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Issues and events that stink to high heaven
Lord Cromwell could have just as easily been talking about Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
October 31, 2019
By Jason Lemon October 31, 2019
President Donald Trump leaves after joining Senate Republicans for their weekly policy luncheon at the Capitol on March 26.CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY
Attorney Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, warned on Thursday that President Donald Trump appeared to be committing “felony bribery” by giving Republican senators fundraising cash ahead of an increasingly likely impeachment trial in the Senate.
The lawyer shared an article published by Politico on Thursday morning. Titled “Trump lures GOP senators on impeachment with cold cash,” the article outlined how the president is turning to his large network of donors to raise funds for a few senators facing difficult re-election campaigns in 2020. All of those senators have also signed a resolution condemning the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry.
“This is a bribe. Any other American who offered cash to the jury before a trial would go to prison for felony bribery. But he can get away with it?” Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, wrote on Twitter. “Criminal.”
Richard W. Painter: The senators can raise their own campaign cash. Any senator who accepts cash from @realDonaldTrump before the impeachment trial is guilty of accepting a bribe and should go to the slammer.
In a follow-up tweet, Painter argued that GOP lawmakers who accept the fundraising support should face criminal charges as well.
“The senators can raise their own campaign cash. Any senator who accepts cash from @realDonaldTrump before the impeachment trial is guilty of accepting a bribe and should go to the slammer,” he tweeted.
The House of Representatives on Thursday will vote on a resolution, which is expected to pass the Democrat-controlled body, to outline the formal impeachment inquiry rules. The resolution will allow for public hearings and the release of transcripts of closed-door depositions. This is not a vote to impeach the president, which is expected to come later after the public hearings. As things stand now, most lawmakers and analysts believe the president will be formally impeached by Congress’ lower chamber.
After that, the Senate will be required to take up the inquiry and carry out a trial for the president. As the upper chamber is Republican controlled, it is considered highly unlikely that Trump will be found guilty and removed from office. The president’s removal requires a two-thirds majority vote, and the Senate is made up of 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats and two independents, who caucus with the Democrats.
None of the Senate Republicans have publicly stated that Trump’s actions have amounted to impeachable behavior, but several have expressed serious misgivings and raised concerns.
“There’s lot of things that concern me,” GOP Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said Wednesday, The Hill reported.
“The question on the table is impeachment, and that’s the question we should get an answer to, and the answer so far is ‘For what would we impeach the president?'” he said. “And the answer is ‘I don’t see anything for that.'”
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — TC Energy’s Keystone pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons (1.4 million liters) of oil in northeastern North Dakota, state regulators said Thursday.
Crews on Tuesday shut down the pipeline that carries tar sands oil from Canada through seven states after the leak was discovered, said Karl Rockeman, North Dakota’s water quality division director. It remained closed Thursday.
The Calgary, Alberta-based company formerly known as TransCanada said in a statement the leak affected about 22,500 square feet (2090.3 sq. meters) of land near Edinburg, in Walsh County.
The company and regulators said the cause was being investigated.
“Our emergency response team contained the impacted area and oil has not migrated beyond the immediately affected area,” the company said in a statement.
North Dakota regulators were notified late Tuesday night of the leak. Rockeman said some wetlands were affected, but not any sources of drinking water.
TC Energy reported an oil spill in the rural Edinburg area, about 30 miles northwest of Grafton, N.D. on Wednesday, Oct. 30. Submitted photo
Regulators have been at the site since Wednesday afternoon monitoring the spill and cleanup, he said.
Crude began flowing through the $5.2 billion pipeline in 2011. It’s designed to carry crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri on the way to refineries in Patoka, Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma.
It can handle about 23 million gallons daily.
The pipeline spill and shutdown comes as the company seeks to build the $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has drawn opposition from people who fear it will harm the environment.
President Donald Trump issued a federal permit for the expansion project in 2017, after it had been rejected by the Obama administration.
Together, the massive Keystone and Keystone XL network would be about five times the length of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
The original Keystone has experienced problems with spills in the past, including one in 2011 of more than 14,000 gallons (53,000 liters) of oil in southeastern North Dakota, near the South Dakota border. That leak was blamed on valve failure at a pumping station.
Another leak in 2016 prompted a week-long shutdown of the pipeline. The company estimated that just under 17,000 gallons (64,350 liters) of oil spilled onto private land during that leak. Federal regulators said an “anomaly” on a weld on the pipeline was to blame. No waterways or aquifers were affected.
In 2017, the pipeline leaked an estimated 407,000 gallons (1.5 million liters) of oil onto farmland in northeastern South Dakota, in a rural area near the North Dakota border. The company had originally put the spill at about 210,000 gallons (795,000 liters).
