You know, there are a lot of things

Jul 14th, 2017 10:33 am | By

On the plane over to Paris Trump talked to the reporters. They thought it was off the record until the White House asked why they hadn’t reported it. The Times shares the White House transcript along with some bits the White House left out.

Q When were you last in Paris? When were you last in France?

THE PRESIDENT: So I was asked to go by the President, who I get along with very well, despite a lot of fake news. You know, I actually have a very good relationship with all of the people at the G20. And he called me, he said, would you come, it’s Bastille Day — 100 years since World War I. And I said, that’s big deal, 100 years since World War I. SO we’re going to go, I think we’re going to have a great time, and we’re going to do something good. And he’s doing a good job. He’s doing a good job as President.

I wonder if he thinks “Bastille Day” is French for 100 years since World War I.

How about that China place, huh?

A big thing we have with China was, if they could help us with North Korea, that would be great. They have pressures that are tough pressures, and I understand. And you know, don’t forget, China, over the many years, has been at war with Korea — you know, wars with Korea. It’s not like, oh, gee, you just do whatever we say. They’ve had numerous wars with Korea.

They have an 8,000 year culture. So when they see 1776 — to them, that’s like a modern building. The White House was started — was essentially built in 1799. To us, that’s really old. To them, that’s like a super modern building, right? So, you know, they’ve had tremendous conflict over many, many centuries with Korea. So it’s not just like, you do this. But we’re going to find out what happens.

Apparently Trump has only just learned that some countries in the world are more than 200 years old.

Well, yeah, when I say reciprocal — you make reciprocal deals, you’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. But before I did that, I wanted to give it a good shot. Let’s see. And they helped us. I have a very good relationship with him. I think he’s a tremendous guy. But don’t forget. He’s for China. I’m for the U.S. So that’s always going to be.

So he could be a tremendous guy, but he’s going to do what’s good for China. And he doesn’t want 50 million people pouring across his border. You know, there are a lot of things. I understand the other side. You always have to understand the other side.

He’s doing an awesome job of understanding the other side, by belatedly grasping the fact that other heads of state don’t put America First. It’s awkward that he thinks no one else knew that either, but whatever.

They ask if he was joking about a solar wall.

No, not joking, no. There is a chance that we can do a solar wall. We have major companies looking at that. Look, there’s no better place for solar than the Mexico border — the southern border. And there is a very good chance we can do a solar wall, which would actually look good. But there is a very good chance we could do a solar wall.

One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.

Ohhh, that’s what they think “transparency” means. Well no wonder then.

Q Are you mad that Putin lied about the meeting that you had with him, especially about —

THE PRESIDENT: What meeting?

Q At the G20, when he said that you didn’t — you know, you accepted that the hacking wasn’t real.

THE PRESIDENT: He didn’t say that. No. He said, I think he accepted it, but you’d have to ask him. That’s a big difference. So I said, very simply — and the first 45 minutes, don’t forget, most of the papers said I’d never bring it up. Had to be the first 20 to 25 minutes.

And I said to him, were you involved with the meddling in the election? He said, absolutely not. I was not involved. He was very strong on it. I then said to him again, in a totally different way, were you involved with the meddling. He said, I was not — absolutely not.

He said it in a totally different way. I long to know how it was different. Standing on his head, yodeling, rhyming couplets? I want to know.

I also wouldn’t mind knowing how he manages to think Putin’s denials are genuine while the Times, the Post, and CNN are all fake.

They wanted to know how it was different too.

Q Do you remember what the different way was that you asked —

THE PRESIDENT: Somebody said later to me, which was interesting. Said, let me tell you, if they were involved, you wouldn’t have found out about it. Okay, which is a very interesting point.

Q But did you say, okay, I believe you, let’s move on?

THE PRESIDENT: What I said, I asked him, were you involved? He said, very strongly — said to him a second time — totally different — were you involved? Because we can’t let that happen. And I mean whether it’s Russia or anybody else, we can’t let there be even a scintilla of doubt when it comes to an election. I mean, I’m very strong on that.

And I’m not saying it wasn’t Russia. What I’m saying is that we have to protect ourselves no matter who it is. You know, China is very good at this. I hate to say it, North Korea is very good at this. Look what they did to Sony Studios. They were the ones that did the whole deal to Sony. You know, we’re dealing with highly sophisticated people.

So, China is very good. You have many countries. And you have many individuals that are very good at this. But we can’t have — and I did say, we can’t have a scintilla of doubt as our elections and going forward.

Q Have you told him that?

THE PRESIDENT: I told him. I said, look, we can’t — we can’t have — now, he said absolutely not twice. What do you do? End up in a fistfight with somebody, okay?

He’d make one hell of a prosecutor.

Then he says he has a great relationship with everyone in the G20, which of course is nonsense.

Then he says yes he would invite Putin to the White House, because it would be stupid not to.

