Tag: #NewYorkTimes

#ProtectMueller! New AG Barr Confirmation Raises Specter of Saturday Night Massacre.

#ProtectMueller! New AG Barr Confirmation Raises Specter of Saturday Night Massacre

Here on the eve of the confirmation of the new Attorney General pick, William Barr, questions abound about the Russiagate investigation and the eventual fate of the special counsel Robert Mueller chosen to administrate it. Barr has been critical of Mueller’s investigation but has stated that he will not interfere. We’ll see. To put it mildly, serious reasons exist to doubt the sincerity of America’s abortive failure of a forty-fifth president when he says he will not fire Mueller, the man who has compiled the case that will likely destroy him. Barr seems like a rubber stamp brought in to do just that, the hatchetman of Russian assets. We hope he proves us wrong.

If Trump does fire Mueller, it will be highly reminiscent of another corrupt president who fired a special prosecutor, president Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox began the end of his presidency, and so conventional wisdom has held that Trump will not go there. Congressional Republicans have also said that the firing of the special counsel Mueller would be a crossing of the line for them, although it’s true we have no reason to believe them either. They have caved to Trump on everything and often in the most shameful imaginable ways. Devin Nunes, former chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee, was recently found to be deliberately covering up House findings in order to protect Trump.

When considered as part of the whole incident, it seems clear this could be destined to bring us into uncharted territory completely if Trump does go the Nixon route. It wouldn’t save him, and it would damn him further in the opinion of many, but he wouldn’t resign as Nixon did. His conduct during the lengthening and unnecessary #TrumpShutdown proves him once again to be utterly without scruples. It is certain he will use the country as hostages again in the process of getting the Russiagate spotlight off of him. Thus, we have no choice but to conclude that the conventional wisdom- which also did not predict the shutdown, or the fool’s errand that was the travel ban, or the Helsinki debacle, or any number of other horrible things- is probably wrong again.

Of course Trump would fire Mueller. ‘Don’t expect Trump to go quietly’, read a Washington Post article published on January 14th. He’s got the whole country held hostage at this moment, he unrepentantly lies about anything that happens to cross his mind, and he thinks he’s “winning”, whatever that even means in the context of a ruined economy and a devastated government. I guess it means getting Employee of the Month from Vladimir Putin. Firing Mueller would fit right in as the stupidest and worst for America thing he could possibly do. It’s a glaring absence in his resume as it is.

Slava.

In related news, Trump, who was in the news over the weekend for having sworn his interpreters in his three closed-door meetings with Putin to secrecy, has taken an increasingly aggressive and door-closed stance toward Mueller’s requests for an in-person interview. Gone are the days when he boasts of having done nothing and means his crimes. The Trump of yesterday always said of Mueller that “No one wants to speak more than me“. That line is yesterday’s news, although references to the “Fake News Media” that has plagued him like the Furies remain plentiful. As usual, Trump blames himself for nothing, and provides an object- and abject- example to American children of what a spoiled brat at its worst can do.

News that the special counsel has already drafted a report- a report that draws the most damning possible conclusions- joined the confiscation of notes taken during his closed-door meetings with Putin as the two top stories in the news this weekend. Trump‘s behavior toward the Russian president was the focus of Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein on Sunday, when he appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources. While there, Bernstein- whose investigative journalism helped to take down Nixon- said the special counsel investigating Trump will find he “helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the [2016] election.” Any Facebook activist can tell you this. We’ve seen it develop from the day they prepared the Wikileaks dumps.

He is joined in this dramatically terrible conclusion by many of the counterintelligence specialists in the country, including FBI investigators assigned to the case directly. The Bureau has now let the public know that they’ve been monitoring his conduct viz. Vladimir Putin all along. God bless the good old American Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has now come through for this country through two attempted fascist takeovers.

We would also like to give a farewell salute to the former and departing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who did not have to pick someone who would look into this as hard as Mueller would, and acted with integrity throughout in spite of Republican reviles. His decency and professionalism will be missed.

In the last analysis, from the standpoint of this illegitimate infantile president, sitting back and letting this atomic report fall on him would most likely be better than trying to resist the inevitable by trying to bring this to an end. Cracks in Trump’s base are said to be forming at last, and as these people realize what they’ve been buying into, more and more of them will be looking for a new home, and a sane alternative. Our capacity to find this for them will prove to be a critical part of success for us as we move forward. Russia has been the chiefest enemy of America for nearly a hundred years now, and most Americans still know that. Reminding them is the way to go moving forward.

