GOP Operative James Comey

Donald Trump was a fine choice as Time Magazine's Man of the Year. Charlier Pierce remarked "the fact remains that the president-elect is the only obvious choice for the award. There simply was no figure more important in shaping the news and the nation than he was."

He was, ultimately, a legitimate choice because- against great odds- he was elected President of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth.  He was inarguably the most "obvious" choice. But whether he was the best, rather than the most obvious, choice is arguable.  

Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and Clinton pollster Joel Benenson discussed the election in a podcast last week. The Daily Beast's Gideon Resnick writes

In the final week after FBI director James Comey released a vague letter saying that the agency was examining new emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, Benenson said that Clinton’s  defectors just didn’t come back.

“Ours were coming back after the third debate,” Benenson said of the Clinton defectors. “We had actually solidified our lead for a period of days after that debate. Comey happens on that Friday, eleven days out, and that’s when we see—our defectors leave, their defectors get loyal and that keeps moving and probably in the end tips the balance.”

Fabrizio completely agreed with him and said if one didn’t understand the polling fluctuations, “you’d think the bottom fell out.”

The groups Fabrizio was tracking, specifically “Trump targets”—a cohort which they consistently tried to sway from supporting Johnson and/or Clinton—drastically decreased in the final week after the Comey letter. They all essentially came home.

But Fabrizio said they “held their breath” because just days later Comey cleared Clinton once again. Benenson said that second announcement did not help them either “because it just put it back into the conversation again.”

There was no accident.  Law professor David Cole has described, FBI Director Jim Comey disregarded a rule which

requires law enforcement officials to avoid public comment on ongoing investigations. The Justice Department’s guidelines on “Disclosure of Information Concerning Ongoing Investigations,” set forth in the US Attorneys’ Manual, provide that, as a general matter, officials “shall not respond to questions about the existence of an ongoing investigation or comment on its nature or progress.” 

The rule recognizes that on “matters that have already received substantial publicity” or where public safety requires, “comments about or confirmation of an ongoing investigation may need to be made.” But that exception is plainly a narrow one. The general no-comment rule is designed to prevent prosecutors and law enforcement officials from using their authority to cast aspersions on the reputations of citizens; their job is to conduct investigations, not offer public character assessments.

When in July the FBI director gave "his highly unusual press conference"

rather than simply reporting that he had closed the e-mail investigation because he had found no evidence of Clinton violating any laws, he went on to castigate her as “extremely careless.” The federal criminal code is byzantine, to be sure, but carelessness is not a federal crime, and therefore, as FBI director, Comey had no business offering his personal opinion. 

"Having violated the rule against public comment once," Cole continued,

Comey then went further, using that violation to justify another infraction. In an e-mail to his staff, he defended his extraordinary step of publically announcing the resumption of a closed criminal investigation by stating that he had promised to keep Congress informed when he testified in July about the investigation’s closure.

The job of the FBI, however, is not to offer Congress public progress reports on criminal investigations, but to conduct those investigations in confidence unless and until they warrant an indictment or dismissal. And Comey’s October 28 “report,” a brief letter to Congress, was bound to be misleading. The announcement followed the discovery of e-mails of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, on the computer of Abedin’s now-estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, who is under a separate investigation for allegedly “sexting” with a minor. Neither Comey nor his staff had actually read any of the newly discovered e-mails when he first notified Congress, and therefore had no basis for believing that they constituted evidence of wrongdoing. But the announcement nonetheless set off a flurry of renewed accusations against Clinton.

Moreover, every four years for the last few decades, including 2016, the Justice Departmenent has issued a memorandum strongly discouraging returning an indictment against a candidate (at all levels) within 60 days of an election. Therefore, Cole reasons, "even if the FBI had acquired enough evidence to charge Hillary Clinton formally with knowingly transmitting classsifed information or otherwise violating criminal law, that fact should not have been made public until after the election." When Comey announced eleven days before the election that additional e-mails had been found- on the server of the spouse of a Clinton aide- he had no reason to believe the messages were pertinent, especially since the FBI at that time had not even obtained a warrant to examine them.

Even though Clinton was ahead in polling in the vast majority of swing states when Comey made his statement on October 28, we don't know for sure who would have won the election had Comey not intervened.  Pigs may fly, Arizona may be swept into the Pacific Ocean, and Trump may have prevailed in the presidential election.  But if Donald Trump is the Person of the Year, Jim Comey deserves honorable mention.

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Voting For A Man Of The People

Slate's Jamelle Bouie tweets "I am... troubled by the choice to use the brutal murder of a homeless man as a device for explaining Trump voters."

He is referring to a piece by one Evan Smith, who finds serious poverty, drug addiction, and hopelessness in the "small Appalachian hill town" of Zanesville, Ohio, in which there are more high school dropouts than high school graduates. The journalist is unsurprised that last month, police there found the charred remains of a 62-year-old man, who had died from blunt force trauma.