And, by the way, I only want to make great deals with Russia. Remember this, I have built up — we’re getting $57 billion more for the military. Hillary was going to cut the military. I’m a tremendous fracker, coal, natural gas, alternate energy, wind – everything, right? But I’m going to produce much much more energy than anyone else who was ever running for office. Ever. We’re going to have clean coal, and Hillary wasn’t. Hillary was going to stop fracking. She was going to stop coal totally. Hey, in West Virginia I beat her by 42 points. Remember, she went and sat with the miners and they said get the hell out of here. So, I was going to — if Hillary got in, your energy prices right now would be double. You’d be doing no fracking. You’d be doing practically no fossil fuels.

So Putin, everything I do is the exact opposite. I don’t believe — in fact, the one question that I didn’t ask him that I wish I did — but we had so many other things going, and really the ceasefire was a very complicated talk, it was a very important talk to me because I wanted to see if we could start a ceasefire.

Later he explains about the witch hunt.

What pressure? I didn’t — I did nothing. Hey, now it’s shown there’s no collusion, there’s no obstruction, there’s no nothing. Honestly, the whole thing, it is really a media witch hunt. It’s been a media witch hunt. And it’s bad for the country. You know, when you talk about Russia, if Russia actually did whatever they want to do, they got to be laughing, because look at what happens — how much time. . . .

They feel it’s a witch hunt, the people. There are a lot of people. And those people vote. They don’t stay home because it’s drizzling. We proved that. But every single party chairman said that my base is substantially stronger than it was in November. That’s a big compliment. That’s a big compliment. And I feel it.

And I think what’s happening is, as usual, the Democrats have played their card too hard on the Russia thing, because people aren’t believing it. It’s a witch hunt and they understand that. When they say “treason” — you know what treason is? That’s Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving the atomic bomb, okay? But what about all the congressmen, where I see the woman sitting there surrounded by — in Congress.

Happy Bastille Day.

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Sessions preaches

Jul 13th, 2017 5:44 pm | By

The Federalist posted a transcript of Sessions’s theocracy please speech. It’s the usual collection of uninteresting bromides.

And of course it was faith that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to march and strive to make this country stronger yet. His was a religious movement. The faith that truth would overcome. He said that we “must not seek to solve the problem” of segregation merely for political reasons, but “in the final analysis, we must get rid of segregation because it is sinful.” It undermined the promise, as he described it, that “each individual has certain basic rights that are neither derived from nor conferred by the state…they are gifts from the hands of the Almighty God.”

But of course Sessions himself resisted King’s movement, and still does to this day.

To an amazing degree, the value of religion is totally missed by many today. Our inside-the-beltway crowd has no idea how much good is being done in this country every day by our faith communities. They teach right behavior, they give purpose to life, and they support order, lawfulness, and personal discipline while comforting the sick, supporting families, and giving support to those in need. They are there at birth and death.

Says a man who works in the administration of Donald Trump, that paragon of right behavior, lawfulness, and giving support to those in need. In short he’s a massive hypocrite and a phony.

In all of this litigation and debate, this Department of Justice will never allow this secular government of ours to demand that sincere religious beliefs be abandoned. We will not require American citizens to give intellectual assent to doctrines that are contrary to their religious beliefs. And they must be allowed to exercise those beliefs as the First Amendment guarantees.

We will defend freedom of conscience resolutely. That is inalienable. That is our heritage.

So if that means preventing women from getting birth control by god that’s what it means – it’s inalienable – it’s their heritage.

The president has also directed me to issue guidance on how to apply federal religious liberty protections. The department is finalizing this guidance, and I will soon issue it.

The guidance will also help agencies follow the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Congress enacted RFRA so that, if the federal government imposes a burden on somebody’s religious practice, it had better have a compelling reason. That is a demanding standard, and it’s the law of the land. We will follow it just as faithfully as we follow every other federal law. If we’re going to ensure that religious liberty is adequately protected and our country remains free, then we must ensure that RFRA is followed.

RFRA is a crap law.

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Sessions wants more theocracy please

Jul 13th, 2017 5:18 pm | By

Jeff Sessions gave a speech at the conservative Christian law firm the Alliance Defending Freedom, in which he promised new guidelines on “religious freedom.” We know what that means when someone like Jeff Sessions says it.

When the speech at Alliance Defending Freedom’s Summit on Religious Liberty appeared on the Attorney General’s public schedule, it was cause for concern among LGBTQ advocacy groups and Democrats — many of whom issued statements questioning why Sessions would speak to what some call an anti-LGBTQ hate group due to its history of litigating against LGBTQ rights.

But after reading the transcript and learning of the Justice Department’s plans to create a new federal policy on protecting religious liberties and doubling down on enforcing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, advocates suggested Sessions was more interested in protecting the right to discriminate than the freedom of religion.

Or both. They may be inextricably tangled together. He may think that’s what freedom of religion means.

The Trump administration has promised several times to enact some form of increased religious liberty protections. During the campaign, Trump said he would sign the First Amendment Defense Act, a bill that would allow businesses to turn away LGBTQ people as well as unmarried couples and single mothers.