Enemy of the People- Trump’s Attacks On Media Border The Deranged.

Our illegitimate president behaving like a thug.

When demagogues incite their followers to violence, they are to blame. Perhaps they are not solely responsible, but they play a key role, a bigger role than any other person. That is what Donald Trump either doesn’t understand- or understands all too well.

Controversy has emerged in recent days over a story carried by CNN in July that was co-written by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. In it, the story gets broken that Michael Cohen knew that Trump knew in advance about the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between members of his campaign team and Russian individuals.

Cohen’s lawyer later said he misspoke, but CNN stands behind the story. Two of its employees told Business Insider senior politics reporter Allan Smith the network’s level of commitment to its story is “100%.”

On Wednesday, Trump called Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, who co-wrote the piece, “sloppy” and a “degenerate fool” in response. Bernstein retorted on Twitter that he has spent his “life as a journalist bringing the truth to light, through administrations of both parties.”

That may be true, but it sure isn’t what Trump wants to hear. And it isn’t what he wants people to do. That’s why he’s always going on vile rampages and outbursts against the American press, people whose jobs are getting more dangerous by the day.

Earlier this year five journalists were massacred at the Annapolis Capital Gazette, and for a few days in the aftermath, Trump toned down his slanders and slurs. He invited New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger to the White House, and for a second it had started to look like things would be okay.

But the next day he reverted to his Stalinist slogan, “Enemy of the People“, to incite his followers to future mayhem.

Not long after, Trump held a “campaign” rally in Tampa. At it, a frenzied mob went berserk with reviles and rage toward CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.

The scene left most of us who write about politics deeply shaken, including Acosta.

“It felt like we weren’t in America anymore,” Acosta said.

Earlier this week, a man named Robert D. Chain was arrested for allegedly threatening to murder journalists at the Boston Globe.  He was said to have been mimicking Trump’s language.

“You’re the enemy of the people, and we’re going to kill every f***ing one of you.”

Anytime in the past that we’ve had this sort of thing, we’ve always come together to insist that we won’t have it. Whoever our leader has happened to be at the time has always done what they could to help things calm down. They certainly haven’t made it their policy to make things worse by inciting it.

The fact that Trump is doing just the opposite is yet another warning, a huge flashing neon sign, that things have gone wrong and we are now all in a really bad situation.

Earlier this year, we were dismayed to learn the U.S. has dropped to spot 45 in this year’s ranking of countries based on press freedom, conducted by the non-government association(NGO) Reporters Without Borders.

Their survey ranked 180 countries based on factors such as pluralism, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of their news.

Unsurprisingly, the report specifically calls out Trump as the reason for the United States’ reduced standing.

“A media-bashing enthusiast, Trump has referred to reporters as ‘enemies of the people,’ the term once used by Josef Stalin,” the report says.

Trump has done more than anyone to appropriate and misuse the term “fake news” in retaliation for critical reporting, even though his campaign was the source of most of the garbage that brought the term into common use.

He also got us bad marks for revoking the broadcasting licenses of media outlets who are critical of him and his lousy policies.

Last year Trump released a doctored pro wrestling video of his halcyon days hanging out at the Madison Square Garden, clotheslining an opponent who has the CNN logo slapped over his head. It was pretty ridiculous to think that such a man is now our president, but that is nevertheless how it went.

The first time it was merely silly, but nobody is laughing now.

This morning, on the topic, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote that whether rhetorical excesses can be blamed for violence or the threat of it is a complicated topic, with no easy answers.

I’m not sure I agree. The complexity lies only in degree; it seems pretty clear that people can whip each other up into violence if they’ve got a stage and a microphone.

You don’t have to be Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, either; there’s no wizardry of dialect needed. Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst told his fans to “get angry” at Woodstock ’99, and they did, and people rioted, and a girl got gang-raped in the middle of the mosh pit.

Is Fred Durst a man who is blessed with the same rhetorical gifts as Cicero or Demosthenes? Doubtful, but he does at least seem to be better than Trump. Was he solely at fault? No. But he certainly helped to kick things off.

Likewise, our nation’s 45th president will have helped to kick off his own fanatical followers, if any of them decide again to actually do what he’s been nudging them to do, and treat members of the press as though they really were Enemies of the People.

