sift closings are usually non-political, but I couldn’t resist this one. Here’s a bouncy song about impeachment from Jonathan Coulton and CBS All Access’ “The Good Fight”.

October 14, 2019 – 12:43 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

The Ukraine Story Runs Deeper Than We Thought

What at first looked like just a phone call has turned out to be a much larger and sleazier operation.

When it first broke, the Ukraine story seemed nice and simple: In a call to Ukrainian President Zelensky, Trump strongly implied that if he wanted American military aid, he should dig up (or invent) dirt on Joe Biden — and also investigate some other conspiracy theory involving the DNC server (and “proving” Putin’s contention that the Russians didn’t really hack it). Unlike the crimes that the Mueller investigation uncovered, it was an easy story to understand, and easy to see why what Trump did was wrong.

Conversely, that simplicity was why Trump supporters didn’t think it was an impeachable offense: It was just a phone call. Trump got a couple of weird ideas into his head, and they happened to spill out while he was talking to somebody. The American aid got released eventually anyway, so let’s just move on.

I have an analogy that I think sums up their thinking. (As far as I know, none of them actually used it, but it would make sense out of the kinds of things a lot of them said.): A married man gets drunk at a party and makes a move on some pretty girl, who manages to get away from him. Sure, his wife should be upset with him, but it’s probably not worth getting a divorce over. Tucker Carlson put it like this:

Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. … The key question with Trump’s Ukraine call, though, is whether the president’s actions, advisable or not, rise to the level of an impeachable offense. It’s hard to argue they do.

In the two weeks that followed the initial revelation, though, we’ve been finding out that the pressure-Ukraine-for-partisan-favors scheme was way more than just a phone call: In fact, it shaped the whole Ukraine policy of the United States over a period of (at least) months. Our ambassador to Ukraine got recalled because she kept getting in the way. Diplomats up and down the line were rattled about it. Multiple national-security people in the White House were raising their concerns with the White House Counsel’s office about Trump’s Ukraine call, some even before it happened. Career officials at OMB protested that it was illegal to hold up aid Congress had appropriated, and were overruled by a political appointee.

Rudy Giuliani, who has no government job at all and is just Trump’s personal attorney (at least for now), was running a shadow foreign policy, and working with some shady characters to implement it. Two of them were arrested Thursday for funneling foreign money into American political campaigns, including giving $325K to America First Action, a pro-Trump PAC. Rudy himself is reported to be under investigation by the office he used to head: the US Attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York. A goal of that scheme (which apparently pulled in Energy Secretary Rick Perry — wittingly or not — as well as various Republican donors) was to try to get their people installed in the management of Ukraine’s state gas company, in order to “steer lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies”.

At this point, it’s hard to say just how far the wrongdoing goes. And it raises a question: If you drilled this deep anywhere in the Trump administration, would you strike a similar gusher of corruption?

The difficult task of the House Intelligence Committee, as it works towards preparing at least one article of impeachment for the Judiciary Committee, is to give the American people a sense of the depth of the cesspool it has found, while not losing the simplicity of the original story: We have the rough transcript (from the White House itself) of Trump pressuring a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 elections.

That’s not right, and something needs to be done about it. But it’s also not all.

October 14, 2019 – 10:58 am Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

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Backstabbing the Kurds is Just Trump Being Trump

Who could have predicted that the founder of Trump University would betray people who had faith in him?
Just about anybody who’s been paying attention.

Ever since he came down the escalator and announced his crusade to protect American womenfolk from Mexican rapists, the Donald’s Republican defenders have been singing the same song: You’ve got to let Trump be Trump.

If he says or does something racist, stands up for the poor mistreated Nazis of Charlottesville, slanders federal law enforcement institutions, sides with Putin over US intelligence services, says dozens of things each week that have no basis in reality, is nicer to enemy dictators than to our democratic allies, calls members of Congress traitors or says that they should go back where they came from … well, that’s just who he is. You need to roll with it.

But strangely, they forgot their own advice this week after Trump ordered our troops in Syria to stand aside and let Turkey attack the Kurds. Kurdish troops bore the majority of the burden in the war against ISIS in Syria, whose success Trump has often crowed about. [1] They lost something like 11,000 soldiers while we lost six fighters and two civilians.