Before being confirmed as Attorney General, then-senator Sessions was a sponsor of the First Amendment Defense Act.

In May, President Trump signed an executive order on religious liberty that allows companies to reject the Affordable Care Act’s mandate on birth control coverage.

Thus violating the religious freedom of women who need birth control and think their health insurance should cover it.

Sessions has also faced criticism from LGBTQ rights advocates. In a January interview, the mother of slain gay college student Matthew Shepard told NBC News that Sessions fought against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Act when it was being debated in 2009. In a lengthy speech decrying the legislation designed to help victims, Sessions said that “gays and lesbians have not been denied access” to anything, and that hate crimes were “thought crimes.”

In his senate career, Sessions displayed strong anti-LGBTQ leanings. According to a report issued by the Human Rights Campaign, then-senator Sessions argued in favor of anti-sodomy laws used to imprison gay men, opposed same-sex marriage, sought to terminate National Endowment for the Arts funding because it once went to black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, opposed repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy keeping lesbian and gay service members in the closet, and tried to block federal funding for HIV-prevention programs if they appear to “promote sexual activity and behavior” among “homosexual men and women.”

Apparently only straight people get to have religious freedom.

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Tough guy

Jul 13th, 2017 4:59 pm | By

Oh, well, Marc Kasowitz should have no trouble getting a security clearance now. Pro Publica follows up its own article:

Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal attorney on the Russia case, threatened a stranger in a string of profanity-laden emails Wednesday night.

The man, a retired public relations professional in the western United States who asked not to be identified, read ProPublica’s story this week on Kasowitz and sent the lawyer an email with the subject line: “Resign Now.’’

Kasowitz replied with series of angry messages sent between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern time. One read: “I’m on you now.  You are fucking with me now Let’s see who you are Watch your back , bitch.”

Just what you want in someone seeking a security clearance – good judgement, maturity, a responsible attitude,  discipline, even temper.

The exchange began after the man saw our story featured last night on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. We reported that Kasowitz is not seeking a security clearance even though the Russia case involves a significant amount of classified material.

Experts said Kasowitz could have trouble getting a security clearance because of what multiple sources described as a recent history of alcohol abuse. Former employees also said Kasowitz had engaged in behavior that made them uncomfortable.

Since the story was published, his spokesman issued a statement disputing several parts of the story: “Marc Kasowitz has not struggled with alcoholism,” Sitrick wrote. “He has not come into the office intoxicated, attorneys have not had to go across the street to the restaurant during the workday to consult Kasowitz on work matters.”

The rigorous background investigation that goes into getting security clearance also considers “any information relevant to strength of character, honesty, discretion, sound judgment, [and] reliability.”

So, telling a stranger, “watch your back, bitch!” should be immensely helpful with that.

The exchange of emails Wednesday began at 9:28 p.m. Eastern when the man sent the following message to Kasowitz’s firm account.

Kasowitz responded with ‘F*ck you.” Then he stewed for fifteen minutes, and sent a more expansive message:

The man thank him politely, and Kasowitz sent two more ragers, the second being:

I call that a threat.

The man told us that the email exchange disturbed him so greatly he forwarded it to the FBI so there would be a written record in case Kasowitz followed through on the threat.

Experts in the laws on harassment and online threats differed on whether Kasowitz’s emails could put him in legal jeopardy.

When considering whether words constitute a true threat versus protected speech, “the threat has to be credible and the person has to intend to make the victim fear imminent physical harm,’’ said Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor and author of a book on online harassment.

But the victim can’t know what the sender intends, and sometimes when people make threats they carry them out. I don’t think enraged threats should be protected speech.

Kasowitz later told Pro Publica he was sorry.

Update, July 13, 2017: A spokesman for Marc Kasowitz sent ProPublica this statement:

“Mr. Kasowitz, who is tied up with client matters, said he intends to apologize to the writer of the email referenced in today’s ProPublica story. While no excuse, the email came at the end of a very long day that at 10 p.m. was not yet over.  ‘The person sending that email is entitled to his opinion and I should not have responded in that inappropriate manner,’ Mr. Kasowitz said.  ‘I intend to send him an email stating just that.  This is one of those times where one wishes he could reverse the clock, but of course I can’t.’”

He should see some of the mail we get.

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He don’t need no stinkin security clearance

Jul 13th, 2017 11:45 am | By

Pro Publica reports that Trump’s lawyer for the Russia inquiries, Marc Kasowitz, doesn’t have a security clearance and doesn’t plan to get one. The trouble with that is that the investigation involves masses of classified material, which Kasowitz can’t see without a security clearance.

Several lawyers who have represented presidents and senior government officials said they could not imagine handling a case so suffused with sensitive material without a clearance.

“No question in my mind — in order to represent President Trump in this matter you would have to get a very high level of clearance because of the allegations involving Russia,” said Robert Bennett, who served as President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer. Like many Washington lawyers, Bennett has held security clearances throughout his career.