There is a prosperous north side of town and a poor south side of town, where

In just the past year, they’ve seen sword stabbings, shootings, deadly police stand-offs, dozens of heroin overdoses each month, too many petty robberies to count, house fires, and now a burned homeless man.

"Everything is falling apart," Smith observes and

Go down those streets and you won’t see a Trump sign,” said county engineer Doug Davis, who knows the bridges and roads of the area better than anyone else. “No, instead you’ll see ‘Hillary for Prison’ signs. You’ll see ‘Drain the Swamp’ signs.”

“It’s about more than just Trump, believe me,” Davis said.

Maintaining "so nothing is surprising," even to see "a man killed and burned over $20" and Smith argues

This is the simple reason why Zanesville voted for Obama in 2012 and then flipped for Trump in 2016: the people on the southside began to rise up. It wasn’t about bankers, lawyers and doctors. Instead, it was about the unemployed, the former-factory workers, the trailer-park dwellers, the looked-down-upon, the white and angry, the white and depressed, and the lost.

Call them racist, xenophobic, deplorable. Go ahead — they’ve heard it all before from their northside neighbors.

But now, for the first time in a long time, they’ve swung back.

They've swung back on behalf of a man who claims to be worth billions and owns a  fleet of five jets, one of which has a 24-karat gold fixture and a leather toilet seat. They clobbered the opponent of a fellow who owns four mansions (Mar-a-Lago, below), as well as a Manhattan penthouse valued at $100 million, and nearly 40 other buildings in the heartland city of New York.. And they swung back on behalf of a guy who brags that not paying any federal income taxes "makes me smart."

Notwithstanding Smith's implication, Zanesville's homeless man was not killed because Hillary Clinton supports the Affordable Care Act or that Donald Trump opposes abortion rights and gun safety legislation, or even because of e-mails or Clinton's representation of the Establishment. The connection of the murder and Trump's election is somewhat tenuous.

Rather, as Bouie notes, the article gives the impression that Zanesville's voters are "justified in directing their anger toward people as or more marginalized."  But it's worse if Smith is correct when he suggests voters on the southside went for Trump because they  were "rejecting the elites on the other side of town — your neighbors who don’t see you as equals — coupled with the impossibility of crossing over to the green grass on the other side."  If widespread, such a perception of "elitism" is a disturbing sign, for Zanesville, for the American voter, and for the nation..












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Obvious Strategy

Two weeks ago, The Nation's Ari Berman- who has been on top of GOP voter suppression like no one's business- wrote (in reverse order)

North Carolina is a case study for how Republicans have institutionalized voter suppression at every level of government and made it the new normal within the GOP. The same thing could soon happen in Washington when Trump takes power....

His conspiracy theories about rigged elections during the presidential race were meant to delegitimize the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s election. But now that he’s won the election we have to take his words far more seriously. He will appoint the next attorney general, at least one Supreme Court justice and thousands of positions in the federal government. His lies about the prevalence of voter fraud are a prelude to the massive voter suppression Trump and his allies in the GOP are about to unleash.

The battle has been joined- on Trump's side, unfortunately. Yesterday we learned from Politico that (President-in-waiting)

Paul Ryan says he doesn’t know if millions of Americans voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, and he refused to repudiate Donald Trump’s groundless claims of a vast voter-fraud conspiracy.

In an interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” the speaker was asked about Trump's tweet that said he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

In a nod to the GOP claims of "I am not a scientist" when asked about climate change, Ryan added "I don't know. I'm not really focused on these things."

Admittedly, his focus is on making health care a whole lot harder for elderly people and poor people to find.. Still, Ryan is intimately interested in voter suppression, without which few Republicans (including Trump) would get elected at the national level, which would leave Ryan's plans in the dust. Last week (prior to Ryan's claims of ignorance and unconcern), Brian Schaffner gave a detailed, thorough takedown of Trump's remarks alleging voter fraud.  The President-elect

and his staff are pointing to a study by Jesse Richman and his co-authors that was published in the journal Electoral Studies and advertised on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog. As a member of the team that produces the datasets upon which that study was based and as the co-author of an article published in the same journal that provides a clear “take down” of the study in question, I can say unequivocally that this research is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections.

That won't stop the Administration and its allies, including virtually all Republicans, and most significantly the Speaker of the House. "Today," Ari Berman tweeted in what is a safe bet, "Ryan, Preibus & Pence refused to condemn Trump lie that millions voted illegally. Tells you massive voter suppression is coming."











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Believing What We Want To Believe

Commence laughter. Right Wing Watch has found

On his most recent “Prophetic Perspectives on Current Events” program, televangelist Rick Joyner declared that President-elect Donald Trump is a “tough as nails” leader who is also deeply compassionate and religious …. not unlike the disciples whom Jesus chose....

