Month: September 2021

On Wednesday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) released a statement about his position on the infrastructure and reconciliation negotiations. There was one sentence that stood out to me.

Proposing a historic expansion of social programs while ignoring the fact we are not in a recession and that millions of jobs remain open will only feed a dysfunction that could weaken our economic recovery.

I’d love to hear him explain how the “social programs” in the reconciliation bill would “weaken our economic recovery.” For example, one of those programs is an extension of the child tax credit that was included in the Democrats’ covid relief legislation. What we learned after just one payment is that it lifted households with 3 million children out of poverty. That would be a BFD to families in West Virginia.

• Child poverty rate: 20.1% (7th highest)

• Overall poverty rate: 16% (6th highest)

• Families with annual incomes below $10,000: 4.9% (4th highest)

West Virginia also ranks last in states for median household income.

What Manchin seems to be saying is that the economy is in the process of recovering from the recession caused by covid and the status quo (where 20% of the children in his state live in poverty) is just fine.

By way of contrast, here’s what President Biden tweeted recently:

I believe we’re at an inflection point.

Are we going to continue with an economy where the overwhelming share of the benefits go to the top?

Or will we choose a new path? One that invests in this nation and creates growth that benefits everyone.

— President Biden (@POTUS) September 16, 2021

The point of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda isn’t to simply help the economy recover from a pandemic, it is to address the long-term problem of income inequality and ensure that “growth benefits everyone.” Getting back to the status quo isn’t good enough.

It is obvious that Manchin disagrees with the majority of Democrats on a lot of the details in the BBB reconciliation package. But it seems to me that this is the heart of the issue. He doesn’t think that income inequality is a problem that needs to be addressed.

I love it when conservatives eat their own…

A conservative website, American Greatness, published a piece Tuesday claiming that, according to “multiple” sources, [South Dakota Governor Kristi] Noem has been having an affair with Lewandowski “for months.” The website did not identify any of the sources.

Lewandowski was Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign manager. He was fired by the campaign in 2016 but remains part of the former president’s inner circle and ran the pro-Trump Make America Great Again Action super PAC…

Noem and Lewandowski have traveled extensively together across the country for political events, and he has promoted her to members of the media. At one event in January, they were spotted partying together late in a hotel bar.

Sadly, the Post goes off on a tangent about Lewandowski’s other problems—apparently he’s back to his old tricks of sexually assaulting and physically abusing women—but thankfully we have one of my favorite punching bags, the ivermectin-guzzling circus clowns at American Greatness to give us the details about the alleged affair (yes, I feel dirty linking to them too).

Lewandowski accompanied Noem across the country as she stumped for Trump’s reelection last year. According to South Dakota Republicans, former Noem chief of staff Joshua Shields left, in part, because of Lewandowski’s butting in. Lewandowski, who is married with four children, still has the former president’s ear, which he reportedly uses to Noem’s advantage.

Noem, a married mother of three, has been eyed as a possible running mate for a Trump presidential bid in 2024. Bloomberg reported in March that Trump’s closest advisors are pushing either for a black or female vice presidential candidate. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Noem have both been named among the favorites by members of Trump’s inner circle.

On March 5, Donald Trump, Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle hosted a fundraiser for Noem at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and home in Palm Beach. Noem was invited to a second fundraiser there in April. Lewandowski has played a key role in boosting Noem’s clout with Trump.

In a brief interview with the New York Times, Lewandowski praised Noem as having “a huge future in Republican politics.” But these recent revelations, in combination with other challenges, threaten her chances of winning a ticket to the White House.

“There are members of Congress close to Mar-a-Lago who have called the affair ‘an open secret’ and worried that about Noem’s viability as a national candidate and within the movement,” a source familiar with the matter told American Greatness.

Now, much of this may well be driven by right-wing hostility to Noem, who apparently went off the reservation by killing a bill that would have banned transgender women from competing in women’s sports and “refusing to prevent private companies from imposing vaccine mandates on employees” (so much for Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, I guess). The writers at AG are true Trump believers, all with ties to the far-right Claremont Institute, and it looks like they smell blood in the water. As an aside, I used to know editors Ben Boychuk and Julie Ponzi via Facebook—they’re former friends of an old editor of mine, and some of the most miserable, dishonest, and vicious people I’ve engaged with in my whole life. So this may all be a tempest in a teapot, trying to ding Noem before 2024 with anything they can throw at her, for veering even a little bit from the hymnbook—Lord knows the complaints about corruption ring hollow from people who are all-in with Trumpism.

