Trump Vilified for Desecrating What Reagan Called “the People’s House”

President Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech to a crowd of 1,500 on the South Lawn of the White House culminated a week in which a key law that governs the conduct of all government employees was repeatedly ignored and broken. The law — the Hatch Act — prohibits the use of government locations or resources and even mention of job titles when a government employee engages in a political act or speech such as campaigning for a politician or political party. The president has completely trampled the law by using the White House as a prop for his bid for re-election, hosting hundreds of Republican National Convention delegates and Party operatives, with
The entrance

campaign banners stretched across the South Lawn, and outsized “Trump Pence” placards making for a double-take that the White House is just another Trump brand building.

The White House needed to be used, according to an official statement, because it is too difficult to move the president during the pandemic. Off he went to a rally in New Hampshire the day after his speech.

Those on the left were incensed. Watching Trump come from inside the White House escorting the First Lady down a long corridor, making an entrance far more grandiose than his escalator descent in Trump Tower five years ago, this time with the people’s house used for backdrop, commentators made remarks such as that by former Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill saying, “This is what a dictator looks like”.

picking a setting

In yet another instance of laws being for the rest of us, not for the president or other officials in his circle, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on an official trip to Israel at government (and our) expense, inserted politics into that mission, recording his convention speech from the roof of the King David hotel so he could have Jerusalem in the background. In an opinion piece in The Washington Post two lawyers, Susan Hennessey and Scott Anderson, formerly with the intelligence services and the State Department wrote, referring to the Hatch Act, “Every U.S. citizen who enters government service agrees to give up some of their rights to engage in politics.” Not Pompeo.

Conservative columnist at thePost, Marc Thiessen, objected to singling out Pompeo, citing Joe Biden “attacking” Trump for knowing nothing of foreign policy when on an official trip to a NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, in August 2016. He cited President Obama for doing much the same on a Japan visit, violating the principle that partisanship should stop at the water’s edge. Trump, though, has not adhered to that at all on his foreign sojourns.

The difference for Pompeo is the State Department. “Diplomats are supposed to represent all Americans to the rest of the world, and limiting their political activities ensures that they are able to serve this role effectively”, say Hennessy and Anderson. “Diplomats, meanwhile, face an added set of restrictions that prohibit them and their families from engaging in any partisan political activity while serving overseas, even in their personal capacities.” No secretary of state has ever participated in a political campaign until Pompeo chose to break with protocol, the professional traditions of the State Department, and the law.

capture the flag

On the third night of the convention, Vice President Pence commandeered Fort McHenry in Maryland, for his talk. Any group can apply to the Parks Department to conduct an event at a national monument but it remains for that group to consider the ethics of its use. Remembering that conventions have always taken place in anonymous arenas, we saw Pence wrap his party in the flag that “was still there”, appropriating the national park where Francis Scott Key wrote what became the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, having watched the bombardment of the fort by the British in 1814.

As for the National Parks Service itself, it has been caught out for using federal funds to produce a polished video that praises the president for his involvement in legislation that provides increased funding to parks. And, to satisfy Mr. Trump’s fondness for fireworks to add dramatic fanfare to his appearances (such as at Mount Rushmore for this year’s Fourth of July celebration), the Parks Service staged the fireworks display on the National Mall that followed Mr. Trump’s speech, using government property to advance his political goal. Donald Sherman, deputy director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told the Washington publication, The Hill:

“Federal appropriations laws make it clear government dollars are meant to be used to serve the American public, not to help political office holders remain in power, and that appears to be what this video and what this event on the Mall is designed to do,”

More than “appears”. The fireworks more than once spelled out “2020” and “TRUMP”.

The Republican National Convention has said it will reimburse the NPS for the costs of the display. Why no pre-payment or down-payment? Why was the permit heavily redacted? Will anyone follow up on that due-bill? Or did we pay for Trump’s fireworks?

firewall

The Hatch Act rules of not combining state and personal business are strict and strictly adhered to on the smallest level, which makes Trump’s major violation all the more authoritarian. Congress members must leave government buildings to make fund-raising phone calls, for example. McCaskill said she…

“…could not make or take a phone call in the Hart Senate office building. Every single member of Congress knows that you do not cross the line between politics and the government’s resources”.

She said that ironically, Mark Meadows, when a member of Congress, “was trying to strengthen the Hatch Act back when he was not this lawless president’s chief of staff”. Television host and commentator Nicolle Wallace, who served as White House Communications Director for President George W. Bush, said, “Richard Painter was my ethics adviser so I couldn’t get a Coke paid for by a reporter”. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, had on Wednesday said, “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares” about violations of the Hatch Act. “That to me was an extraordinary window into the lawlessness of the White House staff”, Wallace went on to say. “A White House chief of staff is the one who makes sure all in the staff follow the ethics laws”. Jason Johnson, an associate professor of politics and journalism at Morgan State, was widely reported for saying on a cable talk show, “This was a crime. You can’t have political events from the White House. I watched a criminal act from a criminal president”.

exposure

Trump brought 1,500 delegates, donors, and honorees to the South Lawn in a scene that looked more like his pre-Covid rallies than a nation in the grip of pandemic.
The South Lawn: Packing them in

There they sat for hours, outdoors but with no social distancing, almost none of them wearing masks. It was a superspreader gathering that was a larger assembly than has been seen in New York, a city of over eight million people, since the pandemic took hold in March and probably one of the largest crowds ever allowed on the eighteen White House acres.