As the spotlight on Russia intensifies with new email disclosures that his son, son-in-law, and then-campaign manager met in June 2016 with a Russian attorney who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Kasowitz’s lack of a security clearance could hinder the president’s legal and political response to the scandal.

And why isn’t he seeking a clearance? Well, because he might have a hard time getting one. He’s had recent problems with alcohol. The people at the Security Clearance Store don’t like that.

Experts on federal security reviews told ProPublica that recent episodes of alcohol abuse are a major barrier to receiving clearance, a process that involves government agents poring over a person’s past and interviewing family, friends and colleagues. Investigators typically raise flags about behaviors that might make someone vulnerable to blackmail or suggest poor judgment.

Trump doesn’t always pick the best people for the job, does he.

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A decision of courage and fortitude

Jul 13th, 2017 11:11 am | By

Scott Pruitt wants to stage a “debate” about climate change, on the grounds that nobody has discussed the things that in fact many many people have been discussing in great detail for decades. Exactly like Trump, Pruitt is stupid and uninformed enough to think that if he is unaware of X that means X doesn’t exist. That takes profound stupidity and ignorance. It’s a pity that someone that stupid and ignorant, as well as ideologically opposed to environmental protections, is head of the Environmental PROTECTION Agency.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is in the early stages of launching a debate about climate change that could air on television – challenging scientists to prove the widespread view that global warming is a serious threat, the head of the agency said.

The move comes as the administration of President Donald Trump seeks to roll back a slew of Obama-era regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, and begins a withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement – a global pact to stem planetary warming through emissions cuts.

“There are lots of questions that have not been asked and answered (about climate change),” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt told Reuters in an interview late on Monday.

No there aren’t. There are likely plenty of questions that haven’t been answered definitively, but that’s the nature of science and of inquiry in general. Definitive answers are often not possible, and definitive answers that never change are even more often not possible, because as conditions change they render existing answers incomplete or wrong. But of course Pruitt is just bullshitting; what he means is that there aren’t enough answers of the form “Everything is fine and we don’t need to change our practices at all.”

While acknowledging the planet is warming, Pruitt says he questions the gravity of the problem and the need for regulations that require companies to take costly measures to reduce their carbon footprint.

“It is a question about how much we contribute to it. How do we measure that with precision? And by the way, are we on an unsustainable path? And is it causing an existential threat?” he said in the interview.

And we’re meant to think that no one has asked those questions? Give me a break.

Since taking up his role at EPA, he has emerged as one of the more prolific Trump cabinet appointees, taking steps to undo more than two dozen regulations, and influencing Trump’s decision to pull the United States from the Paris climate change deal, agreed by nearly 200 countries in 2015.

Pruitt rejected global criticism of the United States for pulling out of the climate deal, which Trump has said would have cost America trillions of dollars without benefit.

“We have nothing to be apologetic about,” Pruitt said. “It was absolutely a decision of courage and fortitude and truly represented an America First strategy with respect to how we are leading on this issue.”

Here’s a news flash: you can’t “lead” by saying “Me First.” That’s a non-starter. If the US is going to be the land of “we do what’s good for us and fuck all the rest of you” then it’s not going to “lead” anything, because the fuckees are going to go their own way.

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Alone and in pain

Jul 13th, 2017 10:30 am | By

In western Nepal:

Alone and in pain, Tulasi Shahi encountered a poisonous snake.

The Nepali woman had been banished to her uncle’s cowshed as per the “chaupadi” tradition, a centuries-old practice common among Hindus in the western regions of Nepal, though it was outlawed in 2005. Some communities there consider women “impure” while they are menstruating. These women are prohibited from daily activities and left isolated in sheds with straw floors for the duration of their periods.

The snake bit her on the head and leg.

Her family members tried to treat her with home remedies before taking Tulasi Shahi to a clinic near Dailekh, which did not have antivenin. Recent monsoon rains have flooded the area, making a trek to a distant hospital difficult.

She died seven hours later, CNN reported.

“If she was given proper treatment, she would have survived,” said Shahi’s cousin Kamala Shahi, a government health worker, according to the New York Times. “She died because of superstition.”

Superstition that takes the form of finding women creepily disgusting.

Shahi, whose age has been reported as 19 by CNN and 18 by the Times, is the latest Nepali woman to die from events related to the chaupadi practice, which has been condemned by the United Nations and global health organisations as cruel treatment of women, often in unsanitary conditions.

Roshani Tiruwa, a 15-year-old girl, died in December from smoke inhalation after she lit a fire in the hut where she was banished while menstruating.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal had called for an end to chaupadi a month earlier, after the death of a 21-year-old woman.

Chaupadi has survived global outcry. A 2015 US State Department report on human rights in Nepal, citing a government survey from 2010, found that 50 per cent of women ages 15 to 49 in the midwestern and far-western regions of the country practice chaupadi. One in five women in the country as a whole reported the practice.