But now that Trump believes the battle against ISIS is won [2], what good are they? Turkey’s authoritarian ruler Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — one of those dictators Trump admires — wants to clear them away from his border, where they give hope to his own oppressed Kurdish minority. And Erdoğan doesn’t just have the second-largest army in NATO going for him, he also has Trump Tower Istanbul, and countless future opportunities for ambitious businessmen who play ball. What’s loyalty to our brothers-in-arms compared to that?

Trump Tower Istanbul

But for some reason, Republicans are upset this time. Lindsey Graham, who has been Trump’s biggest sycophant through all his other betrayals, found this one shocking. The Kurds, he said in outrage, had been “shamelessly abandoned”, as if he thinks Trump’s shamelessness is a new development. Liz Cheney found it “impossible to understand why [Trump] is leaving America’s allies to be slaughtered.”

Well, Liz, I can explain it for you: This is who Trump is and who he’s always been. Betraying people who have trusted him is just Trump being Trump.

A trust-is-for-suckers theme runs through Trump’s entire life. Look at Trump University: People who admired his business acumen believed him when he said he could teach them his secrets. He took advantage of their admiration with a fraud that he needed $25 million to settle. In addition to that betrayal of trust, there’s his long history of stiffing the contractors who build his buildings, scamming the taxman, profiting from buildings that never got built, cooking the books at his hotels, refusing to repay bank loans, cheating on all three of his wives, and on and on.

Why would anyone expect him to stand by people who (in his view) have already done everything for him that they’re going to do? In his eyes, that’s a loser move. He’s never shown that kind of loyalty before, so why would he start now?

So here’s what I have to say to Lindsey, Liz, and all the other Republicans who are shocked by Trump’s faithlessness, as if it came out of the blue: One of Trump’s favorite ways to bash immigrants is to recite part of a poem in which a woman saves a poisonous snake, who then bites her. When she asks why, the snake explains:

Oh, shut up, silly woman, said the reptile with a grin.
You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.

Maybe when you heard that recitation, you thought he was warning you about MS-13 gangsters. You should have realized that he was telling you about himself.

[1] One of the many good things Trump inherited from President Obama was a strategy for beating the Islamic State. Obama saw that the American people had no appetite for another ground war in the Middle East, and yet the spread of the Islamic State not only destabilized Syria, but threatened everything the US had tried to accomplish in Iraq.

So the Obama administration came up with a plan (announced September 20, 2014) in which we would provide air power, material support, and a relatively small number of troops on the ground, while local groups — most prominently the Kurds — would do the bulk of the killing and dying. The public might not like the idea of having troops in harm’s way in yet another Middle Eastern nation, but as long as not too many of them came home in body bags, the war would stay off the front pages and most of the country would forget it was happening.

By the time Trump started measuring drapes for the Oval Office, three things were clear:

  • Obama’s strategy was working.
  • Trump was going to continue what Obama started, because Obama’s reasoning was still sound: Americans didn’t want a major new war, but they also didn’t want to turn large chunks of Iraq and Syria over to an Islamist caliphate.
  • When Obama’s strategy eventually succeeded, Trump was going to hog all the credit.

Here’s what I wrote two weeks after the 2016 election:

ISIS has been losing territory for some while now. Mosul, its last stronghold in Iraq, is cut off and likely to fall in the next few months. Its de facto capital of Raqqa is under attack in Syria. If events continue on their current path, sometime in 2017 President Trump will be able to declare victory in the territorial struggle, though ISIS will continue to be a significant underground movement. That victory will be the result of Obama’s strategy, but I expect Trump to crow about how “America is winning again.”

It took a little longer than I expected, but played out exactly that way. Here’s what our resident stable genius tweeted in January of this year:

When I became President, ISIS was out of control in Syria & running rampant. Since then tremendous progress made, especially over last 5 weeks. Caliphate will soon be destroyed, unthinkable two years ago.

I know this outcome was not “unthinkable” when Trump took office, because I was thinking it and so were a lot of other people.

[2] It isn’t. The Islamic State has lost its territory, but it still continues as the “significant underground movement” that I and everybody else predicted.