An official release from the Trump campaign said the company Patronus Medical would be conducting “strict protocols” that will be “in full compliance with multiple guidelines” but nothing of the sort was in evidence. Meadows said “a number of people” on site would be tested for Covid-19, according to Bloomberg News. The “PBS NewsHour” said they were only those in the first rows who would be proximate to the president. The rest, having come from all over the country, streamed in unchecked and would take home with them whatever they may have contracted from those around them. The Trump administration will likely be uninterested in tracing the guests over the coming weeks so the damage will be hidden. Put at risk, the 1,500 will effectively have been used by the Trump campaign. Mitch McConnell wouldn’t go near the event. Mary Trump, his niece, said after the speech that he doesn’t care about people’s lives.

The visuals broadcast across the land of the tightly-spaced and unprotected crowd seemed meant to persuade America that the pandemic is over — this on a day that the number of cases in the United States approached six million, the number of deaths was crossing 180,000, and another 1,100 had just died. The message — forget masks, forget distancing — pandered to that element that is outraged that their Constitutional freedoms should be compromised, never mind such irrelevance in the path of a deadly species.

If a president, and administration officials protected by him, choose to break laws, there isn’t much that can be done to stop them other than wait until the next election, if even that will work. “The fact is we’re here and they’re not”, Trump said, which drew a standing ovation. We have just seen that the impeachment provisions of the Constitution are impotent, with too high a hurdle to surmount (a 2/3rds vote) even if the members of the affected party were to think for themselves and act on their own. Trump saw this week that he and his campaign could break the law in manifold instances, confident that nothing would come of it. You may be for his re-election, but that foretells what is to come if he retains office.

Aug 30 2020 | Posted in Politics | Read More »

The Plot to Bury Mueller’s Russia Investigation Backfires

Collusion Revisited: August 18th: Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman had repeated contact with Russian intelligence constituting “a grave counterintelligence threat” is the finding of the Senate Intelligence Committee in its final report on Russian interference, which also cites extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services. This is a severe setback to Attorney General Barr’s investigation that seeks to negate any premise for the Mueller probe, an attempt that this and our previous story are reporting.

    

In great haste when Mueller turned in his report on March 22 of last year, Attorney General William Barr claimed to have digested the whole report in only two days for him to rush out his infamous four-page mischaracterization. It stated repeatedly that “no U.S. person or

Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated” with Russians.

Mueller — a Justice employee as special counsel — had adhered to the department office of legal counsel opinion that a sitting president could not be indicted. Barr undercut that by intimating that there was no department policy standing in Mueller’s way of the special counsel making “a traditional prosecutorial judgment” about Trump’s multiple obstructions; Mueller had simply declined to do so.

Trump, who had for months said “No collusion” countless times, and tweeted “NO COLLUSION” without end, now immediately discarded what the report actually said and tweeted, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION”.

Barr let his appraisal steep in the public consciousness for the weeks it took for the report to be redacted while refusing to release the “principal conclusion” summaries that the Mueller group had expressly prepared for the public to read during that hiatus. Then, on the report’s release to the public, Barr told us of the “unprecedented situation” Trump faced “before and after taking office”, that “federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct”, that “the President was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his Presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks”. Finally, Barr said,

“The President took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation. Apart from whether the acts were obstructive, this evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.”

Barr was effectively explaining away Trump’s intemperance, excusing Trump’s obstruction, bathing Trump in innocence, as if to say, don’t believe the report I am releasing to you today. His many dismissals of the report launched the “nothing” campaign, as we’re calling it, the campaign that said no prosecutions meant Mueller had come up with nothing.

And what Barr said about no corrupt intent was a lie. Trump had refused to be interviewed by Mueller. In June of 2017, a few weeks after Mueller was appointed, Trump said he was willing, “One hundred per cent”, and on a different occasion said “I’m looking forward to it, actually” and “under oath”. Then ensued a cat and mouse game with Trump steadily reneging and Mueller successively relenting, knowing that a subpoena would be ineffectual in a hopelessly slow legal system.

Ultimately, Trump would agree only to answer written questions, and took two months to do so, or rather, his lawyers did. Despite his telling us that he has “one of the great memories of all time” or even “the world’s greatest memory”, Trump more than 30 times would answer “I do not remember”, “I do not recall”, “I have no recollection”, “I have no independent recollection”, “I have no current recollection”. Written answers and Trump’s refusal to reply to further questions about those answers disabled Mueller from getting at intent, the important criterion for obstruction. It left Mueller ending with a whimper, complaining of answers that are “incomplete or imprecise”, and turning the mess of pottage over to Congress, which did nothing (the impeachment being about Ukraine).

Verging on a year and a half, Barr has refused to release the full unredacted report. Clearly, there are things he wants to remain hidden.

Mueller didn’t find enough evidence to make a criminal case, but neither was everyone innocent. He clearly found evidence that the Trump campaign operated right on the edge:

“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

the fbi’s colossal screw-up

The FBI did a thorough job of giving opponents of its Russia interference probe all they needed to paint the agency with bias and corruption. There were the anti-Trump e-mails between Peter Strzok, who led the investigation preceding Mueller, and his paramour at the Bureau, Lisa Page, that made accusations of the FBI’s political motivation difficult to counter. Far worse judgment was the use of the Christopher Steele “dossier” as the “essential” document in the FBI’s filing for a FISA warrant for surveillance of Carter Page.