But who cares what the stated rationale is—everyone knows that when it comes to morality and family values, the GOP is the party of “do as I say, not as I do”—the effect is still the same. The GOP is eating their own, and from the sound of things, it’s delicious.

Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance had an interesting conversation on Tuesday night. It all started with the Fox News host showing a video clip of some students confronting their peers about hanging out in a multicultural area with signs saying “police matter.”

The basic way this works is that the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Harvard University endowment, these are fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities, so they benefit from preferential tax treatment…

We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in ill-gotten accumulated wealth. It serves as a tax haven for left-wing billionaires and what do they do with this? They fund critical race theory, they fund ridiculous racism, they fund teaching 6-year-olds that they should, you know, cast off their gender. We are actively subsidizing the people who are destroying this country, and they call it a charity. It’s just ridiculous.

Henry Ford and Bill Gates might be surprised that the money they made and gifted to their foundations amounted to “ill-gotten accumulated wealth.” But that’s a story for another day. What shocked me was to hear these two right wingers complain about the non-profit status of foundations. Carlson kicked off the conversation by saying that “the Ford Foundation is just one of many foundations that enjoy nonprofit status and get to completely change the country non-democratically using their tax exemption.” Vance ends the segment by suggesting that we “seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets and give it to the people.” At that point, Carlson smiled and nodded his agreement.

All of that might come as a surprise to the folks at the Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations, and the Adolph Coors Foundation – all of whom are also tax exempt 501(c) 3’s, just like the Ford Foundation. A report by People for the American Way identified those as the top five right wing foundations that are “Buying a Movement.” You might remember that both Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jane Mayer have documented that several of these foundations are funding the politicization of our courts as well as Trump’s Big Lie as an excuse for voter suppression. As I’ve written previously, all of this is precisely how right wingers are weaponizing philanthropy.

So in a sense, I agree with Carlson and Vance. We ought to be talking about whether these foundations should be tax exempt. That conversation should probably also include other 501 (3) 3’s – like churches that are pushing a political agenda. But now we’re getting into territory that will send right wingers howling. I don’t think any of that is what Carlson and Vance had in mind.

It might be helpful to unpack why these two white men went after the Ford Foundation – particularly their fellowship program. According to the foundation’s web site, the purpose of the program is “to increase faculty diversity at US colleges and universities.” It’s not hard to imagine why white supremacists would find that kind of program to be a threat.

As it turns out, Carlson was lying (surprise, surprise) when he said that substacker Chris Brunet “posted dozens of internal documents from the Ford Foundation that show that the foundation…is focused on pure partisanship, indoctrinating students with left wing political propaganda and sending them forth to wreck the country.”

Brunet has, in fact, launched a massive attack on the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program. The documents he received, however, came, not from the foundation itself, but from fellows who participate on a listserv that offers both alumni and current fellows the opportunity to network, collaborate, and mentor each other. Brunet was provided with archived emails from the listserv by a group he calls “whistleblowers,” who complained about the nature of some of the conversations. Their access and participation in the emails indicates that they, too, are foundation fellows. So the group is hardly a monolith.

What is clear from the comments Brunet selected to share is that, in a group dedicated to increasing diversity at colleges and universities, conversations got difficult at times. Participants were questioning whether or not to engage with comments they found offensive. That kind of conversation is always challenging.

But Brunet faces his own problems when it comes to online communication. At his substack, he identifies himself as a participant and leader at an anonymous online messaging board for economists known as Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR). As it turns out, U.C. Berkeley student Alice H. Wu mined more than a million posts from the board and published a paper titled “Gender Stereotyping in Academia: Evidence From Economics Job Market Rumors Forum.”

Ms. Wu set up her computer to identify whether the subject of each post is a man or a woman. The simplest version involves looking for references to “she,” “her,” “herself” or “he,” “him,” “his” or “himself.”

She then adapted machine-learning techniques to ferret out the terms most uniquely associated with posts about men and about women.

The 30 words most uniquely associated with discussions of women make for uncomfortable reading.

In order, that list is: hotter, lesbian, bb (internet speak for “baby”), sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated and prostitute.

