Category: Veterans – Patriotism
Trump Is Tweeting About ‘Civil War’ and Asking for His Political Opponent to Be Arrested
Esquire
Trump Is Tweeting About ‘Civil War’ and Asking for His Political Opponent to Be Arrested
The president ventured into the insane during an hours-long tweet spasm.
THE WASHINGTON POSTGETTY IMAGES
It was around nine o’clock on Sunday night when the president of the United States echoed language about a “Civil War” if he is impeached and removed from office. Now, he’ll say he wasn’t calling for a civil war—he was just announcing his belief that there would be a “Civil War like fracture” if he faced consequences for violating his oath of office and betraying the national interest for his personal gain. Never mind that impeachment is a provision of the Constitution designed for removing a lawless or otherwise dangerous chief magistrate from power in a manner that comports with the law. The intent here was clear: to tie one outcome to the other, and place the idea of violent response in millions of minds across this country. The vast majority of people would never act on that, but the tweets were incitement. The message has already been received, loud and clear, by at least one right-wing paramilitary group.
Here is the diatribe trump quoted from a Fox News appearance by Robert Jeffress, one of these devoutly Evangelical pastors who talks a lot about following Jesus and also raises the prospect of violent civil war. Don’t get it twisted: there is no Civil War-like fracture without political violence, and that is what they are threatening.
Pastor Robert Jeffress: “Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats can’t put down the Impeachment match. They know they couldn’t beat him in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, and they’re increasingly aware of the fact that they won’t win against him in 2020, and Impeachment is the only tool they have to get……..rid of Donald J. Trump – And the Democrats don’t care if they burn down and destroy this nation in the process. I have never seen the Evangelical Christians more angry over any issue than this attempt to illegitimately remove this President from office, overturn the 2016……..Election, and negate the votes of millions of Evangelicals in the process. They know the only Impeachable offense that President Trump has committed was beating Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s the unpardonable sin for which the Democrats will never forgive him………If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”
Nothing like an endless paragraph full of triple ellipses to reassure you the world’s most powerful man is firing on all cylinders. And it continues to amaze that, three years on, we are still hearing about Hillary Clinton and 2016. The Ukraine issue concerns Trump’s conduct in office this year. It has nothing to do with the election he won despite getting fewer votes. (And never mind that, in the more recent 2018 election, Democrats absolutely routed Republicans in the House elections—not exactly an advertisement for the idea this president has the people’s mandate.) The Ukraine scandal has to do with 2016 only insofar as trump is trying to combine three separately debunked conspiracy theories to muddy the waters around what happened.
But none of these details are particularly important, since the president will soon enough be twisting or outright contradicting them to feed a constantly shifting narrative whose only steadfast feature is that he’s totally innocent and it’s actually his opponents who are traitors. Speaking of, the president also called for his political opponent to be arrested Monday morning.
It must be an incredible feeling when you see the President of the United States call for your arrest for a capital offense via some throwaway sentence fragment at the end of a tweet. Traditionally, this kind of dictatorial call for abuse of the justice system would feature in some long, impassioned speech from a balcony. In the Digital Age, however, it takes less than 280 characters to become an Enemy of the State. While Schiff did paraphrase the transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president in language that made Trump’s conduct more explicitly incriminating—a move that was unnecessary and wrong—there is no evidence he committed treason.
Make no mistake: the stakes are ramping up now, and the president’s behavior will grow increasingly erratic and dangerous. He knows full well that once he leaves office, he no longer enjoys the protection of that justice department guideline which dictates a sitting president cannot be indicted. It might be the only reason he hasn’t been. If you thought he lied before, just wait. If you thought he smeared people before, just wait. If you thought he had spasms of vicious stupidity before, just wait. And if you thought he embraced political violence before— and he has—just wait. Right-wing domestic terrorists, some of whom cited the president’s rhetoric specifically, have already engaged in sporadic acts of violence over the last few months and years.
Of course, all of this is just further reason he should be removed, along with the manifest financial corruption at the heart of his domestic and foreign policy-making thanks to his refusal to divest from his private business holdings. He is capable of anything now, and defenders of the republic will need courage in response.
How many of Trump’s minions will go down with him?
Salon
How many of Trump’s minions will go down with him: Bill Barr? Mick Mulvaney? Possibly Mike Pence?