The allegations in the dossier had not been verified, were in parts salacious, and thought perhaps to be deliberate misinformation planted by the Russians, but the FBI made them the centerpiece of the FISA application anyway. Bad enough. But then, after 18-months of scrutiny into the FBI’s activity, Michael Horowitz, the inspector general at the Justice Department, found 17 violations of process in that FISA application. He also found that an FBI lawyer — who just pleaded guilty — had altered an e-mail to prevent those preparing the application from knowing that Page had told the CIA of some of his meetings with Russians, which would have moderated or ended suspicion. Moreover, the warrant was unjustifiably renewed three times, spanning a year, even though the FBI had found nothing suspect about Page. The Justice Department secretly notified the FISA court that the last two warrant requests lacked substantiation of probable cause and should have been invalid.

Then in June Barr declassified the FBI’s January 2017 debriefing of the principal source for Christopher Steele’s dossier, turning two documents over to Sen. Lindsey Graham for his investigation. In the first, Steele’s source turned out not to be a Russian official or someone with Kremlin connections but only a contract employee of Steele’s firm. Moreover, the employee couldn’t recall the source of some of the information attributed to him, claimed he never said other information attributed to him, and asserted that Steele implied direct access to information that was indirect.

In the second document, Peter Strzok disagreed with a New York Times article alleging Trump campaign ties with Russian intelligence, saying, “[w]e have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with IOs [Intelligence Officials]…We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”

In short, collectively and severally, the Steele dossier was grotesquely fabricated, the FBI had disgraced itself on multiple counts for having used it, and had handed Trump supporters a weapon they would use again and again against the entire Russia investigation.

conflation inflation

Republicans and their various investigations have adopted as a standard tactic to go straightaway to the FBI debacle, as if that was the entirety of the Russia interference investigation. Lindsey Graham’s Senate Judiciary Committee said about the interview with Steele’s sources that it should …

“…question the entire premise of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump Campaign and make it even more outrageous that the Mueller team continued this investigation for almost two and a half years.”

Strzok’s notes refuted only contact by Trump advisers with “Russian intelligence officials” — a Times article had made that claim — but that was inflated in the Judiciary Committee’s proclamation that said Mueller should not have gone on to find all that he did find.

Shouting down the entire investigation to try to make it disappear was often heard from the Right. Examples:

 Just after the Mueller report came out, Holman Jenkins, a columnist at the Journal, put on his willful blinders to make the jaw-drop statement of “the Trump campaign’s nonexistent Russian connections” and ask, “Why did the FBI fan a Russia collusion confabulation that it knew was unfounded, false, and baseless?”. You might want to review the “nonexistent Russian connections” in the partial list of “unfounded” and “baseless” reasons for the Russia investigation in this section of our Part One.

 
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this June, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley segued from the Mueller report to ripping into witness Rod Rosenstein for “rubber-stamping” one of the dossier-based FISA submissions as if Mueller’s report and the dossier were the same.

 
Sen. Ron Johnson, in a Journal op-ed, said that how the FBI handled the Steele dossier “seems consistent with how it ran the entire investigation” with no support for that statement, as well as impugning the integrity of the FBI agents investigating for the Mueller team.

 About the interview with Steele’s dossier source, Graham said, “As Mr. Grassley and I wrote in our declassification request to Mr. Barr, these footnotes provide ‘insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation.’” Here again, we are asked to agree that the dossier somehow disqualified the Mueller report even though the Steele dossier played no role, none, in the F.B.I.’s opening of the Russia investigation in July 2016. Mueller did not rely on it for his report, did not investigate the dossier’s claims. It is barely mentioned. Forgotten, or so Republicans hope, is that the sprawling FBI investigation wasn’t about the dossier that Republicans want to make it all about. The Mueller probe, by mandate, was about Russian election interference and any criminal actions thereto appertaining, with nearly 500 search warrants, interviews of hundreds of witnesses, and a staggering 2,800 subpoenas.

Dianne Feinstein, Democratic senator of California, made the inconvenient point that the FBI officials who opened the inquiry in July of 2016 “had not even seen the Steele dossier”, which didn’t surface until the fall, “but because the Steele dossier was cited in the Carter Page FISA applications, the president and his allies falsely claim that the entire Russia investigation” would never have happened but for the document.

contrivance

In an ultimate attempt to nullify Mueller’s work, Barr wants us to think that Mueller had a preconception of what the Trump campaign was up to and set out to prove it. The two were reportedly once friends, yet here we have Barr speculating on whether Mueller was corrupt:

“One of the things you have to guard against, both as a prosecutor and I think as an investigator, is that if you get too wedded to a particular outcome and you’re pursuing a particular agenda, you close your eyes to anything that sort of doesn’t fit with your preconception. And I think that’s probably the phenomenon we’re looking at here.”

Apart from its being disgraceful, implying withholding of exculpatory evidence, this comment couldn’t be more wrong. It suggests that after that two-day speed reading, Barr never went back to truly read the report. Had he done so he would have found himself wading through tortured analysis that looked at every allegation from every angle in Mueller’s scrupulous laboring to be fair, “a tortured debate among the special counsel’s team” as Jeffrey Toobin puts it in a new book, and did Barr forget that Mueller did not arrive at anything other than equivocation?

What an extraordinary lack of self-awareness. Barr unwittingly described his own preconceptions that caused him to assign John Durham to canvass the world — travelling to Britain, Australia, Italy — wherever it took to prove the “particular outcome” to which Barr is wedded. Durham’s report is what we brought up in Part One, questioning whether Barr might violate tradition by releasing it in the 90-day quiet period before an election. In that window the Justice Department holds off broaching any new discoveries or prosecutions that might harm a candidate, and with too little time to mount an effective response. Then FBI-Director James Comey is vilified by Democrats for having helped Trump win the election by just beforehand reopening the inquiry into a Hillary Clinton associate’s e-mail.