The parallel list of words associated with discussions about men reveals no similarly singular or hostile theme. It includes words that are relevant to economics, such as adviser, Austrian (a school of thought in economics) mathematician, pricing, textbook and Wharton (the University of Pennsylvania business school that is President Trump’s alma mater). More of the words associated with discussions about men have a positive tone, including terms like goals, greatest and Nobel.

David Romer, a leading macroeconomist at Berkeley, summarized the paper as depicting “a cesspool of misogyny.”

Carlson’s source – Chris Brunet – not only hangs out at a cesspool of misogyny, he describes himself as a leader there. That makes it more than ironic for him to criticize a listserve where people struggle to have meaningful conversations about race.

This was one of the later tracks Richard H. Kirk released under the name Cabaret Voltaire. If you’re going to invoke that name as the lone remaining member, then it’s a good idea to make sure that your new music does the original back catalog some justice. Kirk delivered the goods. The Cabs at their best were adept at songs that were ready for the dance clubs but also captured the paranoia and darkness that so often have marked the last four decades. This track is clearly a product of 2020, but it gives a good solid nod to the past he and his former bandmates tried to characterize during their heyday:

Many of their songs incorporated samples from religious and political extremists, used lyrics with disturbing imagery, etc., to capture the dueling impulses toward fascism and destruction on the one hand, and progress on the other. In my day, we referred to the Cabs as an industrial music band. They tend to be lumped in with the broader category of postpunk these days. No matter. The music holds up over time.

Cheers!

When Rupert Murdoch created Fox News in 1996, it was Roger Ailes who came up with the tag line “Fair and Balanced.” His intent was not only to “own the libs,” but to make the claim that establishment news networks had a liberal bias, and Fox News was needed for balance.

The scheme worked. Establishment news began to bend over backwards to provide “balanced coverage” of liberals and conservatives. Here is how Mark Jacob, former editor at Chicago Tribune and Sun Times described it:

When I edited political stories, I went so far as to count the quotes from Republicans and Democrats, thinking an equal number would make us fairer. I didn’t think I was helping either party. I thought I was helping the readers. I was wrong. 3/9

— Pro-Democracy (@ProDemocracyRTs) September 27, 2021

He’s right. Not only was it lazy journalism, it served to mainstream Republican positions that became more and more extreme.

In 2017, Fox News dropped the slogan “Fair and Balanced,” presumably as a way to distance the network from Roger Ailes and his serial sexual harassment. But the news site RealClearPolitics has picked up the mantra. A fundraising piece written by President David DesRosiers is titled, “Bring RealClear Balance to America’s Media.” His main example of balance is a data base the site has created that purports to demonstrate an equivalence between the violence of protests following the murder of George Floyd and the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

While the claim is to simply provide the data, the lack of context is an attempt to make the George Floyd protests appear more violent than the January 6 insurrection. For example, they point to over 16,000 arrests during the former and only 570 in the latter. Here’s a bit of context on the George Floyd protests from the Washington Post.

The Post’s analysis found the overwhelming majority arrested in those 15 cities — 2,059 of the 2,652 — were accused of nonviolent misdemeanors, most on charges of violating curfew or emergency orders…

Nationwide, the large number of arrests in those first two weeks occurred because police policies and training were inadequate to deal with widespread demonstrations at such a tense moment in the nation’s history, experts said.

“When it comes to civil disorder, officers are trained to handle riots,” said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminal justice at Arizona State University, who has helped craft federal guidelines on community policing amid social unrest. “They’re not trained to handle peaceful demonstrations or even mostly peaceful protests. They often show up to crowd control events that are not yet riots and handle them as if they were riots.”

We also know that “Four people who identify with the far-right extremist “boogaloo” movement are among those facing the most serious federal charges.” None of that information made it into the so-called “balanced” database at RCP.

DesRossiers provided some other examples of the publication’s balance. There is the attempt to smear fact-checkers, a “1776 Series” designed as an assault on the NYT “1619 Project,” material on the theme of “trustworthy elections” as a cover for lies about voter fraud, and – of course – attacks on critical race theory. That is what RCP is referring to when they talk about balance.

But it gets even worse. In addition to the fact that one of RCP’s main investigative reporters previously worked for the right wing site WorldNetDaily (which they fail to mention in his bio), the Daily Beast reported this about the site’s parent company.

The company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned.