Here at Millennial Democrats, we want to emphasize how important a free press is, how important it is to adhere to journalistic standards. Without one we’re back in the Dark Ages. The media is the friend of the people, because they bring the people its information. It’s good to promote this point of view, going forward.

Trump Gets Rough Treatment from Pecker- How Deep Is He In?

Trump Is In Deep!

A week that started out with the news that White House counsel Don McGahn had cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, sitting down for more than 30 hours of interviews, did not improve for our nation’s 45th president, although he did manage to yet again make the cover of his beloved Time Magazine- most of him, anyway.

Image result for trump is in deep time magazine

By now everyone knows that in addition to the Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort bombshells, all kinds of different people have been turning on Trump as well.

News came out Friday that federal prosecutors in Manhattan struck a deal earlier this summer with Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. He too was granted immunity for his upcoming grand jury testimony regarding those hush payments.

Time Politics correspondent Philip Elliott spoke of hearing “fear” in the voices of Trump staffers. “They can’t even agree on what ocean they’re in,” he said.

Earlier this week, the big news was that David Pecker, the head of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, American Media Inc, was granted immunity in the federal investigation that is going on around Michael Cohen in exchange for providing information on hush money deals, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Pecker told prosecutors that Trump knew all about Cohen’s payments to the women who claimed to have had sex with Trump, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Pecker also provided investigators with details about payments Cohen made to the women, the sources said.
Prosecutors also granted immunity to A.M.I.’s chief content officer, Australian journalist Dylan Howard, so that he would describe Trump’s involvement in the matter.
All week long, it just kept rolling in. Friday night saw Trump World Tower doorman Dino Sajudin is claiming he’s got the scoop on an affair President Donald Trump had with an ex-housekeeper, one that resulted in a child born out of wedlock.
Legally speaking, he is now able to talk about a contract that he entered with AMI that had prohibited him from discussing the matter with anyone, according to his attorney.
That’s also what happened earlier this year, both with Stormy Daniels and Karen MacDougal, the latter of whom made it a point to claim she would never have sold her story to the National Enquirer in the first place, if she would have known they weren’t going to publish it. A “catch-and-kill” contract, they called it.
Earlier this year, a judge ruled that she, like Sajudin, could tell her story anyway.
Get ’em, Dino Sajudin and Karen MacDougal. I hope you take Pecker and jam him right up Donald’s assets.
Jerry George, who worked for the National Enquirer for 28 years, told CNN’s Erica Hill he thinks Pecker would turn on Trump to “save his own skin,” and that’s what they all seem to be doing. What a surprise.
Going forward, our usual task of raising awareness will not be very hard. All the world is aware that Donald Trump is a sinking ship, and we all know what sort of animals jump off them. This is a deeply corrupt and foolish man, a silly and arrogant man, one who really believed he could hide all this and still be the president. He’s getting what he deserves in Biblical proportions.  Good.
Presidents in generations to come will look to him as an abject model, and his name will become a spiteful slight to cast at other despots.
Obscene jokes and references abound, and the whole development has a bizarre air of perverted humor that somehow says a lot about the state of things today. If our president wasn’t a pervert, we wouldn’t be writing this now. But for Trump they’re not funny at all. Because David Pecker knows a lot that can hurt Donald Trump.

It took him all of two seconds to flip over, which has hit Trump where it hurts, penetrating deep into the core of the network of friends and allies he’s come to rely on over the years. For Pecker to come out with all he knows will be very messy for Trump.

He’s been buying up stories on Trump, only to suppress them, for many years now.

“They’ve got a safe full,” says Jerry George, a former senior editor at A.M.I.

We bet they do.

There is a clear moral to this story, and in it is a lesson to stand for all time. Corruption, in the end, is always its own reward. And the truth is always stronger than mere lies.

Bernie’s Weak on Gun Issues, Still Hijacks March For Our Lives.

Bernie's presence at this march was a bad joke and insult.

On Saturday, March 24, people from New York to Mumbai took to the streets under the banner titled “March For Our Lives” to protest for stricter gun laws.

The mass demonstrations were instigated by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, and they got big. In D.C. alone they were joined by an estimated 800,000 people.

These young people, who have experienced gun violence firsthand, want to ensure that no more innocent lives are going to be lost to gun violence, like the shooting experienced at the school on February 14. That’s the only way they can ever bring justice to their murdered friends.

They came to deliver a strong and eloquent message to the large crowd and they did. However, ten days prior, at the nationwide school walkout held on March 14, they were nearly overshadowed by an unexpected and uninvited guest.