Since our preceding article, Barr has come out and said it:

“There are going to be developments, significant developments, before the election, but we’re not doing this on the election schedule…We’re not going to do anything inappropriate before the election but we’re not being dictated to by this schedule. What’s dictating the timing of this are developments in the case”.

So it’s a “case”. Which means indictments. Since he already knows of these “developments”, how is the timing further to be dictated? Why not now? Is he saving it for an “October surprise”, only somehow coincidentally ready at that moment? If so, any argument that it could not have waited a couple of more weeks until after November 3rd will be indefensible.

And Now They’re Sabotaging the Census

President Trump’s new postmaster general has decreed policy designed to slow the delivery of mail. The objective is to clog the pipeline so mail-in ballots don’t reach their destinations by the deadline. But that is designed only for the coming election, whereas the

Census Bureau has announced a policy designed to affect our democracy for the next ten years. Bureau director Steven Dillingham announced that census-taking would end a full month sooner whether or not it was complete.

One could see what was coming when in June the bureau, an agency that has always been strictly non-partisan and staffed with professionals such as demographers, announced the creation of two top-level positions filled with outsiders, one of whom had appeared dozens of times on television and radio to comment on politics and had written opinion pieces criticizing the case for Trump’s impeachment. Before their appointment, the two had worked for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department operates the Census Bureau. They had been sent to the Census Bureau where staffers said they had asked puzzling questions of why they thought it was necessary to seek out hard to reach residents, by which is meant minorities, low-income people, and the undocumented. Their appointments were greeted with alarm as indicating that now, under the Trump administration, even the census will be politicized, with counts engineered to favor the Republican Party.

The hard-to-count come to some 40% of the population and require an army of census takers to go door-to-door to seek them out. The canvass had already been delayed by the pandemic when the Trump administration announced at the beginning of August the full month foreshortening, which means that in six weeks the impossible must be accomplished, which it surely won’t. A statement from four former Census Bureau directors who had served under both Republican and

Democratic administrations warned that the earlier cutoff would “result in seriously incomplete enumerations in many areas across our country”. Federal law calls for final census counts to be on the president’s desk by December 31, but the pandemic caused the bureau to ask for an extension to April of next year. The House approved, but the Republican-controlled Senate, whose party has an interest in seeing minorities undercounted, has not agreed. Allowing the April date to stand would risk giving control of the census counts to Democrats should Biden win. So the deadline remains the end of 2020.

A memorandum was circulated in the Census Bureau at the beginning of August about using statistical methods to create a state-by-state estimate of illegal immigrants with a cover letter asking for “thoughts, questions, and concerns”. It was thought to have been written by the two appointees and raised suspicions that the purpose was to arrive at numbers to be deducted from blue state counts so as to change the number of congressional representatives in favor of Republicans.

Job #1

The census was the first thing the newly adopted Constitution of 1789 instructed the United States to do, so important that it is the document’s 6th sentence. It orders that an “actual Enumeration shall be made” of persons in the country every 10 years in order to apportion to the states, based on their respective numbers, delegates to the House of Representatives.

Just days after Donald Trump was sworn in, Secretary Ross began pressing to add to the census form the question “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” The question was intended to deter undocumented immigrants from answering. In this atmosphere of an administration that separates asylum applicants from their children, conducts deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and has a president who tweets that immigrants are criminals and rapists, the undocumented already in the country will be too fearful to submit a census form with an obligatory answer to that question. Nor will they answer the door when census-takers make the rounds to fill in who’s missing. A ‘yes’ answer would be fraud risking a prison sentence; a ‘no’ answer would self-identify as illegally in the country and invite deportation, they fear.

Many Americans would prefer that non-citizens not be counted, but short counts in states with large Latino populations — California, Florida, Texas, e.g. — could lose one or two representatives in Congress. Apportionments by the federal government to the states of hundreds of billions of dollars a year are also based on the census and would be reduced by undercounts.

Law suits against adding the citizenship question ensued over the next two years. Ross’s Commerce Department could not substantiate any reason to add the question, so Bill Barr’s Justice Department collaborated by saying it needed the question’s data to aid in enforcing the Voting Rights Act, which its own officials under deposition said was a sham. Ross lied to Congress, which no longer seem to draw any repercussion, saying the White House was never involved, but that was given the lie by phone records and e-mails turned up by one of the law suits. In other words, the administration’s claims were marinated in fraud.

The case worked its way to the Supreme Court which saw through the “contrived” and “pretextual” deceit and ruled 5-to-4 against adding the question, with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the liberal end of the bench.

This president will not be denied

Mr. Trump’s next move was to issue an executive order to all agencies that citizenship data be compiled from existing government sources. That was followed up this July by his directing the government not to count undocumented immigrants when apportioning House seats. It would be clearly against a Constitution that calls for counting everyone. Proof is that slaves were to be counted, although disgracefully as 3/5ths of a person. Right-leaning sources looked for ways around the Constitution. A Wall Street Journal op-ed went through contortions to support the president, saying that the intention of the founders was for only “inhabitants” to be counted. Trouble is, while the word occurs several times in the Constitution, it is never mentioned in conjunction with the census. To remedy that, the op-ed authors found the phrase “number of inhabitants” was used at the Constitutional Convention, that while only “number” survived in the finished document, “inhabitants” was implicit. And besides, they argued, an illegal immigrant living here did not really “inhabit” our country.

In a written statement, Trump said,

“There used to be a time when you could proudly declare, ‘I am a citizen of the United States’. But now, the radical left is trying to erase the existence of this concept and conceal the number of illegal aliens in our country. This is all part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of American citizens, and I won’t stand for it.”