All because of the stuff that provides nutrition to a fetus if the woman gets pregnant.

The Times of India reported on a 2011 survey that found that barely 1 in 10 women in India used sanitary pads during their periods, while others used alternatives such as ashes and sand.

The survey found that nearly 1 in 4 Indian women dropped out of school after they began to menstruate.

H/t Rob

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Transfixed by displays of military power

Jul 13th, 2017 10:08 am | By

Trump is getting a little consolation for the difficulties of life as president. He gets to visit some soldiers and see some big guns.

Mr. Trump arrived in Paris just after 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, beginning his second European trip in two weeks. The visit was set in motion by a call Mr. Macron had made to discuss Syria, in which he invited Mr. Trump to Bastille Day celebrations on July 14. The president and the first lady, Melania Trump, landed at Paris Orly Airport on Air Force One to the reception of a 10-car motorcade.

Mr. Trump loves the trappings of the presidency, whether in the United States or in another country. That includes occupying the most prestigious seats at the Bastille Day ceremony, a pomp-filled parade steeped in military tradition and hardware.

Whee, whee, whee! Almost as much fun as getting to sit at the wheel of the big truck and blow the horn.

Mr. Trump, for his own inaugural parade, had expressed a desire to include tanks and fighter jets. That wish was not granted, but Mr. Trump remains transfixed by displays of military power.

Missile envy.

Image result for toad driving

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Liu Xiaobo

Jul 13th, 2017 9:00 am | By

Liu Xiaobo has died in prison.

The Chinese Communist Party was once a party of conviction, with martyrs prepared to die for their cause, but it’s had nearly 70 years in power to become an ossified and cynical establishment. It imprisons those who demand their constitutional rights, bans all mention of them at home, and uses its economic might abroad to exact silence from foreign governments. Under President Xi, China has pursued this repression with great vigour and success. Liu Xiaobo is a rare defeat.

Beijing’s problem began in 2010 when he won a Nobel Peace Prize. That immediately catapulted Liu Xiaobo into an international A-list of those imprisoned for their beliefs, alongside Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Carl von Ossietzky.

The last in that list may be unfamiliar to some, but to Beijing he’s a particularly uncomfortable parallel. Carl von Ossietzky was a German pacifist who won the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize while incarcerated in a concentration camp. Hitler would not allow a member of the laureate’s family to collect the award on his behalf.

Liu Xiaobo was in prison when he won the prize; he was there for “subversion.” The Chinese government wouldn’t let his wife pick up the award and instead put her under house arrest. There was an empty chair for him at the ceremony.

Strict censorship is another shared feature of both cases. Mention of Carl von Ossietzky’s 1935 Nobel peace prize was banned in Nazi Germany and the same is true of Liu Xiaobo’s award in China today. For a time China even banned the search term “empty chair”. So he has been an embarrassment to China internationally, but at home few Chinese are aware of him. Even as foreign doctors contradicted the Chinese hospital on his fitness to travel, and Hong Kong saw vigils demanding his release, blanket censorship in mainland China kept the public largely ignorant of the dying Nobel laureate in their midst.

…

Comparisons with the human rights record and propaganda efforts of Nazi Germany are particularly dismaying for Beijing after a period in which it feels it has successfully legitimised its one-party state on the world stage. At the G20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month, no world leader publicly challenged President Xi over Liu Xiaobo’s treatment. With China increasingly powerful abroad and punitive at home, there are few voices raised on behalf of its political dissidents.

Certainly the US government isn’t going to raise any voices on the subject.

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We let the cartels investigate themselves

Jul 12th, 2017 4:28 pm | By

A Fresh Air interview with a Pro Publica journalist that told me a whole lot of things I didn’t know, all of them bad.

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. In an era of mass incarceration, why was only one top banker convicted after the financial collapse of 2008? My guest Jesse Eisinger tries to answer that question in his new book.

It’s titled The Chickenshit Club, which Gross couldn’t say on the air because while we fail to prosecute bankers who ruin the lives of millions of people, we’re very strict about saying “shit” on the radio.

The source is, oddly enough, Jim Comey.

But it actually comes from a speech. Now, you may know and your listeners may know Jim Comey from being recently fired by Donald Trump as FBI director. Before that, back in 2002, he became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a role later held by Preet Bharara…

GROSS: Also fired by President Trump.

EISINGER: Also fired – the twofer there. And Comey comes in, and he’s replacing a legend in the office, Mary Jo White, who served as Obama’s SEC head. And he gathered all the hotshots from the Southern District. And the Southern District is the premier office of the Department of Justice. They are 94 offices around the country, U.S. attorneys from all over in every state. And the Department of Justice and – main justice is one of the prestigious units and then the prestige unit for corporate investigations and Wall Street and financial investigations is the Southern District.