Called “Conservative Country,” the Facebook page was founded in 2014 and now boasts nearly 800,000 followers for its mix of Donald Trump hagiography and ultra-conservative memes. One recent post showed a man training two assault rifles at a closed door with the caption “Just sitting here waiting on Beto.” Others wink at right-wing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s “ties to Islam” or the Clintons having their enemies killed, or portray Muslim members of Congress as terrorist infiltrators. The page is effusive with praise for Vladimir Putin, and one post portrays Russia as the last bastion of freedom in Europe.

One of the main reasons people visit RCP is that they aggregate news stories daily. But for every piece from a major news outlet, they link to an opposing view from right wing media. Their favorite so-called “liberal” journalists are people like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté – whose main reason for being these days is to criticize Democrats. That is also what passes for balance at RCP.

RCP is one of the main reasons our news environment is so toxic. At least with sites like Brietbart and WorldNetDaily, everyone knows what they’re getting. RCP is deceitful. Under the guise of balance, they are promoting the same lies and disinformation we see from other right wing sites. But they are treated as legitimate. If you doubt that, take a look at where AllSides places RCP on their media bias chart.

RCP lands right in the middle, along with NPR, Reuters and the BBC.

It is unlikely that we will be able to stop the threat the Republican Party currently poses to our democracy as long as their extremism is mainstreamed.

Since he signed the anti-abortion bill, which provides no exception for rape or incest, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is being forced to answer a difficult question – even from Fox News host Chris Wallace.

CHRIS WALLACE: Is it reasonable to say to a rape victim who might not know they're pregnant until 6 weeks, 'don't worry about it, because we're going to eliminate rape'?

GREG ABBOTT: The goal is to protect the lives of every child with a heartbeat pic.twitter.com/o7rJ5G6JZF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 26, 2021

As Wallace suggests, the first time this question was posed to Abbott, he responded with the ridiculous notion that he would eliminate rape in the state of Texas. But notice how Abbott squirms in trying to avoid the question altogether. In the end, he admits that “the goal is to protect every child with a heartbeat.” So yes, he plans to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, even if it is the result of rape or incest.

J.D. Vance, Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, was even more direct.

When asked during a local interview whether abortion laws should include exceptions for rape and incest, Vance, a Republican, said he thinks “two wrong don’t make a right.”

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance told Spectrum News in Columbus on Wednesday.

“The question to me is really about the baby,” Vance added. “We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.”

The comment that drew the most attention was that rape and incest are “inconvenient.” That is nothing short of appalling.

This, however, is one of the inconvenient questions anti-choicers will be forced to answer as they continue to take steps to overturn Roe vs Wade. If, as they want us to believe, life begins at conception, abortion amounts to murder. When you accept that premise, Vance is right – two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because a fetus is the result of rape or incest doesn’t mean its life is less worthy, and a woman should be forced to carry it to term. That’s their argument – but one that is likely to be rejected by most people, which is why they’ll do almost anything to avoid saying so directly.

The other difficult question that will eventually emerge is that, if abortion is murder, then why wouldn’t both the mother and the provider be criminally charged? You might remember that this is the question that was posed to Trump during the 2016 Republican primary.

NEW Trump to @msnbc: "there has to be some form of punishment" for women who have abortions but he has yet to determine what that should be.

— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) March 30, 2016

Recognizing that statement was problematic – even in a Republican primary – Trump’s campaign tried to walk it back.

If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed – like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions.

Of course, we have no idea how a woman seeking an abortion becomes a victim. But it really is just an excuse to get around a policy that would shock most Americans. Punishing a woman for seeking an abortion is the logical response to a claim that abortion is murder.

The fact is that we are reaching an inflection point on the issue of a woman’s right to chose. As the anti-choicers get closer to completely overturning Roe vs Wade, we will either take steps towards the culture Margret Atwood described in “Handmaid’s Tale” where women are forced to carry every pregnancy to term or be faced with criminal charges, or we’ll reaffirm the sanctity of women’s bodies and their right to chose.

Following along with what’s happening in Congress, it’s easy to see how someone could have a panic attack. It’s like one of those dreams where you realize that all your schoolwork is due by the end of the week and then you have a bunch of exams, but you haven’t even gotten started. There’s too much at stake, and too much work to do in too little time.

I try to figure this stuff out for a living, and I’m just lost. Speaker Pelosi is now saying that she may delay the scheduled vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill (BIB) even though she made a commitment to centrist Democrats that the vote would be held on Monday. This doesn’t surprise me, nor does her reasoning she provided to ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos on Sunday: “I’m never bringing to the floor a bill that doesn’t have the votes.”