How rights would be eroded was not explained and adhering to the Constitution is now left-wing subversion. The many voter suppression tactics, Trump’s furious campaign against mail-in ballots, and here the corruption of the census — all are part of Republicans’ desperate attempts to hold power as the non-Hispanic white majority in the United States is threatened to become a minority.

Congress Vacations Leaving Pandemic Unemployed with Nothing

Senate Republicans would have none of the Democrats’ plan to resume the $600 a week supplement to states’ unemployment insurance, partly because It was part of the scary $3 trillion bill the House had passed two and a half months ago. That would be on top of $2 trillion passed in the now distant month of March. The payments ended July 31 and off Congress went on its August vacation.

The one-size-fits-all $600 of the Cares Act blew past any fine tuning for the sake of getting money into people’s pockets as fast as possible. That, added to highly varied amounts paid by state unemployment insurance programs, resulted in many workers making more per

week than before the pandemic. Republicans are against perpetuating that is any new bill. They contain that overpayment causes those workers not to return to their jobs or find other work, hobbling the Republican goal to restart the economy.

That illogic makes one wonder who it is we send to Congress. First, what jobs would they be turning down. There are only some 5 million job openings for about 30 million who are now on the unemployment compensation rolls. But even if there was an opening for every one of them, what worker would refuse to return to an ostensibly steady job in favor of the iffy $600 subsidy that would leave him or her unemployed and without an income when it stops — which it already did July 31, and will eventually end again if renewed. Many of those jobs have employer-paid health insurance and retirement plans which the worker would be walking away from. Republicans in Congress evidently think very little of the American worker’s intelligence.

The state payments run out as well, most after 26 weeks, and some states, mostly in the South, don’t care at all about their workers: North Carolina and Florida pay unemployment for only 12 weeks, Georgia for 14. Some states halt payments when an employer tells them a worker has refused work, unless for health problems, even if the pay offered is poverty level.

To make sure no one turns down a job, Republicans, as represented in negotiations by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, have proposed $200-a-week until that can be replaced by their preferred idea of paying everyone 70% of what they had been making before let go. There is no progression in a single percentage applied to all; it means those already low-paid would be hurt the most. From the unform payment that got money out the door speedily, this plan goes to the other extreme of fine-tuning at the individual level of tens of millions of people. Fifty states, each with different unemployment formulae, would have to re-code their systems, many still running software on ancient mainframes that was written in the 1960’s COBOL language. Old-timers could name their price to be lured from retirement to dust off that code. This could take months. The need is now.

buying votes

With negotiations stalled and Congress’s August vacation of much greater import, enter Donald Trump and his executive order pen. Overlooking where the money would come from — it is Congress that decides on appropriation — he settled on $400-a-week relief for those who lost employment. But there’s a catch. The states would have to pony up $100 of the $400 for the government to come up with its $300, like a charity angel’s pledge of a matching grant. Once again, inattention to how things work. Fifty state legislatures would have to approve those outlays. Some to many would have to refuse for lack of funds; states can’t print money. That would leave workers in those states with nothing if the federal government stayed with the Trump rule.

Trump has no access to funds for his proposal. It is Congress that decides on appropriations. There’s mention of his illegally directing monies approved for other purposes by Congress — taking from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been mentioned in the van of what is expected to be an unusually active hurricane season.

The president also seems to have succumbed to the hectoring by economist Stephen Moore, whose obsession is a payroll tax cut which he says is the “best pro-growth idea”. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Moore unabashedly promoted the giveaway as a scheme for Trump to win the election. Trump announced a “payroll tax holiday” beginning September 1st that defers the 7.65% paycheck deduction for workers earning less than $100,000 a year (and the same percentage co-paid by employers). Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle disapprove. Payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare which both face empty coffers no far in the future. But it is senseless for helping people who don’t need it, those who have paying jobs; it does nothing for those out of work who are in greatest need.

Trump made it obvious that this is a cynical vote-buying scheme, saying, “If I’m victorious on Nov. 3, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax”. That he cannot do. He can defer tax deductions for up to a year, but only Congress has the power to cut the payroll tax or make the deferrals permanent. But this tells us that, whereas in the 2016 campaign he pledged not to go near entitlements, now he wouldn’t hesitate to cripple their funding and consequently their benefit schedules.

He also enjoyed sacrificing government revenue for its added bonus of putting Joe Biden and his since-announced running mate Kamala Harris in an awkward position: “So they will have the option of raising everybody’s taxes and taking this away”. They would also have be the ones to debit employees and employers to recover the deferred and unpaid taxes if Congress doesn’t sanctify this president’s usurpation of their Constitutional power by waiving the bygone tax.

Trump is infamous for leaving his bills unpaid.

Aug 13 2020 | Posted in Economy | Read More »

Barr and Senators Plot to Invert the Mueller Report

Just before the election, timed for greatest effect, Attorney General Barr will release his special investigator’s report in his quest, in the service of President Trump, to invalidate the entire Mueller report. He has often made clear that objective. He has said that “the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions” and that the Mueller probe that ensued was “one of the greatest travesties of American history.”

Barr had tapped Connecticut’s U.S. Attorney John Durham to scour the world to find proof of his theories. As he did with the Mueller findings, Barr is characterizing Durham’s investigation before the public learns of it, saying he is “troubled” by what Durham has found. Barr would in fact be troubled only were Durham to find nothing.

There is traditionally a 90-day quiet period before an election during which any new discoveries are put on ice out of concern they could be unfairly disruptive.