Earlier this month, Pence met with Zelensky and promised to relay to Trump just how hard Ukraine was working to fight corruption — a term Trump has repeatedly used to explain his interest in getting Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, who was formerly employed by a Ukrainian gas company. When Pence was asked if U.S. aid was being held up over Ukraine’s failure to investigate Biden, he acknowledged that “as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.” A week after Pence met with Zelensky, U.S. military aid was finally released to Ukraine.
Another Trump confidant looks to be tangled up in this sordid bullying of Ukraine as well. When Trump ordered military aid to the nation to be frozen earlier this year, he reportedly went through his acting chief of staff and budget director Mick Mulvaney, to the chagrin of Pentagon officials.
Finally, Attorney General Bill Barr appears to be most implicated by the recent revelations on Ukraine.
As Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., told CNN after reading the whistleblower report Barr attempted to withhold from Congress, it appears the attorney general has once again been caught playing interference for the White House. “All I can tell you is they’re doing the very same thing here,” Quigley told CNN, comparing Barr’s rationale for blocking the whistleblower report to his summary of Robert Mueller’s report earlier this year. In his four-page summary of the Mueller report, Barr downplayed the documented episodes of Trump’s obstruction of justice, writing that he found no evidence to support criminal charges. As Barr later admitted, he had not read the Mueller report in its entirety before writing that summary.
As the White House summary of Trump’s July call with Zelensky notes (there was reportedly also an April call), the president mentioned four times that he wanted Barr to speak with the Ukrainian government about launching an investigation into Biden. As the New York Times reports, both the director of national intelligence and the inspector general of the intelligence community referred the whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s communications to the Justice Department Curiously, Barr’s DOJ took less than a month to abandon an inquiry into Trump’s communications with Zelensky, concluding that the complaint could not even trigger an investigation because the allegations could not involve a crime.
While Barr’s DOJ released a statement denying that Barr had any contact with the Ukrainians, it is increasingly difficult to believe an attorney general who has already been held in contempt of Congress for previously faulty testimony. As Sen. Kamala Harris recalled on Wednesday, Barr previously testified under oath that he had never been directed by the president to investigate a political rival. Remarkably, a month before that, Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he ordered Barr to look into Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.
Barr, like Pence and Mulvaney, basically begged to get into Trump’s swampland. He leapt out of retirement to become one of the architects of Trump’s assault on our democracy. He is not a bumbler who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and was too weak to resist being corrupted. He came corrupt.
But Barr, like Trump’s personal lawyers Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani, doesn’t actually care about corruption. More than likely, he’s playing for the Fox News retirement plan. Every lie has told on behalf of Trump is another badge of honor.
Audio of private meeting shows oil industry ripping into Trump administration
Politico
Audio of private meeting shows oil industry ripping into Trump administration
These Scientists Were Disbanded by the EPA — They Plan to Meet Anyway
This week’s New Yorker cover
This week’s New Yorker cover
Researchers Assembled over 100 Voting Machines. Hackers Broke Into Every Single One.
Mother Jones
Researchers Assembled over 100 Voting Machines. Hackers Broke Into Every Single One.
A cybersecurity exercise highlights both new and unaddressed vulnerabilities riddling US election systems.
Al Vicens September 27, 2019
A report issued Thursday by some of the country’s leading election security experts found that voting machines used in dozens of state remain vulnerable to hacks and manipulations, warning that that without continued efforts to increase funding, upgrade technology, and adopt of voter-marked paper ballot systems, “we fear that the 2020 presidential elections will realize the worst fears only hinted at during the 2016 elections: insecure, attacked, and ultimately distrusted.”
The 47-page report is the product of researchers who organized a shakedown of voting machines at the annual DefCon conference, one of world’s biggest information security gatherings frequented by hackers, government officials, and industry workers. First incorporated into DefCon in 2017 with the aim of improving voting machine security, this year’s version of the now-annual “Voting Machine Hacking Village” assembled over 100 machines and let hackers loose to find and exploit their vulnerabilities. While election officials have criticized the effort’s utility as a testing ground, deriding it as a “pseudo environment,” some have seen value in letting machines’ flaws become more known and potentially lead to security improvements.
“Once again, Voting Village participants were able to find new ways, or replicate previously published methods, of compromising every one of the devices in the room,” the authors wrote, pointing out that every piece of assembled equipment is certified for use in at least one US jurisdiction. The report’s authors, some of whom have been involved with election machine security research going back more than a decade, noted that in most cases the participants tested voting equipment “they had no prior knowledge of or experience” in a “challenging setting ” with less time and resources than attackers would be assumed to marshal.