The Atlantic’s national security correspondent Mike Giglio summarizes:

For much of America’s war against the so-called ISIS caliphate, it was clear that the extremist proto-state that ISIS created across Syria and Iraq didn’t stand much chance of lasting. The militants had no way to counter the relentless U.S. air-strike campaign and faced a committed enemy in the U.S.-backed local soldiers who did the bulk of the ground fighting. ISIS, a successor to the al-Qaeda militants who battled U.S. troops during the Iraq War, would one day return to its insurgent roots and go underground. It would ultimately be left to America’s local partners to keep up the pressure and ensure the group’s lasting defeat.

These local soldiers—the Kurds in Syria, the Iraqi military, and various other forces—have already suffered many thousands of casualties. Once the territorial caliphate was defeated, America could have focused on rebuilding them as well as the heavily bombed areas where they are now charged with keeping the peace. As The New York Times reported this summer, ISIS still has as many as 18,000 fighters across Iraq and Syria, many of them organized into sleeper cells and hit teams who carry out ambushes, kidnappings, and assassinations across both countries.

Remember: Al Qaeda never did control territory, but managed to be a quite a nuisance anyway.

October 14, 2019 – 7:44 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s been a week of interesting times, in the Chinese-curse sense of the term.

When I posted last week’s Sift, Trump had announced that American troops in Syria were pulling back from the border zone that Turkey wanted to occupy, apparently abandoning the Kurdish allies who had defeated ISIS under our guidance. Turkey hadn’t moved yet, but an invasion was expected soon.

Since then, Turkey has invaded, the UN Security Council’s condemnation of that invasion was blocked by the odd couple of the US and Russia, Trump made noises about economic sanctions against Turkey but did nothing, the Kurds flipped their alliances and sought protection from the Putin-supported Assad regime, some unknown number of ISIS prisoners escaped to sow new mayhem, and now the remaining US troops in Syria are making a chaotic retreat to avoid getting caught in a Syrian-Turkish crossfire. The only clear winner in all this is Putin. Funny thing; weird Trump administration stories always seem to come back to Putin somehow.

The Trump impeachment story also got more interesting. Our recently fired ambassador to Ukraine defied Trump’s gag order and testified behind closed doors for nine hours. Two of Rudy’s cronies got arrested for channeling Ukrainian (and possibly Russian) money into Republican campaigns, amid tales of plots to manipulate the Ukrainian national gas company to the advantage of Republican donors. Giuliani himself is said to be under investigation by the SDNY, which he used to run. The administration lost a series of court cases, but that didn’t stop the White House Counsel from staking out a maximal Trump-is-above-the-law position in a letter to Congress.

Meanwhile, Trump announced a breakthrough in the China trade war, which so far looks a lot like his “breakthrough” to denuclearize North Korea. The Democrats are about to hold another presidential debate. Another big Brexit deadline is coming up. Poland’s voters endorsed its authoritarian-populist ruling party. California had a series of brownouts and blackouts. The kettle kept boiling in Hong Kong. And … well, you get the idea. The world kept being the world, even while we were all looking in some other direction.

So anyway, there will be two featured posts this week. The first one, out soon, is my answer to Republicans like Lindsey Graham, who have supported Trump in everything else, but are shocked by his betrayal of the Kurds: “Backstabbing the Kurds is just Trump being Trump”. A trust-is-for-suckers theme has run through his entire life, so you can’t really be surprised that the Kurds are joining Trump U students and his three wives on the list of people whose trust he’s abused. As Trump often says about immigrants, you knew he was a snake when you took him in.

The second featured post will focuses on impeachment, and in particular how the Ukraine shakedown gets bigger and bigger the longer Congress investigates. At first we thought it was just a simple phone call, but now it looks like large chunks of the State Department — and possibly Energy Secretary Perry and VP Pence — got pulled into a months-long corrupt scheme. That should be out around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover more of the operational developments in Syria, plus a lot of important stuff that isn’t getting the attention it deserves while we all focus on Syria and impeachment. It should appear between noon and 1.

October 14, 2019 – 7:13 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Morally Centered People

I hear this, too, from my Republican Senate colleagues. There is a belief that there is a group in every corner of the government that is out to get Trump. There really are morally centered people who find him deeply distasteful, and it is required of them to raise questions of corruption if they see it. The Trump Administration sees that as a conspiracy.

– Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)

This week’s featured post is “More Answers to Impeachment Objections“.

This week everybody was still talking about impeachment

I focused on that in the featured post. Other new developments are that a second whistleblower is emerging. I suspect we’re about to see a flood: If you’re not objecting to what Trump did, then you’re part of the cover-up.

It’s not immediately related to impeachment, but a federal judge just turned down Trump’s attempt to block a grand jury from subpoenaing his tax returns. The judge said Trump’s claim that a president has “”absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind” is “an overreach of executive power”.

I think we’re going to find out just how partisan this Supreme Court is. The law is clear, but what they’re going to rule isn’t.

Secretary of State Pompeo has not complied with a subpoena from the House.

Something I’ve been wrestling with for months is when a bad president should be impeached and when the voters should just refuse to re-elect him. Nancy Pelosi has come to more-or-less the same conclusion I have: Elections are the way to correct bad policies or to reprimand a president’s character.

If you think he’s a coward on protecting children from gun violence, and you think he’s cruel for not protecting ‘dreamers,’ if you think he is in denial on climate change, take that up in the election. That has nothing to do with what we are doing here. If you think his vocabulary and his behavior and his immorality and his indecency are personally offensive, take it up in the election.

Impeachment, on the other hand, is for abuses of power that endanger the Republic, especially the ones that damage the integrity of the election itself.

No Republicans in Congress have shown real spine yet, but some of them are creating space where a spine might go someday. Mitt Romney is the most obvious. He thinks that it’s “wrong and appalling” for Trump to ask the Chinese to investigate Joe Biden, but he hasn’t said that anything should be done about it. Likewise Susan Collins and Ben Sasse.

Trump has been tweeting that Romney should be “impeached”, apparently not realizing that impeachment is not a thing for senators. There’s also no way for voters to recall a senator. (New presidents really ought to get an introductory lecture on the Constitution.)

and Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy theory

Trump’s attempt to get bogus Biden corruption investigations going is getting all the attention, but he’s been asking for another investigation as well: into Ukraine’s role in 2016. (BTW: I don’t think Trump cares that the investigations of Biden won’t find anything. Clinton was never found to have done anything wrong during Benghazi, but the investigations helped create a fog of uncertainty around her. It would be enough to have a bunch of headlines saying “Ukraine opens investigation into Biden corruption charges”.)

You seldom see the Ukraine theory spelled out in detail, because it is in fact a long series of conspiracy theories rolled into one: The DNC computers were never hacked by Russia, but instead DNC staffer Seth Rich leaked the emails and was murdered for it. Then Ukraine and the Clinton campaign conspired to fake the evidence of Russian hacking, and all the US intelligence services (and a number of foreign intelligence services as well) were either fooled by this evidence or were in on the plot. All the predicates of the Mueller investigation were planted or manipulated in some way. Ukraine also framed Paul Manafort, and Mueller tried to use that frame to pressure Manafort to invent evidence against Trump and Russia.

It goes on.

What Trump seems to be hoping for out of the investigations is wiggle room that will allow him to pardon Paul Manafort and relax the sanctions against Russia.

If you want to get more fully read in to this cesspool of speculation and invention, here are some links.
Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort: The Ukraine Scheme

How a Fringe Theory about Ukraine Took Root in the White House

and abortion

In 2015, the Supreme Court threw out a Texas law that required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. (When you state it like that, the provision sounds reasonable, but the point is that it’s easy to pressure hospitals to deny such privileges. That’s a roundabout way to keep abortion clinics out of a region.) Now Louisiana has a similar law. In the ordinary practice of law, courts would just apply the Texas ruling to Louisiana and that would be that.

Instead, the Court is going to hear the Louisiana case this term. Nothing has changed in the law, but the vacancy created when Justice Scalia died has been filled by Justice Gorsuch (and not Merrick Garland), while Justice Kennedy has been replaced by Justice Kavanaugh. So the Court may have changed its mind, and “activist judges” may be ready to ignore precedent. Roe v Wade may be in trouble.