Near the end of July, Barr finally appeared before the House Judiciary Committee where Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.) asked him if he would “commit to not releasing any report by Mr. Durham before the November election?” Barr answered, “No”. Just as former FBI Director James Comey may have irretrievably damaged Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes by reopening the FBI’s email inquiry days before the 2016 election, so is Barr likely to flout the three-month protocol with an “October surprise” in the hopes of dimming Joe Biden’s prospects. He had just said in his opening remarks to the committee that he joined the Trump administration because “I became deeply troubled by what I perceived as the increasing use of the criminal justice process as a political weapon”.

President Trump’s modus operandi goes little further than revenge. He considered the Russia investigation a criminal plot engineered by former President Barack Obama. Accordingly, we are supposed to be grateful that Barr doesn’t expect any charges will be filed against Obama or Biden in consequence of Durham’s findings.

open wide

But whereas Mueller’s mandate was narrowly defined, restricted to searching for possible “coordination” between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, the Durham probe has no boundaries. Trump gave Barr freedom to issue subpoenas and to demand and expose classified CIA and FBI documents. He can therefore make the claim that Durham’s report will be more authoritative for having broader access. In addition to coming up with allegations that the FBI and Mueller probes were founded on false premises, it is a certainty that Durham or his aides have been upending Ukraine in the hopes of finding corruption by Biden’s son when working for Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company, and by Biden himself, because he had attempted to sideline a prosecutor general who had investigated Burisma. Never mind that had taken place before Biden arrived. His mission was to press for corruption clean up so that infamously corrupt Ukraine could win international economic support.

Barr’s probe is not the only one hoping to obliterate Mueller’s 448-page opus. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted in June to give its chairman, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the power to subpoena some 50 persons — Comey , former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper among them. Graham wants to exhume the beginnings of Crossfire Hurricane, the codename for the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s election interference and the Trump campaign. He has concluded in advance that the entire Russia investigation was “corrupt” and says, “It’s important to find out what the hell happened.” He intends “to look long and hard about how the Mueller investigation got off the rails”.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc) is diverting his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee from the coronavirus threat at home to find dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine. Media reports have it that pro-Russian Ukrainians have passed materials to Johnson’s committee. Johnson, the Trump campaign, the White House, and the State Department “have all declined to comment on whether that is true”, says the Biden campaign, “meaning that each are refusing to tell the American people whether they are party to a foreign influence operation against the United States”, which is illegal.

Fortunately, there is the Senate Intelligence Committee which has honorably been conducting its bipartisan investigation, with four reports so far and a fifth on the Trump campaign’s Russian contacts eagerly awaited.

Barr called the FBI probe into possible Trump campaign connections to Russia a “travesty”. The FBI operated in “bad faith”, the nation “turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely hyped and fanned by a completely irresponsible press”. In his statement before the House Judiciary Committee he called it “the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal” (curiously, he skipped that phrase when he read his statement aloud).

He and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and for Barr, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.” President Trump calls it the “Greatest Political Crime in the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt”, usually tweeted as “WITCH HUNT!”. The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, slandering the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.”

fake news from the right

Right-leaning media have fallen in line, employing slander to bring their readers along. Holman Jenkins at The Wall Street Journal calls it “the Russia follies” and “the implosion of [Adam Schiff’s] Russia collusion theory”. Fellow columnist at the Journal, Kim Strassel, who writes about nothing else, portrays the “collusion narrative as a political dirty trick aided by a rogue FBI” instigated by Democrats and the “rogue bureaucrats of the Deep State” at the intelligence agencies. The Washington Examiner says, “No need to build to a crescendo — let’s just say it: The Trump-Russia investigation was a politically driven fraud from beginning to end”. Another writer there says it’s “the costly and ultimately pointless Russia collusion hoax, which alleged that the Kremlin installed the president of the United States in the White House”. At RealClear Policy it’s “the same Democratic conspiracy theories based on a fever dream that its bête noire, Donald Trump, was an agent of the Kremlin”. The always furious Jim Jordan (R-Oh) summarized the Mueller report at the Barr hearing with, “We get two years, 19 lawyers, 48 witnesses, 2,800 subpoenas and a $30 million cost to the taxpayers and they come back with nothing!”.

Nada, nulla, niente

“Nothing” is what Republicans want you to remember. Constrained by a Justice Department memo from the office of legal counsel that he could not bring indictments against the president, Mueller made clear, albeit in nuanced language that the Messrs. Barr and Trump chose not to understand, that:

“[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

The campaign to erase the Mueller findings knows it can count on American’s chronic amnesia. “There was no basis for them to start the investigation in the first place”, said Jordan at Barr’s hearing. He echoes Barr, who has questioned why it began. By such total nullification they are saying that the FBI should never have looked into Russian election interference or the hacking of the Democratic National Committee servers. They should have just shrugged it off. Mueller should have ignored finding out who was behind Russia’s “Active Measures” social media campaign and GRU’s hacking operations. Because Mueller could not quite build a criminal case, we should ignore that the Trump campaign was teeming with Russian contacts and (please note, Sen. Graham) the nation was wondering “What the hell is happening?”.

 Why didn’t campaign adviser George Papadopoulos report to the FBI that the Russians had a huge file of Hillary Clinton’s email, instead trying to broker a meeting between the Russians and the campaign to acquire the trove. Why did the FBI learn of this only through Papadopoulos spilling this to an Australian diplomat in London (over perhaps too many drinks)?

 How to explain Trump’s hiring to run his campaign Paul Manafort, who had extensive dealings with Ukraine’s pro-Russian president who ultimately had to flee to Russia, was compromised by owing a reported $10 million to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska whom Manafort agreed to brief about the campaign, and was meeting regularly with another Russian thought to be connected to Russian intelligence, Konstantin Kilimnik, to hand over campaign polling data?