Bernie Sanders showed up uninvited, to do some articulating of his own.

The manner in which he conducted himself is astonishing. It even appears that he brought his own cheering section, as the Parkland students specifically did not invite him because of his record on gun control. They are said to be very upset that he crashed their party.

An excellent description the way he conducted himself during the event was found on Twitter by one of our contributors, and we decided it was worth including whole.

Even aside from this revolting display, the casual observer might be tempted to scratch his head. Bernie Sanders? Doesn’t he have a really weak history on gun control legislation? Didn’t he vote against the Brady Act, to implement background checks and waiting periods for gun purchases?

BERNIE SANDERS: “Thank you to the young people throughout this country who are walking out today and who have the courage to do what the United States Congress is not doing: lead us forward to stop the slaughter that we have seen from coast to coast due to gun violence.”

Okay, fine, but- What are YOU doing to lead the stopped slaughter forward, Bernie?

There is a very specific word of caution to make in this article. Just because a cause is worthy doesn’t mean its leaders are good people. In fact, it is often just the opposite. The Parkland students are the cause of these protests and the ones that people came to hear. But they’re not the ones running the organization.

For years, Bernie Sanders has been showing up to take credit for things that aren’t his. This Millennial Democrats contributor remembers people talk endlessly about “Bernie’s dreams” and “Bernie’s ideals” during the 2016 election cycle.

But where is he when it matters? He goes down to Florida to grandstand in front of the kids, but in the past when he has had the chance to vote on a policy to stop something like this from happening again, he was nowhere to be seen.

One example that sticks with me is when the daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal who was killed during the Newtown massacre, asked Bernie to apologize to the victims for “putting the gun lobby above our families.”

Sanders dodged making any sort of apology at all, instead making a lame-duck excuse to the effect that he recognizes his constituents’ preferences, and so does not make gun control a priority.

If you want to know how Bernie feels about guns, look no further than his voting record on the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, a landmark piece of gun control legislation.

The Brady Act mandated that everyone who wanted to buy a handgun had to wait five days while local law enforcement ran criminal background checks; Sanders voted against it numerous times.

He also voted against an amendment that would have ended state waiting periods, while still voting for an amendment giving those denied a gun the right to know why.

The final compromise version of the Brady bill was an interim five-day waiting period while installing an instant background check system; Sanders voted against it.

Bernie took a lot of heat for this during the 2016 election cycle, and he equivocated at every turn, wriggling like a worm on a hook.

That’s just what he did again, last fall, when he hijacked the Women’s March. He knows full well that he has never done a thing for women’s rights, but that didn’t stop him from accepting a chance to be the keynote speaker at last year’s Women’s Convention.

When it was found out what they were pulling, women got so mad, so fast, that Bernie backed out as fast as his legs would carry him.

But he left his proxies behind. And they were quick to announce their intent.

Linda Sarsour, for example, tweeted out late in the primary season that “Bernie had changed her life” along with a picture of her framed with the Sanders family.

There are people in this country who make a living out of protesting everything, and a number of them have shown up to co-opt the efforts of the Parkland students to seek justice and change.

We’ve met them before, of course- they’re the very same people who did this to the Women’s March.

The “March for Our Lives” permit application for D.C. was actually filed by Deena Katz, the co-executive director of the Women’s March Los Angeles Foundation. The application identifies her as the “person in charge” of the event. She is also listed as the president of the “March for Our Lives Fund.”

In this capacity she works right alongside Sarsour, who has made a career out of viciousness and vulgarity.

These are some of the opinions espoused by Ms. Sarsour as collected by the New York Times.

“Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” she wrote in 2012.

From 2015- “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?”

The March for Our Lives and the Women’s March are too important to sit out just because a few of their organizers are corrupt.

As Democrats, i.e. persons with a conscience, we realize fully how important it is that we be there to stand in support of these crucial issues.

But it’s equally important that we do everything we can to raise awareness as to what is going on. Progressive causes are being co-opted and hijacked all over the country for the use of Bernie Sanders and his devotees, and it is hurting them. The people doing it need to be shut down.

It is the opinion of Millennial Democrats that we’ve got to Occupy those organizations before their current leaders can run the perceived legitimacy of their causes into the ground.

Democracy Aflame- Trump Almost Fires Robert Mueller.