The report urges election officials to use machines relying on voter-marked paper ballots and pair those with “statistically rigorous post-election audits” to verify the outcome of elections reflects the will of voters. The authors also warn that supply chain issues “continue to pose significant security risks,” including cases where machines include hardware components of foreign origin, or where election administrators deploy foreign-based software, cloud, or other remote services. The report lands as officials in several states are working to upgrade election equipment, and as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. debate federal election security legislation and funding.
Ultimately, the report notes flaws that have been acknowledged for years.
“As disturbing as this outcome is, we note that it is at this point an unsurprising result,” the authors conclude. “However, it is notable—and especially disappointing—that many of the specific vulnerabilities reported over a decade earlier…are still present in these systems today.”
Russians Used Greed to ‘Capture’ NRA
The Daily Beast
Russians Used Greed to ‘Capture’ NRA, Senator Alleges in New Report
Ties between the National Rifle Association and influential Russians were substantial and potentially lucrative enough to render the politically potent gun lobby an “asset” of Russia, according to a Senate Democrat’s year-plus investigation.
More than 4,000 pages of NRA records provided to Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the finance committee, documented deep connections between the beleaguered gun group and Maria Butina, who in December pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a Russian agent without registering with the Justice Department. Wyden’s report, released Friday and undertaken without the cooperation of committee Republicans, indicates that greed motivated some NRA officials to engage in the outreach.
Butina also made clear to NRA officials long before their controversial Butina-facilitated December 2015 trip to Moscow that Alexander Torshin, her patron and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was a man with mysterious pull in the Kremlin. She emailed former NRA president David Keene in January 2015 that Torshin’s appointment to the Russian central bank was “the result of a ‘big game’ in which he has a very important role. All the details we can discuss with you only in person.”
“During the 2016 election, Russian nationals effectively used the promise of lucrative personal business opportunities to capture the NRA and gain access to the American political system,” Wyden said.
Representatives for the NRA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to scrutinizing the December 2015 NRA trip, Wyden found that the NRA hosted former Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak for a three-hour tour of its headquarters in August 2015. Kislyak was a key figure in Russia’s 2016 election interference before former national security adviser Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to misrepresenting his conversations with him to the FBI. An NRA calendar entry provided to Wyden suggests that NRA leaders took Kislyak hunting at the Grand National Waterfowl Hunt weeks before the Moscow trip.
Wyden’s report shows the NRA officials, donors, and supporters meeting with Russian officials under U.S. sanctions during the Moscow trip, something previously reported. But it also shows that Butina ensured the NRA would send sufficiently senior leaders, something necessary to enhance Torshin’s prestige, by dangling opportunities for NRA luminaries to enrich themselves. While U.S. sanctions do not make meeting with foreigners under sanction illegal, U.S. nationals can’t conduct business with them.
Returning from Moscow further inclined the NRA to aid its Russian friend Butina, who presented herself as the head of a rare Russian gun-rights foundation. Soon after, the NRA bought Butina and Torshin memberships in a hunters’ advocacy group known as Safari Club International. Later, one of the key NRA figures on the Moscow trip, Pete Brownell, confirmed to Wyden that he personally introduced Butina to Donald Trump Jr. at the NRA’s 2016 annual meeting, though Brownell’s counsel dismissed it as a “chance encounter.” Butina would also write to NRA heavies for formal invitations to their events, something she said would help her get visas to enter the country.
The NRA has attempted to distance itself from the Moscow trip after it became politically controversial. It told Wyden’s office in May that any relationship “certain individuals, including NRA supporters and volunteers” had with Butina and Torshin was entirely distinct from NRA business.
Yet Wyden’s report shows then-NRA president Allan Cors, who backed out of the trip, contemporaneously referring to it in an email to Torshin as a chance to “represent the NRA” to influential Russians. Among those Russians were Butina’s reputed moneyman, Igor Pisarsky, whom Butina presented as Putin’s “campaign manager”; the sanctioned Russian deputy prime minister for the defense industry, Dimitry Rogozin; and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Documentation the NRA provided, the report notes, did not show “action to discourage or prevent its officers from using organization resources to explore business opportunities or to meet with sanctioned individuals and entities” during the trip.
