Month: May 2019

Sometimes it is very hard to come up with explanations for the behavior of the Trump administration. Increasingly, I’m defaulting to the position that they’re just fucking lunatics who believe insane things, and as long as we stick to that as the best rationale that can be found, we’re probably going to be on safe ground.  For example, let’s take a look at what they’re up to with the Obamacare.

The Trump administration formally declared its opposition to the entire Affordable Care Act on Wednesday, arguing in a federal appeals court filing that the signature Obama-era legislation was unconstitutional and should be struck down.

Such a decision could end health insurance for some 21 million Americans and affect many millions more who benefit from the law’s protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions and required coverage for pregnancy, prescription drugs and mental health.

Just yesterday, I wrote that Trump was looking to bring down the cost of health insurance in anticipation of facing the electorate next year. That seemed like a decent take on why he spoke with Schumer and Pelosi about possibly restoring the funding he had eliminated in 2017 for cost-sharing reduction subsidies. Those subsidies were designed to keep Obamacare’s Silver Plans affordable.

But what do I fucking know? He’s in court the very next day seeking to throw the whole law out and take health insurance away from 21 million people. There’s no consistent electoral plan here. The Republicans just got absolutely destroyed in the midterm elections because they threatened people’s access to health care. They kept falsely insisting that they weren’t trying to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions, and now they’re threatening access for everyone. That’s not exactly politically astute.

When I published The GOP Doesn’t Care About Your Health back in March, I wrote:

One way to determine if a political party cares about people like you is to see if they have any interest in whether you have access to quality, affordable health care. If they’re indifferent to whether you live or die, that’s a good indicator that they’re not on your side. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is a member of the Republican Party, and he could not be more clear that he has no interest in health care as a topic other than for its potential as a political weapon against the Democrats.

At that time, I was basically laughing at Trump because he had suggested that the Republican-controlled Senate was going to come up with a great new alternative for the Affordable Care Act, and McConnell’s response was a flat-out, “Nope!”

He was as clear as he could be that he was not going to ask his committee chairs to waste one minute of their time working on health care. Even Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas told the president to come up with his own damn bill: “The president’s entitled to his opinions, so I don’t begrudge him that. But what they need to do now is tell us what their plans are.”

The whole episode was amusing in an extremely grim kind of way, but Trump had already indicated that he intended to kill Obamacare in federal court, so the story he told about a replacement bill was a cover story from the start. The Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2017-18, and they never got close to figuring out a way to protect people with preexisting conditions without some kind of mandate that people buy insurance and a buttload of subsidies for both the insurers and their customers.

The congressional Republicans were dumbfounded when they first learned that the administration was going to fight the health care law in court, and they’re still unhappy about it today.

In filing the brief, the administration abandoned an earlier position — that some portions of the law, including the provision allowing states to expand their Medicaid programs, should stand. The switch, which the administration disclosed in late March, has confounded many people in Washington, even within the Republican Party, who came to realize that health insurance and a commitment to protecting the A.C.A. were among the main issues that propelled Democrats to a majority in the House of Representatives last fall.

There’s really no explanation for this I can come up with that makes any political, moral or even ideological sense. I think it’s the product of rotted minds. The president and some his close advisers simply want to get rid of the Affordable Care Act to spite for Obama, and because they were told it is some Stalinist monstrosity. Only idiots were supposed to believe that, but now the idiots are in the White House.

It seems like everyone is trying to figure what is motivating William Barr to debase himself and destroy his credibility. Why did he even want the job of defending the president? And, let’s be clear, that is how he views his job description as attorney general of the United States.

For James Comey, he’s succumbed to Donald Trump’s nefarious influence.

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

But that doesn’t explain why Barr took the position in the first place. Eliana Johnson of Politico writes he had to be dragged kicking and screaming, but he was ultimately convinced to accept the nomination by his longtime conservative legal buddies who share his affection for the Unitary Executive theory.

Ultimately, his friends managed to talk him into it. “We had discussions over a period of time, and I encouraged him to take it,” said George Terwilliger, a conservative attorney and longtime friend of Barr’s.

Barr’s social and professional circle was critical in drawing him into Trump’s orbit. Barr pals, including Terwilliger, Cooper, Luttig and former Virginia Attorney General Richard Cullen are part of a group of elite conservative litigators who were once wunderkinds in the the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. They grew up together and have fought countless political battles alongside one another…

…They are united by a firm belief in a theory of robust presidential power dusted off by Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese. Known among legal scholars as the theory of the “unitary executive,” they argue that the Constitution grants presidents broad control of the executive branch, including — to take a salient Trump-era example — the power to fire an FBI director for any reason at all.

Yet, it would seem possible to defend the unitary executive theory without becoming an unethical lackey for a criminal president.

I think the simplest explanation is that he’s just another example of an American whose brain has been rotted by consuming too much right-wing media. He’s defending Trump for the same reason Fox News says he should be defended. Trump is a victim of a witch hunt–a plot to destroy him hatched by liberals and Obama holdovers in the FBI and Justice Department. I think he actually believes this, which would explain his behavior better than the idea that Trump corrupted his morals or that he’s just putting up with Trump in order to defend the power of the presidency.