 Why did Jared Kushner and Eric Prince, founder of the notorious mercenaries-for-hire firm Blackwater (sister Betsy would become Trump’s education secretary), meet with the head of Russia’s sovereign fund, and travel all the way to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean to do so, a meet-up that remains one of the more heavily redacted sections of Mueller’s report.

 What to make of Trump first considering as his running mate (and ultimately appointing as his national security adviser) a man who was paid $45,000 to join Russian President Vladimir Putin at a December 2015 dinner for the Kremlin’s media arm, RT, had been paid over $500,000 by a company owned by a Turkish-American businessman close to top Turkish officials without registering as a foreign agent, and in a tweet was even promoting Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories.

 How about Jared Kushner discussing with Russia’s ambassador use of Russian embassy facilities to set up a “back channel” for communication between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin to keep pre-inauguration conversations secret?

 How did Roger Stone know in advance there would be a Wikileak dump of DNC e-mails? Why, on a drive to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, was candidate Trump, after taking a phone call, able to tell Manafort sidekick Rick Gates that more releases of damaging material would be coming? Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen overheard a Trump phone call saying the same. No collusion. Trump denied knowing of this, recently proven to be a lie to Mueller.

 Then there was Donald Jr., convening a meeting with a Russian lawyer who said she had dirt on Hillary Clinton. That turned out to be a come on, but that Trump’s son e-mailed “If it’s what you say, I love it” looked to be a certainty he would have “colluded” by accepting assistance from a foreign power had she in hand what she led him to believe.

 Why was Carter Page, whom the FBI thought might be a Russian agent after an attempt by two Russian spies to recruit him in New York in 2013, an aide in Trump’s campaign? Why bring in someone who boasted that year of the “privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin” in a letter to a book publisher? (That drew a FISA warrant in 2014.) In the midst of the Trump campaign in 2016, why had Page gone to Moscow where he met with unusually highly-placed contacts and gave a speech criticizing U.S. sanctions policy toward Russia?

 Trump repeatedly expressing admiration of Putin even to the extent of standing next to him in Helsinki saying “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that had waged a campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election.

That’s a partial list. The Republican Party line is that, if nothing quite rose to the level of legally prosecutable “collusion”, all this is nothing and should not have been investigated. And all the while Donald Trump, a candidate for the presidency, praising Vladimir Putin as a real leader, unlike Barack Obama. And if no one was doing anything that might be wrong, why did they all lie, which is why several drew their prison sentences?

We made the mistake of reading the entire Mueller report, all 448 pages, footnotes and all. It is 180 degrees from nothing.

Part 2 Next Time

Is Pandemic the Death Warrant for Globalism?

For decades the decided world order has been a liberal internationalism of cooperative relations between countries and free markets in which multinational companies flourished. Emerging market countries

attained a prosperity never before seen, and poverty around the world was dramatically reduced.

But developed countries such as the United States saw manufacturing plant closures, millions of jobs moved offshore, the soaring wealth of the multinational ownership class, and working class wages that, dollar-adjusted, have stagnated for decades.

New leaders riding a wave of populism have traded on the growing discontent of the left-behind and have championed nationalism as the answer. In the U.S., Donald Trump won the presidency on an “America First” platform of building walls to stem immigration and tariffs to curtail imports. What could have played into their hands better than a pandemic? The world shut down and closed its borders. “It is a true gift for them”, said the head of a Paris think tank. Is globalization finished?

As Covid-19 spread, countries looked to their own needs. Nationalist leaders saw in the steps to be taken to confront the pandemic the opportunity to extend their grip as they issued orders to shut down unessential businesses, dictated what others are to produce, and imposed quarantine on their people. Once assumed, those powers are unlikely to be relinquished.

The process has pit country against country, threatening in an instant the web of collaboration that had become the norm for most of the world. At least 75 governments banned the export of personal protective gear leaving poor nations who don’t manufacture this matériel exposed to the virus. The scramble to find medical equipment led to spats between allies. Outraged Germany called it “modern piracy” and “Wild West tactics” when the U.S. commandeered shipments of face masks headed for Europe. Switzerland upbraided the German ambassador for that country blocking a shipment of 240,000 masks. The French government requisitioned all medical supplies, blocking Valmy SAS of France from honoring an order for a million masks intended for the British health service. America’s 3M Company was caught between sides when the Trump administration ordered American companies producing protective wares overseas for overseas customers to ship them instead to the U.S. while China, with the stranglehold it had developed over personal protective gear, had blocked 3M and other American factories from exporting back to the U.S. Even anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine was locked down; Britain banned its export, Hungary banned export of the raw material that makes it and medicines that contain it. A poll had it that 70% of Italians think Germany was trying to “strangle” their country. In another poll, Italian support for leaving the European Union (EU) has almost doubled from 29% late last year to 49% today.

The squabbles must be delighting Vladimir Putin, fitting in nicely with his strategy to sow division between the European Union and NATO allies. Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vucic declared that European solidarity “does not exist”.

dependency

Long opposed to America’s trade policies and bearing a particular animus toward China, Mr. Trump has all along wanted to create jobs by bringing manufacturing back to these shores. Along came the pandemic to add to his buy-American message by showing how vulnerable we are in our reliance on other countries for essential supplies. “If we learn anything from this crisis, [it is that] never again should we have to depend on the rest of the world for our essential medicines and counter-measures”, Peter Navarro, one of the president’s trade advisers, stridently urged at the beginning of April. His mission is to get American companies to abandon China and he has proposed rules to force the American health care field to buy protective gear and medicines only from U.S. suppliers.