Joyner insisted that Trump is also "one of the most honest people I've met" and that he possesses a "remarkable fear of the Lord."

When someone believes that Donald Trump is an honest man deeply influenced by the Holy Spirit, he'll believe anything. And so

Joyner said that he met with Trump once before the election and discussed Trump’s plans to address illegal immigration. During the discussion, Joyner claimed, he “saw the tears well up” in Trump’s eyes at the thought that his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants could split up families.

“He was about to bust out crying,” Joyner claimed. “He said, ‘We can’t do that, we can’t hurt the families, we’ve got to fix that.'”







Don't laugh too hard, though, for such naivete may deeply affect not only (willfully) ignorant televangelists, but also the media and global politicians. Representing the latter category we have Pakistan's Press Information Department issuing this statement:

Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif called President-elect USA Donald Trump and felicitated him on his victory. President Trump said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me any time even before 20th January that is before I assume my office.

On being invited to visit Pakistan by the Prime Minister, Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald Trump.

Laugh all you want at what seems to have been dictated by Trump himself but.... no, laugh all you want.  However, note that the Pakistani Prime Minister appears to have been impressed by Trump, who probably was "buttering Sharif up without giving much thought to the sensitivities involved in a very tense geopolitical conflict or how his words might be interpreted."

It may be unsurprising that the likes of Muhammad Nawaz Sharif and Rick Joyner can be so easily fooled. So, too, however, The New York Times, whose reporters and editors two weeks after the election interviewed the President-elect. Trump said he had an "open mind" about climate change, then stated "I know we have, they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists. Where was that, in Geneva or wherever five years ago? Terrible."

Asked whether "human activity is or isn't connected," Trump replied "It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies. You have to understand, our companies are noncompetitive right now."  "A lot of smart people disagree with you" about climate change," he told Tom Friedman. "We've always had storms," he assured Arthur Sulzberger, to whom he maintained "You know the hottest day ever was in 1890-something, 98."

Then the Times wrote its story and in the first paragraph argued Trump was "pledging to have an open mind about climate change." No. really.

During the primary and presidential campaigns, Donald Trump craved adulation as he spoke to huge, adoring crowds. However, he craves acceptance also, and will structure his remarks to accomodate the preferences of whomever he's talking to. In the age of social media, we were assured, politicians and others could not say anything without considering its impact upon a larger audience. Trump has shattered that notion.

The President-elect effortlessly soothes his immediate audience, contradicting himself promptly and often,allowing reasonable people to hold out hope that he is moderating. A United States President, we need to believe, could not possibly be as bellicose, bigoted, and ill-informed as Donald Trump appears  to be. But he can.

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Oil Man

On Saturday, Bernie Sanders tweeted "The United States has a decision to make: do we continue the exploitation of Native Americans or do we treat them with dignity and respect?"

I think the decision has been made.  PBS reports

President-elect Donald Trump supports completion of the disputed Dakota Access oil pipeline in the Midwest, based on policy and not the billionaire businessman’s investments in a partnership building the $3.8 billion pipeline, according to an aide’s memo.

Spokesman Bryan Lanza said in a memo this week to supporters that Trump’s backing for the pipeline near a North Dakota Indian reservation “has nothing to do with his personal investments and everything to do with promoting policies that benefit all Americans.”

It's possible, given Trump's fondness for fossil fuels and the corporations making a killing off them. Still

Trump’s most recent federal disclosure forms, filed in May, show he owned a small amount of stock in Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline builder, and at least $100,000 in Phillips 66, an energy company that owns one-quarter of the pipeline.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in response to an AP story last week that it is her understanding Trump recently sold his Energy Transfer stock, but she provided no details. Neither Hicks nor other Trump aides have responded to repeated requests for information since then.

Given the cabinet nominations of Steve Mnuchin, Elaine Caho, Tom Price, Wilbur Ross, Betsy DeVos, Mike Pompeo, Jeff Sessions, and even Nikki Haley, Trump's preference for further enriching and empowering fossil fuel companies may be as much an ideological preference as looking out for #1.   Support for the Dakota Access oil pipeline dovetails nicely with both priorities.

With America's Populist, Donald Trump, to take office on January 20, 2017, the dignity and respect Bernie Sanders is looking for will be in short supply, other than for defense contractors, Wall Street firms, fossil fuel companies, and the like.  Activist and author of "The Militarization of Indian Country" Winona LaDuke goes into some detail about pipeline company Enbridge, then concludes

So I'm asking American labor to stand with us and to say "we want peipelines, we want infrastructure that goes for people, that goes for communities and not for companies that are going to destroy our environment and cause more climate change to our planet."