And these guys really are the hottest shots, the best of the best of the best. And you know, if you have any doubts about them, you just have to ask them, and they will tell you how good they are. And they think of themselves as the best trial lawyers. And Comey gathers them all together and asks them, how many of you have never lost a case, never had an acquittal or a hung jury? And a bunch of hands shoot up. They’re very proud of their undefeated records. And he says, well, me and my buddies have a name for you guys. You guys are the chicken-[shit] club. And the hands go back down very fast.

And what was he trying to say there? Well, he was trying to say – and he goes on to explain that the prosecutor’s job – federal prosecutor’s job is not to win – like, win at all costs and preserve an undefeated record. What they’re doing is something more important. They are seeking justice. And to seek justice and ensure justice in this country, you have to take on ambitious cases. You have to raise your sights and look at the most significant wrongdoers in society and focus on them. And you can’t be afraid of losing and avoid those difficult cases if justice calls for taking on the powerful interests.

How’s that for depressing? If Comey’s right they were avoiding the important cases because they were more interested in never losing. Oy.

GROSS: You write about how the Enron case was a turning point in how the Justice Department prosecutes these kinds of financial crimes, corporate crimes. So the Enron case seems to have been very successful. I mean executives of Enron went to jail. The accounting company that handled Enron was found guilty of crimes as well. Arthur Andersen is the name of the company. It was one of the big five accounting companies. So sum up for us some of the prosecutorial successes in the Enron case without getting too deep into the details of the case itself.

EISINGER: Sure. Well, the Enron case is the high watermark. And what I argue is that, you know, there’s never been a golden age where the rich and powerful who did something wrong really had to fear for their safety and were guaranteed to go to prison, but there have been silver ages. And the last high watermark was in the post-Nasdaq bubble-bursting era where we – the government prosecuted a number of companies and the individuals at all these companies, including Adelphia and WorldCom and Global Crossing and Tyco and Enron. Enron was the marquee fraud of that era 15 years ago.

And what the government did was something very different from what it did in the financial crisis. They assigned a task force. They brought individual prosecutors from around the country and FBI agents and assigned them just to the task force to prosecute this company. And if you remember, Enron was very close to the Bush administration, and yet the – his Department of Justice, to its credit, prosecuted without fear or favor. And they worked for years.

They – so one thing they did was they dedicated the resources. Two, they were very patient. Three, they worked up the chain. So they flipped low-level individuals. And that’s the way you have to prosecute complex corporate crime. Treat it something like a mob investigation where you flip the soldiers to get to the capos to get to the capo di tutt’i capi. And here you have to work painstakingly by turning lower-level individuals so that you can put them on the stand and they can say, I did something wrong, and so did my boss, and he’s sitting right there. And that’s the way they prosecuted the top two executives, Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, successfully. They won at trial.

But now, he thinks, they’ve lost the will to do that kind of thing.

GROSS: And that backlash was also aimed at the victory the Justice Department won against the accounting company Arthur Andersen, which was Enron’s accounting company and was in on the fraud. So what were the convictions like…

EISINGER: Exactly.

GROSS: …At Arthur Andersen?

EISINGER: Yes. So this is – the undoing of the Department of Justice starts with the backlash against Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen was, as you say, Enron’s accounting firm and literally destroyed tons and tons of documents related to the Enron audit right before it was subpoenaed. But Enron had been subpoenaed. And the government was rightly outraged by this and started to investigate.

And Andersen’s activities were obvious. It looked very much like obstruction of justice. And they refuse to admit that they’d done anything wrong in the Enron case. And the government debated it and tried to settle with them and couldn’t because they demanded, quite rightly in my view, an admission of wrongdoing. And so the government felt like it had no choice but to bring Andersen, the firm, to trial. One executive pleaded guilty, and the government won.

But in the ensuing years, something remarkable happened – that it turned – the debate changed from a debate about accounting fraud and a recidivist and corrupt organization – which I think Arthur Andersen was – to a debate about the collateral consequences of indicting a large company.

In this case, many tens of thousands of workers were put out of work, which is clearly a tragedy and unfortunate. Unfortunately, my argument is sometimes companies need to go out of business if they are corrupt. But what happens is the Department of Justice learns the lesson that this was a bad prosecution, an overly aggressive prosecution, a cowboy prosecution. And they internalized the notion that they should never prosecute a large company again, which really ends up undermining their powers when it comes to corporate legal enforcement.

Esinger argues there’s been a shift to an unofficial de facto policy of  backing away from trying to indict a corporation.

EISINGER: And if you’re doing that, you only have settlement options. And what happens gradually is that settling becomes so attractive and so easy for prosecutors. They do over 400 of these kind of settlements called deferred prosecution agreements, DPAs, over the most recent decade compared to an insignificant number in the previous 10 years. And that becomes so attractive that they – two things happen. One is they don’t really want to indict companies. And two, they lose the focus on prosecuting individual executives. And they end up losing, I argue, the skill set to do it.

Gross asks for an example.