She doesn’t have the votes because progressives are demanding that the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill be ready to go before they’ll give the centrists their best leverage. There are some House Republicans who intend to vote for the BIB but not enough of them, apparently, that it will make up for progressive holdouts.

Pelosi could hold the vote anyway just to put everyone on the record, but she doesn’t operate like that. She still insists that the BIB will pass this week, but I suspect that’s more bluster than actual confidence.

As for the budget reconciliation bill, the House Rules Committee approved the $3.5 trillion number on Saturday, but Pelosi acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that the number will be lower:

Pelosi said it “seems self-evident” the price tag for that larger bill could drop in negotiations with concessions.

“We’ll see how the number comes down and what we need in that regard, but we have agreed on an array of pay-fors in the legislation,” Pelosi said. “This will be paid for.”

“Obviously with negotiations there will have to be some changes with that, the sooner the better so that we can build our consensus to go forward, and we will do that,” she also said.

It’s a bit late in the game to have so little clarity on how this will work out. And this isn’t the end of the Democrats’ problems. As the New York Times puts it:

Nobody said it would be easy, but the multiple tasks piling up for Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi present a particularly daunting set of challenges: A $1 trillion infrastructure bill awaits consideration in the House on Monday, a $3.5 trillion social policy and climate change measure is still being stitched together, and a possible government shutdown looms on Friday followed by a potential debt crisis next month.

That’s right. It’s all coming to a head at the same time. A government shutdown and national credit default need to be averted, and the Republicans are refusing to offer any help even though 10 Republican senators are needed to overcome a filibuster.

The only thing keeping me sane is the idea that the consequences of failure are so dire that Pelosi will eventually get the votes she needs. As for the Senate, it could be that the Democrats have to rip up the filibuster rules to prevent a credit default. That might be the only threat that could persuade all 50 of them to go along with such a power move.

For now, I’m not sleeping very well. This is a minefield.

In May of 2019, then Attorney General Bill Barr announced that he had tasked John Durham with investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. The former federal prosecutor from Connecticut has now been at it longer than the original investigation conducted by Mueller.

Three days before the term of the grand jury Durham impaneled was set to expire, the special prosecutor filed an indictment against Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie.

Sussmann is charged with lying to the FBI in September 2016 during a meeting with General Counsel Peter Baker. Sussmann had requested the meeting in order to warn the FBI that news stories were about to be published regarding connections between the Alfa Bank in Moscow and the Trump Organization. According to the indictment, Sussmann is not charged with lying about the allegations he made, but about who he was representing. Durham claims that Sussmann told Baker that he was “not doing this for any client” when, in fact, he was representing the Clinton campaign and a tech executive.

After two years and four months, that is the sum total of what Durham was able to come up with. Both Barbara McQuade and Benjamin Wittes have written excellent pieces detailing the weakness of Durham’s case against Sussmann. The only two people who know what transpired are the defendant and Baker. During congressional testimony in October 2018, Baker repeatedly stated that he didn’t recall whether Sussmann identified himself as representing the Clinton campaign. So if Baker is the only witness, he’s going to have a tough time during cross examination if this one ever goes to trial.

It’s also worth noting that Barr specifically assigned Durham with investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. Right wing media is now salivating at this indictment as proof that the whole thing was hatched by the Clinton campaign. Oh how quickly they’ve moved on from their accusations about the so-called “deep state.” In this scenario, the FBI isn’t the culprit, but the unwitting victim of a cabal working on behalf of Trump’s opponent.

What these folks want to ignore is the fact that Mueller didn’t even mention Alfa Bank in his report. Instead, he documented multiple instances of collusion between Trump and the Russian government – even though he wasn’t able to prove a criminal conspiracy. In addition, Mueller found at least 10 examples of obstruction of justice. As Benjamin Wittes wrote, “The extensive findings of the Mueller report depend not a whiff on Perkins Coie or Fusion GPS (read: the Steele dossier). Not even if Michael Sussmann lied to Jim Baker about his clients.”