Cors’ absence from the trip was a problem for Butina. Without a senior NRA leader to show off to the influential Russians who had agreed to meetings, Torshin could lose face. “Many powerful figures in the Kremlin are counting on Torshin to prove his American connections—a last minute important member cancellation could affect his political future,” she emailed. In November, Butina turned to Brownell, the NRA’s then-vice president and Cors’ future successor, with an urgent plea for his attendance.
Outside the NRA, Brownell runs a business that sells guns, ammunition, and firearms accessories. A Brownell spokesperson told The Daily Beast in February that Brownell took the trip “understanding that it was an NRA-related event organized with the support of the organization.” His corporate compliance officer later said Brownell could meet with sanctioned Russians insofar as his trip was not business but an NRA “cultural exchange.”
But materials Wyden acquired cast doubt on that. Butina, in emails, told Brownell that while it was an NRA trip, “especially for you and your company I have something more.” She told him that Russian gun manufacturers “are ready to meet you and talk about export and import deals.” Another email, this one from Brownell, records the NRA vice president musing that he was “not interested in attending if [it is] just an NRA trip.” In another email, Brownell called the “strictly diplomatic” trip a chance to “introduce our company to the governing individuals throughout Russia.” Among the people the NRA met with in Russia were representatives of the Kalashnikov Concern, a weapons manufacturer under U.S. sanctions. The report states that later Brownell explored a deal with someone he met on the trip but ultimately canceled because the Russian was unable to follow proper import-export rules.
Brownell recently resigned from the NRA’S board, a move seen as part of the organization’s recent turmoil. In April, its president Oliver North resigned after losing a power struggle to longtime NRA magnate Wayne LaPierre. The group is locked in bitter litigation with its former ad firm, which might be the least of its legal woes, considering investigations into its tax status by attorneys general in New York and the District of Columbia.
A representative for Brownell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brownell was not the only one to whom Butina appealed with an offer unrelated to NRA business. Wyden’s report corroborated a Daily Beast report that Butina told trip attendee Keene, who was also the Washington Times’ opinion editor, that one of the meetings was with a Russian media oligarch who would be able to secure Keene an interview with Putin for the paper.
Butina also dangled to the NRA a meeting with Putin himself, though no such meeting appears to have manifested. An email ahead of the trip from Butina’s since-indicted boyfriend, the GOP consultant Paul Erickson, to Brownell promised “private meetings with the top ministers in Putin’s government and private lunches in oligarch’s dachas.” Butina fronted money for the attendance of another trip attendee, NRA donor Jim Liberatore, for which the NRA reimbursed her with $6,000 from its president’s budget.
The NRA was an open door for Butina and Torshin, whose goal was to use the organization as a lever to move U.S. politics in a direction more agreeable to Russian interests. In addition to welcoming the two to the NRA’s own events, the NRA aided them in attending other conservative-friendly gatherings, including the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, a staple event for politicians of both parties. Butina asked then-presidential candidate Donald Trump a question about U.S.-Russian relations at a campaign stop in Las Vegas, boasted of being a conduit for his campaign’s communications to Russia, and was photographed with prominent GOP politicians like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Wyden stopped a step short of recommending the NRA lose its tax-exempt status, citing insufficient cooperation from the group. “A broader review of NRA’s activities in recent years” from the IRS was needed to determine if the NRA’s Russian connections fit within a “persistent pattern of impermissible conduct,” the report concluded.
“The totality of evidence uncovered during my investigation, as well as the mounting evidence of rampant self-dealing, indicate the NRA may have violated tax laws. This report lays out in significant detail that the NRA lied about the 2015 delegation trip to Moscow,” Wyden said. “This was an official trip undertaken so NRA insiders could get rich—a clear violation of the principle that tax-exempt resources should not be used for personal benefit.”
Trump, Impeachment, and the Democracy That Happens Between Elections
There was always going to be a last straw, a single event that would launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. On Tuesday, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, declared that Trump had finally gone too far, by “asking the President of Ukraine to take actions that would benefit him politically.” As a result, she was officially announcing the transition from investigation to an impeachment inquiry. “The President must be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.”