People in Maine need to remember: We have Susan Collins to thank for Justice Kavanaugh.

and the Democrats

The Trump-Ukraine scandal is taking up all the attention the public has for politics, which is a problem for Democratic presidential candidates, particularly the ones who are trailing in the polls and need a break-out moment.

The whole thing is unfairly bad for Biden, simply because Trump keeps smearing him. The mainstream news outlets have been pretty good about reminding the public that there is no evidence for Trump’s claims, but the simple repetition is bound to take a toll. After 2016, a lot of Democrats are understandably skittish about nominating a candidate whose rectitude we will need to defend.

The problem is: that’s everybody. Biden isn’t being smeared because there’s something uniquely slimy about him. He’s being smeared because he’s the candidate Trump is most afraid of. If the Democrats nominate someone else, that person will face smears too. No one is so perfect that Trump can’t lie about him or her.

Elizabeth Warren’s recent rise in the polls has brought a smear her way as well. The same guy who tried to gin up false sexual harassment claims against Robert Mueller now says that Warren had sex with a 24-year-old Marine.

Warren responded with humor, tweeting a double entendre connecting her University of Houston degree to a slang term for older women who date younger men. (“Go Cougars!“) In general, her fans laughed with her in a you-go-girl way.

In 2016, a lot of Bernie Sanders fans objected when I wrote that Bernie had never been targeted by the right-wing smear machine, but this is the kind of thing I meant. Right-wingers may refer to Bernie as a crazy Socialist, but he hasn’t faced some complete invention. And Warren hasn’t faced her last one yet, either. No one is so perfect that Trump can’t lie about them.

Sanders had a heart attack Tuesday night. He spent two and a half days in the hospital, had stents inserted into a blocked coronary artery, and says he’s “feeling so much better” and is eager to “get back to work”.

Lots of men have heart attacks and go on to have many more productive years, but this incident is not good for Sanders’ campaign. It feeds the argument that he is too old for the presidency, and comes at a time when his rival for the progressive vote, Elizabeth Warren, is starting to break out in the polls.

Sanders plans to participate in the debate a week from tomorrow.

The NYT ran a piece yesterday on Kamala Harris’ changing strategy — namely, deciding to contest Iowa rather than focusing on later primaries in South Carolina and then California.

But in my view, Harris’ problems run deeper than how she deploys her campaign assets: I don’t know a clear one-line summary of why she’s running in the first place. Biden represents a return to the path America was on before Trump. Sanders and Warren have a bold progressive agenda. Buttigieg is the non-Washington outsider with Midwestern common sense. But what is Harris?

I’m reminded of Marco Rubio in 2016. Demographically, he was exactly what the Republican Party needed: a young, handsome, conservative Latino. But there was never a convincing story about what a Rubio presidency would mean for the country.

but I read a book this week

Samantha Power turns out to be an engaging writer. Her autobiography The Education of an Idealist combines policy with interesting characters — some in her family, some in the Obama administration, and some in the UN.

The main philosophical theme that runs through the book is the relationship between power and principle. You can do a lot of good in the world if you manage to get into the room where decisions are being made. But if you compromise too many of your principles to stay in a position of power, you become just another cog in the system of global injustice.

Early in Power’s career, she’s a free-lance journalist covering the genocide in Bosnia at considerable personal risk. She resents the government officials she sees zipping by in their armored limos, who could do so much to end this genocide if they just would. The whole point of her journalism was to make Bosnia harder for officials to ignore.

Years later, she’s in the Obama administration when Assad is killing large numbers of his own Syrian people, creating the refugee crisis that then destabilized much of Europe. Obama isn’t doing as much to stop Assad as she wants. What to do?

The book doesn’t provide an easy answer, and she isn’t smug that she got the balance right.

The book also has a lot of sparkling personal stories. During Obama’s 2008 campaign, she met and then married Cass Sunstein, who is famous in his own right. During Obama’s first term, the two of them are like West Wing characters — working long days, eating takeout in their offices, and so on.

In Obama’s second term, Sunstein goes back to teaching and Power becomes UN Ambassador. That means her official residence is now the huge, posh penthouse apartment of the Waldorf Astoria, with its full staff of servants. There are many amusing culture-shock stories, since neither Power nor Sunstein had ever lived that way before.