Federal regulators said at the time the Keystone leak was the seventh-largest onshore oil or petroleum product spill since 2010. Federal investigators said the pipeline was likely damaged during installation during 2008 and may have occurred when a vehicle drove over the pipe, causing it to weaken over time.
North Dakota’s biggest spill , and one of the largest onshore spills in U.S. history, came in 2013, when 840,000 gallons (3.1 million liters) spilled from a Tesoro pipeline in the northwestern part of the state. The company spent five years and nearly $100 million cleaning it up.
The Sierra Club said the latest spill was an example of why the Keystone XL should not be built.
“We don’t yet know the extent of the damage from this latest tar sands spill, but what we do know is that this is not the first time this pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won’t be the last.”
Ellen Ioanes October 25, 2019
Jose Segovia-Benitez, a US Marine Corps veteran who served two tours in Iraq, was unexpectedly deported to El Salvador Wednesday, his attorney told the Phoenix New Times.
Segovia-Benitez, 38, came to the US as a toddler and grew up in California. He joined the Marines right out of high school, NBC News reports. He was honorably discharged in 2004, a year after he suffered a brain injury that left him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD.)
“He is a soldier who put his life on the line to defend his country,” his mother, Martha Garcia, told NBC News. “But when he returned from the war, he came back with problems.”
Segovia-Benitez wasn’t diagnosed with PTSD until 2011, accoding to Brandee Dudzic, the executive director of Repatriate our Patriots. In the interim, his family said, he turned to alcohol and committed a series of crimes including injuring a spouse, for which he served an eight-year jail sentence, and narcotics possession.
Segovia-Benitez was initially scheduled for deportation on October 16, The Phoenix New Times reported. Segovia-Benitez had boarded a plane bound for El Salvador, but was pulled off and sent to Arizona’s Florence Correctional Center to await a potential pardon from California Governor Gavin Newsom.
But when Segovia-Benitez’s attorney Roy Petty arrived at the facility on Wednesday for a scheduled visit to fill out paperwork so he could re-open his deportation case, his client was gone.
“Certainly, this is a surprise,” Petty told the Phoenix New Times. “ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] kept his deportation a secret. They kept it a secret from him, me, his other attorney, and they kept it a secret from his mother,” he said.
While it’s not illegal for ICE to proceed with the deportation, “It’s not common practice. Generally, what ICE will do is they will notify the person so the person can make arrangements. They woke him up and put him on a plane,” Petty said.
After serving his jail sentence, Segovia-Benitez was held in an ICE detention facility for nearly two years. He and 14 others filed a lawsuit in August alleging they were subjected to horrific and “inhumane” conditions during their detention, NBC News reports.
Segovia-Benitez is currently in a jail in El Salvador as part of his deportation proceedings. In El Salvador, a notoriously violent country, Segovia-Benitez’s attorney worries that his veteran status might make him a target for gangs.
“Gangs target former U.S. military,” Petty told the Phoenix New Times. “They’ll kidnap a person, they may hold a person for ransom, they may torture an individual.”
Segovia-Benitez, who previously had legal status, filed an appeal of his deportation and two stays after a judge ordered that he should be deported in October 2018, all of which were denied, a spokesperson for ICE told The Hill.
October 27, 2019
How sad that we are STILL fighting for this 60 years later!
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How sad that we are STILL fighting for this 60 years later!Follow Occupy Democrats for more.
Posted by Occupy Democrats on Sunday, October 27, 2019
Right now, out in sunny California, 50,o00 people have been forced to evacuate their homes. That’s just in Los Angeles, where at least four wildfires are currently ravaging the nation’s second-largest city. The largest is the Tick fire, which is burning through the canyons north of town and scything towards heavily residential areas at pace, The New York Times tells us. All schools in the San Fernando Valley have been closed due to “air-quality and safety concerns.” An entirely separate blaze, known as the Kincade fire, has burned 16,000 acres of Sonoma County. 13,000 firefighters are battling it, but it’s so far only 5 percent contained.
The 2019 fire season has actually been a let-off from previous years, particularly the one just past. Only 300 structures have been destroyed so far, compared to 23,000 in 2018. 163,000 acres have burned, compared to 1.6 million (!) last year, though the 2019 season is far from over.
In fact, as David Wallace-Wells detailed this year for New York magazine, the fire season never really ends anymore. Both scientists and firefighters have suggested dropping the “season” term. It is always fire season, and fire season is always getting worse, because it is always getting hotter and drier. About half of the 88 cities in Los Angeles county are classified as “Very High Fire-Hazard Severity Zones,” raising the prospect that in the future, the gleaming jewel of the West—our great American dream factory—will come to resemble a very particular kind of hell. After all, as Wallace-Wells tells us, some of these fires grow an acre a second. Some grow three times faster still. You cannot outrun fire traveling 60 miles per hour on the Santa Ana winds.