EISINGER: Well, prosecutors used to be able to say to companies, if you want to claim that you’re cooperating with our investigations, then you have to waive your privilege and let us see all the evidence of wrongdoing at the company. And today, after the…

GROSS: Waive the attorney-client privilege.

EISINGER: Waive attorney-client privilege, exactly. They said they sort of enveloped the – themselves and protected themselves with attorney-client privilege. And companies used to have to waive that if they wanted to say that they were cooperating with government investigations. And after a big lobbying effort from the white-collar bar and corporations that fought – was fought over years behind the scenes in Washington, now the Department of Justice prosecutors can’t do that anymore. And that really deprived them of a very useful tool.

GROSS: Give us an example of the kind of information the Justice Department could get when it required a company or a bank to waive its attorney-client privilege.

EISINGER: They could get the full interviews that the company was having with executives about whether – when they were investigating wrongdoing. Now the lawyers can give summaries of them, little notes here and there. And it turns out that they’re going to inevitably kind of elide key details that might be very useful. And it gets even worse than that. Sometimes they don’t even tell the prosecutors who the names are of the people who are involved in the potential wrongdoing. It’s all sorts of information that’s vital to really understanding what really happened in one of these investigations.

Gross asks, but isn’t attorney-client privilege kind of sacred?

EISINGER: Well, it’s not in the Constitution. It is a common law practice that has grown up over hundreds of years – predates the United States. It is very important. And it’s a protection that each individual should have, and even corporations should have it in some point. But the Department of Justice needs to be less dependent on companies’ own law firms for these investigations so that if they’re not going to get access to privilege material from the companies cooperating, then they have to decide, well, we’re not going to be dependent on companies’ cooperation to conduct these investigations; we have to do it some other way.

GROSS: So you’re referring to instances where the corporation has hired a law firm to investigate itself when the corporation says, wrongdoing happened here; we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And they hire a law firm, and the law firm investigates. Is that what you’re talking about?

EISINGER: Yes. The dirty secret of American corporate law enforcement is that we have outsourced and privatized corporate investigations to the corporations themselves. We let the cartels investigate themselves about whether they’ve dealt drugs. And that of course is a deeply pernicious development and, I think, is a corrupting one.

Thunk. That’s one of the things I didn’t know. It certainly is a dirty secret. It seems right up there with Citizens United as a symptom of corporations seizing power from the rest of us.

GROSS: So when you’re talking about waiving attorney-client privilege, you’re referring to when a corporation has hired a law firm to investigate itself and then won’t tell the Justice Department what that law firm found.

EISINGER: Yeah. Often this is what happens – is that there’s some kind of scandal or some kind of investigation into a company like GM or Volkswagen or Uber or the major banks – JP Morgan, Chase. They’ll hire a major law firm like Debevoise and Plimpton or WilmerHale, these powerful law firms in New York and D.C. And those law firms assign dozens and dozens of associates and partners to comb through the company to figure out whether there was any wrongdoing. And then they deliver those results to the prosecutors. And the prosecutors flip through it and try to see if there’s any wrongdoing there.

Now, what happens is those investigations are studiously incurious about wrongdoing perpetrated by the CEO or chairman, as you can imagine. They – these law firms – sometimes they do very tough jobs investigating, but often they don’t because they’re not only worried about annoying their client, but they’re worried about their future revenue streams. If they do a tough job this once, other companies won’t hire them.

And that’s the important thing – law firms making lots of money, not corporations kept from robbing us blind or destroying the Gulf of Mexico or anything like that.

GROSS: So you think that having, say, investment banks settle for large fines is not an adequate punishment. Why not?

EISINGER: I don’t think it deters crime. And I think it undermines the sense of equity and justice in this country. I think people see companies paying big checks and the individuals getting away with it. And I think it stokes an enormous amount of anger with the system and undermines the legitimacy of our justice system, especially because we have a justice system which excessively punishes the poor and people of color while allowing top corporate executives, powerful people, off. We talk about inequality in this country, but I argue that the greatest perquisite of being powerful and wealthy in this country is the ability to commit crimes with impunity.

Just a tad.

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A broader receptivity to Russian aid

Jul 12th, 2017 12:04 pm | By

Norman Eisen and Richard Painter discuss the “did he break the law” question.

The defense that this was a routine meeting to hear about opposition research is nonsense. As ethics lawyers, we have worked on political campaigns for decades and have never heard of an offer like this one. If we had, we would have insisted upon immediate notification of the F.B.I., and so would any normal campaign lawyer, official or even senior volunteer.

That is because of the enormous potential legal liability, both individually and for the campaign. The potential offenses committed by Donald Jr., his colleagues and brother-in-law who attended the meeting, and the campaign itself, include criminal or civil violations of campaign finance laws. These laws prohibit accepting anything of value from a foreign government or a foreign national. The promised Russian “documents and information” would have been an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign government — and a priceless one.