Watching cable news, I see a phalanx of former Justice Department officials who are somewhere between flummoxed and flabbergasted by Barr’s behavior.  They can’t imagine what has happened to him. I think the answer is simple. He sat in his living room watching Sean Hannity and it destroyed his brain, his moral compass, and his potential worth as a public servant.

On Sunday, March 24, 2019, Attorney General William Barr publicly circulated a four-page memo that purported to clear President Trump of all wrongdoing in any of the key matters Special Counsel Robert Mueller had examined during his nearly two-year long investigation. It was supposed to be a summary of the top-line conclusions from the Mueller Report, but at the time it wasn’t possible to judge whether Barr properly characterized the report’s conclusions because he didn’t release them. He held the actual summary conclusions a guarded secret for almost a month before producing a heavily redacted version of them on the 18th of April.

We now know that this did not sit well with Robert Mueller–at all. It appears Mueller took a brief moment to compose himself and then took considerably more time to compose an irate letter to Barr. The Department of Justice received his protest on March 27, three days after Barr issued his original memo. Using stark language “that shocked senior Justice Department officials” and left them “taken aback by the tone,” Mueller ripped into the Attorney General.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

He was clear that he felt Barr had misled the public and needed to quickly rectify the situation.

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

There was also a conversation on the phone. They spoke on March 28 for about fifteen minutes, and Mueller emphasized that it wasn’t Barr’s characterization of his investigation of Russian election meddling that pissed him off, but rather the bogus effort to exonerate the president.

In that call, Mueller said he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials. Mueller did not express similar concerns about the public discussion of the investigation of Russia’s election interference, the officials said.

Mueller reiterated his view that the public was being misled.

Throughout the conversation, Mueller’s main worry was that the public was not getting an accurate understanding of the obstruction investigation, officials said.

At that point, it should have been clear to Barr that Mueller has significant problems with how he had presented his work, but he wasn’t honest about this when he testified before the Senate on April 10th, claiming that he did not know how Mueller felt about about his conclusions on his report.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland got the date of the testimony wrong in the following tweet, but it’s significant that he’s calling on Barr to resign.

On April 20th, I asked Barr, “Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?” His answer was, “I don’t know whether Mueller supported my conclusion.”

We now know Mueller stated his concerns on March 27th, and that Barr totally misled me, the Congress, and the public. He must resign. pic.twitter.com/rod404BbYo

— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) May 1, 2019

Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was slightly less dramatic, but with the Attorney General scheduled to testify before the Senate again on Wednesday, he demanded that he bring along the letter the DOJ received from Mueller on March 27.

In light of Mueller's letter, the misleading nature of Barr’s 4/10 testimony & 4/18 press conference is even more glaring.

Barr must bring the letter with him when he testifies in the Senate tomorrow.

And it’s time for Mueller to testify publicly. Now.https://t.co/d3lObZSQBE

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) May 1, 2019

Barr will have a friendly forum on Wednesday because Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina will chair the hearing. You can read Barr’s prepared remarks here. He’s also scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, but he’s still haggling with Democratic Chairman Jerry Nadler about the format and may seek to avoid making an appearance.

It’s unclear why news of Mueller’s letter to Barr broke the night before is due to testify, but the timing is certainly no accident. Someone wanted to put Barr on the hot seat.  On the score, I’m gratified to realized that more and more people seem to be embracing my recommendation that the House Democrats threaten to use their inherent contempt powers to arrest non-coorperating witnesses and put them on trial. Hell, if they’d taken my advice back in 2007, we might not even be having this argument today.

 

There has been a significant development in the saga of Julian Assange.

A British court sentenced Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, to 50 weeks in prison on Wednesday for jumping bail when he took refuge in Ecuador’s Embassy in London seven years ago.

It’s still not clear if the United States will be successful in their effort to extradite Mr. Assange, but it now appears that he’ll be spending almost all of the next year in a British prison. He’s being punished for violating the terms of his bail after he exhausted all his appeals in a Swedish extradition case.

Here his how the New York Times covered the story back in June 2012:

Last week, Britain’s Supreme Court rejected Mr. Assange’s final appeal in his 18-month legal battle against Sweden, which is seeking to extradite him for questioning about allegations of sexual abuse and rape made by two women in Stockholm in 2010. Barring intervention from the European Court of Human Rights, the British justices said, Mr. Assange would be sent to Sweden by midnight on July 7.

Assange asserted at the time that the rape charges against him were false and that Sweden would re-extradite him to the United States to face punishment for his role in the 2010 Bradley/Chelsea Manning leaks of classified military material. His lawyer said the alleged victims were “honey pots” and part of an American intelligence plot to destroy him. They lost that argument in court at the time, and fared no better this time around.

Prior to sentencing, Assange asked for leniency, stating that he was “struggling with difficult circumstances” and rationalized his violation of the law, “I did what I thought at the time was the best or perhaps the only thing that I could have done.”  Then he gave a classic non-apology apology: “I regret the course that that has taken.”

It seems doubtful that Assange will be able to repeat his 2016 election meddling performance in 2020, although he should be done with his current term of incarceration before Election Day.  The Russians will need to find a new coconspirator.