All this, of course, is just one spasm of our almighty planet’s sprawling reaction to the great disturbance we have caused in it. Someday, we will appreciate that if you put the 4 billion-year history of Earth on a 24-hour clock, human history is the equivalent of one second. We are ants crawling about on a particularly fancy rock in a galactic backwater, one that is determined to maintain an equilibrium we have disrupted. If need be, it will sweep us off like the ants we are, with increasingly powerful storms and incredible rain events and oppressive heatwaves and rising seas and epidemic diseases and failing crops and yes, raging wildfires. In the meantime, we will likely tear each other apart to escape the near-term consequences. But like those fires traveling on the Santa Ana winds, there will be no outrunning them in the end.
And all the while, we squabble over taxes and The National Debt and whether the president should be impeached for selling out the national interest in favor of his own when dealing with foreign countries like Ukraine. He should be, of course: he violated his oath of office and abused his power. But someday, assuming we make it that far, future generations will surely wonder why we did not remove him from the world’s most powerful office simply because he denied the existence of a fundamental threat to human civilization as we know it. The president has not just said the climate crisis is a Chinese hoax, or suggested he has some different opinion on whether it’s a problem compared to the scientists—you know, people who have devoted their lives to studying this phenomenon. He has actively rolled back our efforts in pretty much every department, to combat a crisis that will upend not just our children’s lives, but our own.
Surely, this constitutes a high crime against humanity. His apparatchiks will laugh at the suggestion now, and call it liberal delusion. But soon enough, they won’t be laughing. The people who actually know a goddamn thing about this say we have 12 years to change course in order to avoid this onrushing doom. The president wants to dig more crap out of the ground. He’d like to force New York State to do it, to abandon its commitment to future generations so some energy executives—who perhaps have some sort of relationship with the president—can make a buck.
Donald Trump, for his part, likely figures he’ll be dead and it won’t matter. This is also his view on The National Debt, but at least that’s an overblown problem. His radical solipsism permits him to dismiss small concerns like the future of the human species, not to mention all the other species, which are currently dying off at a prodigious pace in what scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction event. Meanwhile, his rich cronies probably believe they can make enough money to outrun whatever the consequences may be if they’re still around when the time comes. That will require covering an acre a second. Better get your track spikes on.
Evan Vucci/AP
WASHINGTON—The Government Employees (AFGE), the nation’s largest union for federal workers, has summarized and is publishing, in five installments, a secret Trump administration memo outlining in detail how President Donald Trump and his ideologues systematically plan to destroy federal worker unions. AFGE adds its own analysis. Part 1 and Part 2 have already appeared, with three more to come.
And private-sector workers and unions are next on Trump’s hit list, the memo promises.
The memo by Trump White House aide James Sherk, a former “fellow” at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, is being posted and analyzed on AFGE’s website. It includes restoring Republican President George W. Bush’s ban on unionization of the nation’s 45,000 airport screeners. And that’s just for starters.
It also would ban unions for the Defense Department’s 200,000 civilian workers, the hundreds of thousands of workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and workers at the Department of Homeland Security and the federal Office of Personnel Management—the government’s human resources agency—itself. Trump also wants to abolish OPM.
Killing OPM and transferring its oversight of federal workers to unaccountable White House aides would bring back the spoils system of the 1880s and before, union leaders say.
“The memo, laced with familiar half-truths and outright lies, is proof AFGE has been right all along in saying the administration’s true goal in making changes to personnel rules is to ‘end collective bargaining’ in the federal sector. It’s right there in their own words,” the union states. It also goes far beyond Trump’s prior executive orders trashing federal worker rights.
Trump’s executive orders don’t plan to obliterate unions outright. His memo does.
“End collective bargaining,” the memo sets as a goal. “Government unions impede the efficiency of federal operations and direct the government to put the interests of government employees first. Curtailing collective bargaining in government serves the public good. The [Civil Service Reform Act] allows the president to exempt agencies from its coverage on the basis of national security concerns.” The New York Times and Politico first disclosed the memo’s existence.
Destruction of federal workers and their unions, including cuts in their pay and benefits—also part of Sherk’s memo—is part of an overall right-wing and corporate-backed drive to destroy unions in the U.S. and thus remove the biggest and most-effective obstacle to their agenda. That larger drive includes the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision and anti-worker rulings by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board.
One motive of the larger drive, Tom McCabe, CEO of the conservative Freedom Foundation, admitted to The Guardian in 2016, is to “de-fund the left” and thus destroy opposition.
AFGE revealed Sherk also “discusses ways to make it impossible for workers to unionize” in the private sector. “It details steps to boost corporations’ profits by cutting workers’ overtime pay and redefining workers as ‘independent contractors,’” who legally cannot unionize. “It explains ways to shield mega-corporations from being liable for workers’ poor working conditions in franchises,” AFGE summarizes.