Stick up for Robert Mueller

The New York Times reported Thursday evening that President Donald Trump ordered the firing of Robert Mueller last June. Mueller is the Special Prosecutor assigned to investigate Russian interference in our 2016 election cycle. He is also the best hope we have of getting out of this mess in one piece.

In June, Chris Ruddy, a close Trump friend and Mar-a-Lago member, said after a visit to the White House that he’d overheard a discussion about the president considering firing Mueller.

Ultimately he decided not to go through with it, after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit instead of carrying out the order.

That seems like a pretty thin line of defence against something of the same type actually happening in the future.

This news is very big. It means that Trump drove us up to the brink of a constitutional crisis and took a good long think about driving us right over the edge.

The pretext he’d planned to use was that Mueller had once been a member of his golf club who quit over an argument over fees.

The kind of ridiculous insanity displayed by that line of reasoning has been the hallmark of Trump’s time in office. It’s that kind of thinking that’s got him going around poking at the North Koreans. He does not seem to grasp the idea of consequences. To Trump, regard for the law or the social contract is something for poor people and losers. But while he will not be around much longer to suffer for these decisions, the rest of us will.

In America, we have always had the time to stop and take a look at what we want our futures to look like, and how we want our lives to go. We choose a path, and we stick to it as well as we are able.

If things keep on as they have been, that is going to go away forever. To millennials, who must soon adapt to the post-Trump America, this is of the utmost concern.

This is the way that democracy dies. People stop caring about it. They cease to understand why it is valuable. And by the time they wake up to the fact, it is often too late.

Plato observed that political regimes follow a predictable evolutionary course, from oligarchy to democracy to tyranny.

Oligarchies give way to democracies when the would-be elite classes become decadent and develop interests apart from those they rule.

Democracies give way to tyrannies when mob passion overwhelms political wisdom and a populist autocrat seizes the masses.

The one constant is that the tyrant never starts out looking like a tyrant. On the contrary, in a democracy, the tyrant most commonly arises in the guise of the people’s champion. To this man, every trust is given. He’s the one man who can make everything whole again.

We all know who this reminds us of.

With Trump, we have a glimpse of what this sort of evolution looks like: A vulgar right-wing populism has emerged out of a maelstrom of anti-establishment hysteria from both sides of the political spectrum. Trump has been trying to play the part of a strongman fascist, right here in America. He views Mueller as a threat and wants him gone.

He began to argue for Mueller’s firing just days after his appointment to investigate the president’s 2016 campaign for collusion, the source said.

The revelation comes right as Mueller’s investigation appears to have intensified. Members of his staff in December finished an initial round of interviews with all of Trump’s senior White House staff.

In an impromptu press conference on Wednesday, Trump said that he himself may speak to Mueller’s team in the next “two to three weeks.”

Clearly, this is a terribly ominous sign.

Lawyers involved with Mueller’s investigation know that too.

“It’s one more brick in the wall,” said a Washington lawyer representing another senior Trump aide in the Russia probe.

Vast numbers of Americans have already made preparations to protest if Trump’s firing of Mueller becomes reality, a reaction similar to the public response after Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. On that infamous evening, Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox. It ultimately led to his impeachment, but not before doing much to complete the ideological cleaving of America.

A report by the National Constitution Center summed up how well the whole scheme worked out for Nixon.

“Within hours of executing this Saturday Night Massacre, a firestorm of public protest erupted that led to the appointment of a new special prosecutor, the subpoenaing of dozens of additional damning tapes, the drafting of impeachment resolutions … and the ultimate unravelling of the Nixon Presidency.”

After the Saturday Night Massacre, the percentage of Americans who believed that Nixon should resign jumped from 19% to 38%, and reached 57% within six months. These kinds of low numbers are also reminiscent of Trump; it would be interesting to see how many of us currently think Trump should resign.

There’s a very real chance that if Trump pulls this he will get away with it because people cannot possibly be more disgusted with him than they already are. His base would cheer him on.

We also can’t be lulled into believing that this Congress will have the same sort of stomach and decency as the one that prepared to oust Nixon. Democrats hold neither house. And these Republicans have acted without conscience at every vote. There is not a sound reason to trust them.

Going forward, we will need to keep the closest possible eye on this and sound the alarm every way we can. Trump will do this if he thinks it will save him.

And besides. Nothing screams out the necessity for a blood-feud like golfing fees.

Back then, Chris Ruddy said during an interview with Politico that “It(the firing of Mueller) could trigger something well beyond anything they ever imagined.” 

It is to be hoped that those words are never put to the test.