When it comes to the accusations about Alpha Bank, I remember reading the first article published about that, which was written by Franklin Foer. Not being a techie, a lot of it went over my head. But in layman’s terms, what it boils down to is that a group of computer scientists disclosed, on the basis of DNS (Domain Name System) logs, that two internet servers belonging to Alfa Bank had looked up the address of the Trump Organization server 2,820 times between May and September 2016. The speculation was that this might have been a back-channel way for Russian operatives and the Trump campaign to communicate.

The accusations were serious enough that the FBI opened an investigation. From there things get a little confusing. Here is what the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in September 2020:

Based on the FBI’s assessment, the Committee did not find the DNS activity reflected the existence of covert communication between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization personnel. However, the Committee also could not positively determine an intent or purpose that would explain the unusual activity.

They also noted that the committee was not able to see the underlying records that the FBI used in its briefings to members.

In his report on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted that “The FBI investigated whether there were cyber links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links.” However, in March 2017, CNN reported this:

Federal investigators and computer scientists continue to examine whether there was a computer server connection between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, sources close to the investigation tell CNN.

Questions about the possible connection were widely dismissed four months ago. But the FBI’s investigation remains open, the sources said, and is in the hands of the FBI’s counterintelligence team – the same one looking into Russia’s suspected interference in the 2016 election.

One U.S. official said investigators find the server relationship “odd” and are not ignoring it. But the official said there is still more work for the FBI to do. Investigators have not yet determined whether a connection would be significant.

What stood out to me about that report is not only the timing – coming a month after Horowitz said that the investigation into the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank had concluded. It also references the FBI’s counterintelligence team. You might recall that on March 20, 2017, then FBI Director James Comey made this announcement during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee:

I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part out our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.

That counterintelligence investigation (Crossfire Hurricane) began on July 31, 2016 based on Trump campaign consultant George Papadopoulos’s assertions of Russians having damaging material on Hillary Clinton.

On May 9, 2017, Trump fired Comey. According to Rep. Adam Schiff, that is when intelligence briefings on this matter stopped and he was not able to determine if the counterintelligence investigation had been closed. Apparently it had, which is what Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times.

The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia…

[L]aw enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said that Rosenstein led him to believe that such a counterintelligence investigation would be handled by Mueller. But sources told Schmidt that “privately, Mr. Rosenstein instructed Mr. Mueller to conduct only a criminal investigation into whether anyone broke the law in connection with Russia’s 2016 election interference.”

So Rosenstein limited Mueller to a criminal investigation and led the FBI to believe that the special prosecutor would take over the counterintelligence investigation. In other words, the Trump administration effectively shut down any probe into the president’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia. That would also shut down any investigation into the Trump-Alfa Bank connection.

What we have is a former president who – at minimum – welcomed Russian interference in his election, obstructed justice, and shut down a counterintelligence investigation. In the end, we still don’t know what was up with the Trump-Alfa Bank servers.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Chincoteague, Virginia scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

This week brings further refinement to the green portions and the water. I have also repainted the sky. Almost done.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

This is just in from the New York Times:

PHOENIX — After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory, according to draft versions of the report.

In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.

After you get done laughing, catch your breath because there’s more. Trump has been telling everyone to tune in for the results.

On Thursday night, without acknowledging the findings of the draft reports that had been rippling across Arizona for half a day, the former president said in a statement, “Everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!”

I put absolutely no stock in Cyber Ninja’s “official” results. But apparently the best they could do is add 360 v0tes to Biden’s margin of victory. That’s not good election-rigging. That’s not what they were paid to do. Trump is going to lose his mind.

The leaked report will raise some issues on the margins, like a few folks who moved and voted at their old address. Frankly, most of those examples are probably Trump voters anyway, and unless they double-voted it doesn’t matter and happens all the time.

One expert and critic of the review who had seen a draft report of the findings called those red herrings.

“The whole report just reflects on the Ninjas’ lack of understanding of Arizona election law and election administration procedures,” said Benny White, a Republican in Tucson who is an adviser on election law and procedures.

The crazy won’t end here, of course, but this is still a big moment. Trump has convinced millions of people that the election was stolen from him, and that the investigation in Maricopa County would offer the first proof of this. What it “showed” instead is that the Republicans in control of the voting systems there actually undercounted Biden’s vote by a few hundred. That’s going to be a big disappointment to the believers, and while many of them will latch onto something else rather than face reality, there will be a good number who understand they’ve been sold a false sense of hope. It’s going to kill the momentum of Trump’s Big Lie.