My favorite is when she finds herself on a ladder, collecting the ping-pong balls that have accumulated in the chandelier of the apartment’s Great Room, where an official event is going to be held soon. The balls got there because she had been pitching them to her eight-year-old son, who hit them with a whiffle bat. She thinks: “Somehow I can’t see Adlai Stevenson doing this.”

and you also might be interested in …

According to a new book by University of California Professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data.

It didn’t used to be like this.

The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.

We appear to be turning on an ally: the Kurds in northern Syria. Turkey has been warning that it plans to send troops into northern Syria, and now Trump is pulling back American troops who otherwise would be in the way.

In a major shift in United States military policy in Syria, the White House said on Sunday that President Trump had given his endorsement for a Turkish military operation that would sweep away American-backed Kurdish forces near the border in Syria.

Turkey reportedly plans to establish a buffer zone in Syria, and repatriate Syrian refugees into it.

The Kurds have been major allies in the battle against ISIS, and are holding a number of ISIS prisoners. What will happen to them is anyone’s guess.

Brett McGurk, who was the special presidential envoy for the coalition to defeat the ISIS until he resigned last December shortly after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest over Trump’s decision (slightly relaxed since) to withdraw all US troops from Syria, said:

This looks to be another reckless decision made without deliberation or consultation following a call with a foreign leader. The White House statement bears no relation to facts on the ground. If implemented, it will significantly increase risk to our personnel, as well as hasten ISIS’s resurgence.

Having just read the Power book, I worry about genocide. The Syrian refugees that Turkey settles in their buffer zone will be people that no one cares about. What will happen to them?

Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) resigned from Congress prior to pleading guilty in an insider-trading case. He was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s candidacy. And he took at least one page from Trump’s book, denouncing the charges against him (to which he now pleads guilty) as “fake news“.

North Korea says the Trump administration has been misleading the public about their nuclear negotiations, which have broken down.

Meanwhile, missile tests have resumed. North Korea recently tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile.

About a hundred people have died in anti-government protests in Iraq.

The protests began last Tuesday, starting small and driven by social media with calls for an end to corruption and a new commitment to kick-start Iraq’s moribund economy. The gatherings have mushroomed into large demonstrations of thousands calling for the downfall of the government in an intentional echo of the 2011 Arab Spring protests that brought down leaders in several Middle East countries.

Remember how much grief Obama took for not doing more to back democracy protesters in Iran? Trump has agreed to say nothing about the Hong Kong protests to keep trade talks with China moving.

and let’s close with something portentous

Let’s hope there’s some symbolic significance in this collection of falling dominoes.

October 7, 2019 – 1:08 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

More Answers to Impeachment Objections

This post is a follow-up to a similar one last week. As the available information has changed, Trump’s defenses have shifted, and some of the points I made last week have more support now.

But before we get into the excuses and responses, I think it’s important never to lose sight of the heart of the case against Trump. It’s a simple case, which is why his supporters work so hard to obscure it: He’s cheating again.

One thing the Mueller Report made absolutely clear was that Russia cheated for Trump in 2016. Mueller couldn’t prove that the Trump campaign itself was part of the Russians’ criminal conspiracy, but what Russia did is pretty well established at this point. Tucker Carlson and Jared Kushner may try to minimize it as “a few Russian Facebook ads”, but serious crimes were committed: In addition to the illegal social-media campaign help, Russian operatives broke into the DNC’s computers and conspired with WikiLeaks to distribute what they found. That drip-drip-drip of email revelations consistently disrupted the news cycle for the Clinton campaign, and (in such a close election) was almost certainly decisive.

It’s a very real possibility that Trump owes his presidency to Vladimir Putin’s criminal conspiracy.

The essence of the Ukraine and China stories is that Trump is looking for a country to cheat for him in 2020, the way Russia did in 2016. And this time he has more to work with than just a wink-and-nod about sanctions. As president, he can distort all of US foreign policy to bribe or threaten foreign leaders into doing him “favors”.

So the question to be answered in this impeachment is: Are we going to let presidents cheat their way to re-election? And there are only three possible answers.