It’s not just China that America depends on medically. Robert Zoellick, a former World Bank president, U.S. trade representative, and deputy secretary of state, made the point in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that our primary foreign source for CT systems, hand sanitizer, patient monitors, pulse oximeters, X-ray machines, and even breathing masks are the European Union countries.

But it is China’s factories that make 80% percent of the world’s antibiotics. We also depend on China for generic medicines such as penicillin and the active ingredients for a huge number of drugs. Generics account for 90% of all U.S. prescriptions. Most come from India, but India gets 70% of its active ingredients from China.

The percentages could be even higher. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in February that compressing foreign ingredients into tablets in the U.S. is all that is needed to satisfy the FDA’s country-of-origin requirement as made in the U.S. So these are not counted in the import totals.

Our medical essentials are hooked to the Chinese lifelines, yet at the same time White House relations with the Middle Kingdom have capsized. The hostility has reached the point of a cold war that is becoming hot, with the Trump administration suddenly challenging Chinese usurpation of South China Sea islands and outcrops as “entirely illegal”. Imagine China blocking all shipments of antibiotics as retaliation. The pharmaceutical industry has been permitted to put our health and even our medical survival at risk by single-sourcing from an authoritarian country that can turn off vital supplies with the ease of flicking a light switch.

Moreover, China, where profit takes precedence over ethics, has a shoddy record. Are your drugs full strength, or were ingredients adulterated with filler? Are the expensive brand name drugs you take possibly counterfeit, perhaps with the same adulteration? The FDA conducts each year some 3,500 inspections of foreign plants that produce generics but China and India require that almost all visits be announced beforehand, and incredibly we meekly go along with that.

Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio has been well out in front of the issue. A year ago February he issued a report on China supply chain vulnerability, warning…

“There comes a point where, as a nation, we have to ask ourselves what are the critical goods that you must retain the ability to make even if it’s not the most efficient outcome. I think that’s now right before us.”

Nothing came of it. It took a pandemic to shake sense into the heads of our major corporations that they had better diversify their sources.

Ricardo run amok

David Ricardo was the 18th Century British economist whose theory of “comparative advantage” said that efficiency lies in countries exporting what they do best and importing what others do best. The world has taken that to an extreme. An article in The Economist tells us that

“Even simple products rely on elaborate supply chains. A humble cup of coffee requires 29 firms to collaborate across 18 countries, according to one estimate”.

The focus, given the health crisis, has of course been on the medical supply chain. But vulnerability pertains to an endless list of essential products and raw materials. Bloomberg Businessweek cites the example of French automaker PSA. Its 173,000 employees need parts from 6,000 suppliers around the globe to assemble its Citroëns, Peugeots, and Opels, each typically an agglomeration of 4,000 components delivered “just-in-time”, which is the Japanese innovation to deliver those components only at the moment they are needed to keep inventory costs at a minimum. But if the chain breaks for any one of those — Covid-19 flare-up shuts down a plant in China, say — the assembly lines halt and a scramble ensues to come up with a substitute. Such is the vulnerability of hyper-efficiency.

Even our military has allowed itself to become exposed. At least an October 2018 report made them aware. Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, said in a Journal report that…

“[T]he department had burrowed four or five levels down into the supply chain to uncover weaknesses…There is a large focus on dependency on foreign countries for supply, and China figures very prominently there. I am very concerned that we have secondary sourcing in all of our critical components.”

In all this time the U.S. military has relied on China as the only source for the so-called rare earth minerals needed in its high-tech kit despite knowing that China leverages this vulnerability against the West. Their implicit threat in trade negotiations to choke off supplies has caused the Defense Department to help pay to resuscitate a mine that had been bought out of bankruptcy by the only U.S. company in the rare earth business.

It is not just the West that has seen the light. Japan has set aside $2.2 billion to help its companies move production out of China. The two-year trade war with the U.S. has made it clear even to China that it must accelerate its program to produce everything it needs at home so as not to be dependent on U.S. technology. Its universities disgorge thousands of engineers annually and China has launched a crash program to develop the electronic chips for which it has no substitutes. The Trump administration has promoted “decoupling” by American business to end its reliance on China.

So, is globalization dead?

There will be a closer look at made-in-America but globalization will continue. Some companies — Apple, for example — have moved certain operations to the U.S. But for the most part the reaction has mostly been to look to Vietnam, Malaysia, Myanmar, and other low-cost countries for alternate suppliers. For pharmaceuticals that’s not easy. New sources must obtain FDA approval, which can take a couple of years. And those are not likely to be wholesale substitutions that replace China altogether. Companies will seek protective redundancy, but are not eager to abandon trillions in global investments, nor quit the relationships they have developed with trusted foreign producers over the last two decades, nor scuttle their complex supply chains.

This is not to say that a restoration of amicability is likely to break out. A major test will come when the first country devises a successful vaccine. China is on a mission to be the first, eager to display that its technical prowess now leads the world. It has a thousand scientists at work on a vaccine with nine candidates being rushed into trials. The U.S. is doing the same, with trials underway, and has just detected the Russian hacking unit Cozy Bear with trying to steal the research work of ours and other countries.

The World Health Organization (WHO) worries about protectionism, that the lead country will keep it to itself until all its citizens are vaccinated while sickness continues to plague the rest of the world. The New York Times quotes Simon Evenett, an international trade expert, as saying…

“The parties with the deepest pockets will secure these vaccines and medicines, and essentially, much of the developing world will be entirely out of the picture. We will have rationing by price. It will be brutal.”