“The administration’s divide-and-conquer strategy with respect to organized labor is as disgusting as it is shameful. But it won’t work.
“Across this country, our members and the members of every other labor union are getting educated, organized, and mobilized. As the largest union representing federal employees, AFGE will continue to resist the president’s mob mentality and disrespect for the federal workforce and the work they do.”
Sherk’s White House anti-union memo outlines further moves beyond Trump’s executive orders, which AFGE, the Treasury Employees, and other federal unions have fought both in court and in Congress.
Those executive orders tossed unions out of their small offices in federal buildings—where shop stewards met with members—yanked their phones, fax machines, and computers, banned federal workers from communicating with lawmakers, and told the stewards they would have to represent workers on their own time and on their own dime, among other restrictions.
Trump’s biggest order also made it easier to fire federal workers, depriving them of many of their due process rights, including the simple right of having some time to prepare to defend themselves and to argue their cases before unbiased decision-makers.
His “national security” excuse would let Trump abolish unions for the screeners—Bush used the same national security rationale to ban unions for them—defense workers and at VA.
AFGE waged a long campaign to get the Democratic Obama administration to overturn Bush’s anti-union edict for the screeners, formally called Transportation Security Officers. And AFGE has defended VA whistleblowers who revealed bosses’ mismanagement of care for veterans, including mismanagement that led to dead vets.
While the memo hasn’t been formally implemented yet, government-wide, AFGE notes Trump is already taking away some civil service protections for the screeners, whose pay is so low the TSOs have the lowest morale of any group of federal workers. One of every four TSOs quits within 16 months of being hired, AFGE says.
Bush also imposed a National Security Personnel System “merit pay” plan on the DOD workers, to give bosses total sway over workers’ pay and promotions, leaving everything open to favoritism. AFGE and a 31-union alliance battling for the DOD workers fought that scheme in court, too, and won. Congress eventually banned DOD from implementing it.
By Heather Digby Parton October 25, 2019
U.S. Attorney General William Barr (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.
Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)
Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances. Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.
It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)
That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.
Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”
On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter. No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.
The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)
So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy. According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?
So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about. Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.
The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.
Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
By Steve Benen October 25, 2019
Attorney General Bill Barr has long been focused on the origins of the Russia scandal, to the point that there is reportedly a criminal investigation underway that could target American law enforcement and intelligence officials who examined Russia’s 2016 attack. That probe was technically assigned to U.S. Attorney John Durham.But that’s not to say Barr is somehow taking a hands-off role in the process. As Rachel noted near the top of last night’s show, the sitting U.S. attorney general, an unabashed Donald Trump loyalist, has apparently been personally involved in traveling the world, meeting with foreign officials, hoping to find evidence to support a conspiracy theory that would disprove the facts surrounding his boss’ Russia scandal.
The theory itself is plainly bonkers, and even many congressional Republicans have no use for it. But Barr keeps racking up frequent-flier miles, including making stops in Italy – where the prime minister was asked by Italian lawmakers to explain what in the world the American attorney general wanted. The New York Times published this striking report yesterday:
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said his country’s intelligence services had informed the American attorney general, William P. Barr, that they played no role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, taking the air out of an unsubstantiated theory promoted by President Trump and his allies in recent weeks.
“Our intelligence is completely unrelated to the so-called Russiagate and that has been made clear,” Mr. Conte said in a news conference in Rome on Wednesday evening after spending hours describing Italy’s discussions with Mr. Barr to the parliamentary committee on intelligence.
Mr. Conte publicly acknowledged for the first time that Mr. Barr had twice met with the leaders of Italy’s intelligence agencies after asking them to clarify their role in a 2016 meeting between a Maltese professor and a Trump campaign adviser on a small college campus in Rome, Link Campus University.
As bizarre as this may sound, the American attorney general appears to have gone to allied nations, looking for damaging information about American officials, which he thought might help Donald Trump.
Italy, not surprisingly, had no such information, and seemed baffled as to what the United States’ top law-enforcement official was looking for.
The precise details of the conspiracy theory are a bit mind-numbing, and they involve George Papadopoulos, who served as an adviser to the Trump campaign, a London-based Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud, and assorted characters. It’s all quite ridiculous, and for more information along these lines, I’d recommend last night’s A block and this Vox piece from last month.
But stepping back, the big picture is profoundly embarrassing, not just for the administration, but for all of us. The United States – the world’s preeminent superpower, ostensibly the global leader on matters of international affairs – has an attorney general who has gone to foreign countries, hat in hand, looking for dirt on his own country’s officials, begging for help with a ridiculous conspiracy, only to be told by our allies, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”