  • Yes. We’re going to become the kind of banana republic where the full power of the government is devoted to making elections come out the right way.
  • No. We’re going to take the power of the presidency away from Trump so that he can’t use it to cheat his way to a second term.
  • No. We’re not going to remove Trump from office, but we have some other way to stop his cheating and to make sure future presidents don’t follow his example.

I included that third bullet for logical completeness, but I’m still waiting to hear what such an “other way” might be. If someone makes the case that what Trump is doing is wrong but not impeachable, I think the burden is on them to explain how exactly the US is going to avoid the banana-republic scenario.

Anyway, let’s get to what Trump supporters are saying.

Trump is just being Trump. The point of standing on the White House grounds and publicly asking China to investigate the Bidens — coincidentally at a time when Chinese negotiators are about to arrive for trade talks and might be looking for a cheap way to curry favor with him — was to normalize the situation: This isn’t a crime committed in secret (although it was; that’s why Trump’s staff inappropriately locked the transcript down in a computer system meant for secrets about covert operations), it’s just how I roll.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump claimed that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not only get away with it, but “not lose any voters”. Now we know how he would accomplish that feat: The day after he shot the first guy, he’d shoot somebody else. The day after that he’d shoot two people. And by the end of the week Fox News and Lindsey Graham would be saying: “That’s who Trump is. He shoots people. The country knew that when it elected him.”

But crimes are crimes and abuses of power are abuses of power, no matter where or how often they happen. If “being Trump” means abusing the power of the presidency, then he shouldn’t have that power. Let him go be Trump in private life, or in prison.

Trump just said a bad thing. This related defense is one that Trump’s supporters use a lot: His heart is in the right place, but because he’s not a career politician, he occasionally says things that break protocol. It’s no big deal.

We’ve heard this defense many times. For example, after the Access Hollywood tape came out: You may think you heard Trump confessing to a pattern of sexual assaults, but no; it was just “locker room talk“. And he shouldn’t have used the word pussy. So he said a bad thing, but that’s all there was to the scandal. (And when dozens of women accused him of the same kinds of sexual assaults he had bragged about, they were all lying. Most of them were too ugly to assault anyway.)

Tucker Carlson adapts the he-said-a-bad-thing argument to Ukraine:

Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. … The key question with Trump’s Ukraine call, though, is whether the president’s actions, advisable or not, rise to the level of an impeachable offense. It’s hard to argue they do.

But as I pointed out above, Carlson does not offer any way out of the banana-republic scenario. He doesn’t propose any consequence that would discourage Trump from doing this again, or doing worse things. Maybe a president shouldn’t abuse his power this way, but … let him.

It was a joke. Remember when the writers of Dallas painted themselves into a corner, and then got out by claiming that the whole previous season was a dream? That’s what “It’s a joke” is for Trump. It’s how he calls backsies. We’d all love to have the power to do that: Imagine if anytime somebody brought up something you shouldn’t have said, you could respond with, “Oh, that was a joke. Where’s your sense of humor?” I’m sure Henry II would have loved to claim that “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” was a joke. But Pope Alexander wasn’t buying it.

Getting back to Trump, he claimed it was a joke in 2016 when he said:

Russia, if you are listening, I hope that you are able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think that you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.

And here’s the real punch line: It did happen, or at least Russia tried to make it happen.

Russian spies began trying to hack Hillary Clinton’s personal email server on the very day Donald Trump urged the Russian government to find emails Clinton had erased, prosecutors said on Friday.

Putin’s people didn’t get the joke, so they went out and tried to do more illegal hacking. Those effing ex-KGB guys! No sense of humor, any of them.

Even better than being able to claim backsies yourself is having other people do it for you, so your position can remain ambiguous. Whatever you said is either a joke or not a joke, depending on what’s convenient. Right now, Republicans in Congress know they can’t defend what Trump says, so it’s-a-joke has become convenient for them. Marco Rubio started it, saying that Trump’s suggestion that China investigate Biden wasn’t real.

I don’t know if that’s a real request or him just needling the press knowing that you guys are going to get outraged by it. He’s pretty good at getting everybody fired up and he’s been doing that for a while and the media responded right on task.