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Hustler With An Angle

It seems as if everyone inside the Beltway, and pundits and politicians beyond, are all atwitter over news that, as reported by The New York Times

President-elect Donald Trump spoke by telephone with Taiwan’s president on Friday, a striking break with nearly four decades of diplomatic practice that could precipitate a major rift with China even before Trump takes office.

Trump’s office said he spoke with the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, “who offered her congratulations.” He is believed to be the first president or president-elect who has spoken to a Taiwanese leader since at least 1979, when the United States severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan as part of its recognition of the People’s Republic of China.

Tweeting "The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you," a clever Donald Trump uncharacteristically avoided an outright lie. However, the Taipei Times maintained the call was "arranged by his Taiwan-friendly campaign staff after his aides briefed him on issues regarding Taiwan and the situation in the Taiwan Strait."

Count me as someone unconcerned about any damage this dust-up may do to U.S.A.-mainland China relations.  Everyone played his/her role. The Taiwanese government said its " its president also told Trump that in the future she hopes that on the question of international relations, the U.S. side can continue to help Taiwan have more chances to participate and make contributions."  Beijing labeled the move "petty" but said it would not intefere with acceptance of the "one China" policy and avoided criticizing the President-elect.

Neither the direct benefit or drawbacks from the call will probably be global-changing. However, we read two days earlier

Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan confirmed rumors that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump was considering building luxury hotels and resorts in Taiwan’s Taoyuan City, according to media reports Wednesday.

A woman working for the Trump Organization came to Taoyuan in September, declaring the company’s investment interest in Taiwan’s Taoyuan Aerotropolis, a large urban planning development project surrounding the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.   

However, given the megaproject plan is still under review, the meeting was merely a form of gesture, the mayor said, according to media reports. 

Don't look now, but a family member likely to receive security clearance will be doing some of the gesturing:

Reports also said the meeting suggested that Eric Trump, the son of the President-elect, will come to Taiwan personally to see about the potential business opportunity by the end of the year.

"Trump's call to Taiwan," David Frum tweets, "is exactly like Obama's to Iran, "if Obama had simultaneously lobbied the ayatollah to lease him a huge pistachio farm."

Less than two weeks after the election, Donald Trump and daughter Ivanka spoke by telephone to the President of Argentina. One day later, approval was announced by an Argentinian developer for the 35 floor, $100 million "Trump Offices Buenos Aires" to be owned by America's Populist.


 




In Argentina, in Formosa, and in many countries to come, the selling off of America proceeds, even before the transition has ended. Follow the money.

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Ryan & Trump

Nolan D. McCaskill of Poliitico reports a case not of the blind leading the blind, but of the biggest fake ever leading the most significant demagougue ever:

In an excerpt of a “60 Minutes” interview to air Sunday, Ryan was asked whether he has conveyed to Trump that being president is not the same as being the CEO of the country and that Congress will have a role in his administration.

“Oh, we’ve talked about that extensively,” Ryan said. “We’ve talked about the Constitution, Article 1 on the Constitution, the separation of powers. He feels very strongly, actually, that under President Obama’s watch, he stripped a lot of power away from the Constitution, away from the legislative branch of government, and we wanna reset the balance of power so that people and the Constitution are rightfully restored.”

President Obama "stripped a lot of power away from the legislative branch of government?"   President Bush 43 issued 291 Executive Orders- Obama thus far, 235. At this rate, by the end of Obama's second term, he will have issued in eight years no more  than his predecessor did.

Little would have been accomplished by Washington without those Executive Orders, given that, as Michael Grunwald found, during the 2008-2009 transition, Joe Biden

was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ ” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was, ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden said."  

Soon thereafter, on the night of Obama's inauguration, 15-20 Republicans (including seven U.S, Representatives and seven U.S. Senators) met at The Caucus Room, an upscale restaurant in Washington, D.C.. Robert Draper explained that they decided they would

Go after (Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy) Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it—please?’)

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

One of those Representatives was Paul Ryan, who should know better than to whine about an imaginary abuse of power on the part of President Obama.

While he "talked about" the Constititution with Donald Trump, the august Speaker of the House- were he to develop a backbone- might talk about Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8, which inconveniently reads (chart below from this Twitter account)

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.

CNN notes

In his most recent financial disclosures, Trump listed 144 individual companies that have had dealings in at least 25 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, South America and North America, among other companies with regional international interests, according to a CNN review.


The interests range from management deals with golf courses in the UAE, branding agreements with real estate projects that bear Trump's name in India as well as companies that have been involved with beverage sales in Israel.





The leader of the Free World will get plenty of gifts out of those 25 countries, which will want something in return. President Trump will compromise the United States of America or will retaliate. It won't be pretty.

"Prior to the election," the President-elect tweeted on November 21, "it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal." Well, the media and the United States Constitution. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (and the rest of the thoroughly cowed GOP congressional delegation), not at all.

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