The Rubicon that Pelosi crossed is more rhetorical than procedural. As my colleague John Cassidy has pointed out, the six congressional committees that have been investigating Trump in a de-facto impeachment inquiry will continue their work, incorporating the newly urgent investigation of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian President, Vlodymyr Zelensky, and the whistle-blower report that apparently, at least in part, stemmed from it. But what makes this event different from all the other malfeasances of the Trump Presidency? Trump has been credibly accused of breaking the law many times—nearly two hundred pages of the Mueller report document the President’s attempts to obstruct justice. Now he appears, judging from a newly released summary of the call, to have pressured a foreign leader to dig for dirt on a potential electoral opponent, tied the release of congressionally approved military aid, explicitly or implicitly, to this request, and stopped the acting director of National Intelligence from releasing the resulting whistle-blower report to Congress. Why are these alleged crimes the ones that, in the estimation of Pelosi and her colleagues on the Democratic caucus, warrant impeachment proceedings?
This is less a legal question than a political one. Hours before Pelosi’s announcement, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued that the Ukraine revelation changed the mathematics of impeachment because it concerned an “ongoing attempt to hijack American foreign policy in service of the president’s reelection.” Impeachment stemming from the Mueller report would constitute punishment for past misdeeds, while impeachment stemming from the whistle-blower report would serve to prevent further harm. This, Beauchamp argues, would make it harder for Republicans to dismiss the inquiry.
The inquiry gains additional urgency because it concerns the 2020 Presidential election. For the first two and a half years of the Trump Presidency, congressional Democrats and much of the legacy media have concentrated on investigating and relitigating the 2016 election, sometimes at the expense of paying attention to the events of the Presidency itself. Now the focus is shifting to 2020, with Ukraine upstaging Russia and the entire story already upstaging current events (such as, for just one example, Trump’s isolationist, anti-immigrant speech at the United Nations on Tuesday). An election gave us Trump, and, impeachment proceedings notwithstanding, an election has the potential to rid us of him. For the past two and a half years, Trump has aspired to autocracy—attacking institutions, undermining and subverting the separation of powers—but, as long as his Presidency can be ended by an election, he has not consolidated autocratic power.
How Trump Could Get Fired
Evan Osnos on what it would take to cut short Trump’s Presidency.
And yet we habitually overstate the importance of elections. We have a way of talking about elections as though they were synonymous with democracy. They are not: they are merely a very imperfect way of creating the possibility of democracy, which is the government of the governed. Ideally, democracy is what would happen between elections. Trump’s attacks on democracy include his war with the media, his redefinition of American identity in white-male supremacist terms, his isolationism, his use of the Presidency for personal profit, his campaign of packing the federal courts, his verbal attacks on judges, and his treatment of the judiciary as a nuisance on the way to getting things done—a view that he applies to the separation of powers in general. These are just some of his high crimes.
Trump should be impeached. The event that finally got Pelosi to say so is, in fact, a straw: an incident that resembles a succession of other incidents in which Trump has used his office for personal gain and sabotaged the system of checks and balances. His attempt to use two hundred and fifty million dollars of congressionally approved military aid for his own benefit falls in the same category as his and his children’s foreign business deals, brokered on the back of American diplomacy; his use of the Presidency to attract lobbyists, dignitaries, and perhaps entire summits as paying guests to his properties; and his use of taxpayer funds for incessant leisure travel. Trump’s attempt to quash the whistle-blower’s report is similar to his attempt to pressure the F.B.I. director James Comey to stop the investigation of the national-security adviser Michael Flynn, or his attempt to get the White House counsel Don McGahn to lie to the public. This time, Trump succeeded, at least for a while, surely in part because Joseph Maguire is the third person in the course of his Presidency to hold the National Intelligence job, and because, like an ever-growing number of Administration officials, Maguire has the word “acting” in front of his job title. As the impeachment inquiry moves forward, it would behoove congressional Democrats, and all of us, to focus less on Ukraine and the eternal spectre of election contamination by a foreign power and more on Trump’s pattern of abuse of executive power and the destruction it has wrought on American government. This is what will require repair in the time after Trump.
Let the young people save the planet! Just get out of the way!
NowThis Politics
September 25, 2019
‘We’ve been talking about saving the Amazon for 30 years.’ — Harrison Ford urged UN leaders to listen to young people and let them save the planet from the climate crisis
Harrison Ford Urges Leaders to Get Out of Young Activists' Way on Climate
‘We’ve been talking about saving the Amazon for 30 years.’ — Harrison Ford urged UN leaders to listen to young people and let them save the planet from the climate crisis
Posted by NowThis Politics on Wednesday, 25 September 2019