On yesterday’s talk shows, Senator Roy Blount and Rep. Jim Jordan repeated that excuse. Blount said:

Well I doubt if the China comment was serious to tell you the truth

The important question this time is whether China got the joke. China’s foreign minister did not appear to be laughing when he said:

China will not interfere in the internal affairs of the US, and we trust that the American people will be able to sort out their own problems.

I think Congress should react like the TSA does when you “joke” about having a bomb in your luggage. Unless he’s in an obviously comic setting, like the White House Correspondents Dinner, when the President of the United States says something, the world should take it seriously. If Trump can’t adjust to that situation, he shouldn’t be president.

And BTW: Is there any evidence that Trump even has a real sense of humor? Has anyone ever seen him laugh — except possibly at someone else’s pain or disability?

No quid pro quo. Last week, I answered this by saying that the quid pro quo in Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was implicit:

It’s impossible to read the transcript of the Ukraine call without immediately recognizing the quid (money for Ukraine’s defense against Russian invaders) and the quo (manufacturing dirt on Joe Biden).

The case for that interpretation got much stronger Thursday when former Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker testified to Congress, and provided text messages related to the case. For example, Bill Taylor, the acting US ambassador to Ukraine, asked U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland about what he perceived as a quid pro quo:

Taylor asks for further direction: “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Sondland replies: “Call me.”

A few days later Taylor texts:

As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

And Sondland replies with the White House spin that will turn into its cover story, while again trying to stop Taylor from leaving an evidence trail:

The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign[.] I suggest we stop the back and forth by text[.]

However, in conversation with Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sondland also expressed his belief that there was a quid pro quo. So Johnson talked to Trump:

Johnson claims he heard from Sondland that this was in fact the policy. However, Johnson adds that he became disturbed by this, and followed up with President Trump himself — who denied any such linkage. “He said—expletive deleted—‘No way. I would never do that. Who told you that?” Johnson told Journal reporters Siobhan Hughes and Rebecca Ballhaus.

But the story doesn’t end there. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Molly Beck, Patrick Marley, and Eric Litke, Johnson said in a separate interview that Trump did say he was considering withholding the aid because he wanted to find out “what happened in 2016.”

Johnson said he asked Trump whether he could tell Ukraine’s president the aid was on the way anyway, to dispel the government’s fears, but “I didn’t succeed.”

Chris Hayes sums up:

The thing that is so damning about these texts is the consciousness of guilt that hangs over them. … They knew what they were doing was wrong, and they were trying to keep it secret. … Not only did they know it was wrong, but they worked on their cover story.

BTW, the format Hayes is experimenting with, of doing his show before a live audience, works really well here. The real editorializing comes from the audience, which laughs at Trump supporters’ ridiculous excuses.

Trump is draining the swamp. His push to investigate Biden is part of his anti-corruption mandate. The Trump campaign makes this point in a TV ad you may have seen.

But Mitt Romney nails him on this:

When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated.

Other observers have noted that there is at least one other example of Trump caring about corruption: He wanted Hillary Clinton investigated also. CNBC’s Eamon Javers asked the obvious question:

Have you asked foreign leaders for any corruption investigations that don’t involve your political opponents?

Trump bloviated for a while, but could not name any other instances. Trump has picked this trick up from the autocrats he most admires: Putin and Mohammad bin Salman. They both like to manufacture “corruption” cases to take down their rivals.

In general, the drain-the-swamp argument is a joke at this point. Trump’s cabinet is full of lobbyists. He has stood behind obviously corrupt officials like EPA Director Scott Pruitt and Wilbur Ross. He channels public dollars into his private businesses. And in spite of Trump’s claim that his tax plan would “cost me a fortune”, Trump himself is one of the law’s prime beneficiaries. That’s one reason why his tax returns are such tightly held secrets.

To conclude: Washington has gotten much, much swampier since Trump came to town. If you want to drain the swamp, support impeachment.

Democrats are pushing impeachment because they know they can’t defeat Trump in 2020. That’s the case made in that Trump ad. However, all the current polling indicates that the major Democratic candidates — especially Biden — are ahead of Trump by wide margins.

This point makes more sense if you turn it around: Trump is trying to cheat because he knows he can’t win a fair election.

But if Trump is allowed to use the full power of his office to cheat — then yes, Democrats are worried that he’ll win in 2020.

October 7, 2019 – 11:13 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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