Then there is the question of whether the statements of enthusiasm in the emails about the meeting (“I love it,” Donald Jr. wrote) constituted assent on behalf of the Trump campaign to continuing Russian help. Welcoming the information and taking the meeting can reasonably be understood to signal a broader receptivity to Russian aid. This is even more serious than the campaign finance violation because it brings conspiracy law into play. That could make Donald Jr. and others liable for all of the Russian dirty tricks that followed, including any Russian cybercrimes or other crimes targeting the Clinton campaign.

They’ve done irreparable damage to the US and to much of the rest of the world. It’s not much consolation that now they’re in Big Trubble, but it’s the only consolation we’re going to get.

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The team amended his clearance forms

Jul 12th, 2017 11:37 am | By

Interesting – Big Trump’s people conferred on how Little Trump should respond to the Times story, and Big Trump signed off on the criminally incomplete statement they composed for Little Trump.

As Air Force One jetted back from Europe on Saturday, a small cadre of Mr. Trump’s advisers huddled in a cabin helping to craft a statement for the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to give to The New York Times explaining why he met last summer with a lawyer connected to the Russian government. Participants on the plane and back in the United States debated how transparent to be in the statement, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Ultimately, the people said, the president signed off on a statement from Donald Trump Jr. for The Times that was so incomplete that it required day after day of follow-up statements, each more revealing than the last.

So basically Daddy’s people told him to lie, which could put him in legal jeopardy as he keeps having to revise the lies.

The emails, which the younger Mr. Trump released after learning that The Times had obtained copies and was about to publish them, undercut the president’s line of defense in the Russia inquiry. For months, Mr. Trump has dismissed suspicions of collusion between Russia and his team as “fake news” and a “total hoax.” His eldest son, likewise, had previously asserted that talk of collusion was “disgusting” and “so phony.” Donald Trump Jr. said in a Fox News interview that he would have done things differently in retrospect, but he maintained he had done nothing improper.

At a minimum, however, the emails show that the younger Mr. Trump was not only willing, but also eager, to accept help advertised as coming from the Russian government. “I love it,” he wrote.

Daddy raised them to be as corrupt and dishonest as he is, as his Daddy Fred raised him. They’re basically Mafiosi but without the cannoli.

In the Fox News interview on Tuesday night, the younger Mr. Trump said that Mr. Kushner left the meeting a few minutes after it began.

While Donald Trump Jr. has been the main focus of the controversy because he set up the meeting, Mr. Kushner faces potential trouble because he currently works in the White House and neglected to mention the encounter on forms he filled out for a background check to obtain a security clearance.

They’re crooks, all of them. They’re sleazy, conscienceless crooks and they’ve taken over a large nuclear-armed country. The hair oil and the snappy suits don’t make them any less crooks.

The emails were discovered in recent weeks by Mr. Kushner’s legal team as it reviewed documents, and the team amended his clearance forms to disclose it, according to people briefed on the developments, who like others declined to be identified because of the sensitive political and legal issues involved.

What? Can you do that? Can security clearance forms be amended after they’ve been submitted and acted on and the person is doing the job for which he needed the clearance? Corrupt son of corrupt father submits security clearance to work in executive branch, then months later it’s “Oh whoops I forgot to mention my secret dealings with a hostile foreign power, let me just cross out that line and add a footnote.” It doesn’t seem as if it would work that way.

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So drearily predictable you could replace him with an algorithm

Jul 12th, 2017 9:52 am | By

Martin Robbins on the leaden predictability of Brendan O’Neill:

I found the two sources.

Martin in the New Statesman in 2013:

“Niggers put the ape in rape.” If an opinion columnist wrote that on the websites attached to their newspapers, we’d be facing questions in the Commons, earnest debates on Newsnight, and a lazy column about how “nigger” isn’t really a bad word after all scribbled on the back of a fag packet by one of the professional attention-seekers at Spiked!. This sentiment was posted on Twitter though, and nobody really cares because, well . . . Twitter.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked two days ago:

Sharpen the pitchforks, fan the flames: a politician has misspoken.

Yes, another day, another Twitch-hunt. Another live-tweeted expulsion from polite society. Another roll-up-roll-up real-time destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of having said something stupid.

The victim this time is Anne Marie Morris, the Tory MP for Newton Abbot. She was recorded dumbly using the outdated phrase ‘nigger in the woodpile’ at a gathering of Eurosceptic Tories at the East India Club in London. Ms Morris said ‘the real nigger in the woodpile’ in the Brexit issue is what happens if we get two years down the line and there’s still no deal between Britain and the EU. So she was clearly using the phrase in its classic sense to mean an issue of great importance that isn’t being openly or sufficiently discussed. She wasn’t being racist, just old-fashioned. Phew. We can call off the Twitterhounds, put back the tomatoes.

Its “classic” sense? What, that phrase originated with Aristophanes, or maybe it was Cicero on a bad day? So the phrase has a “classic” sense that is in no way contemptuously racist and demeaning? It’s just one of those hallowed British idioms from the golden past that haven’t got a mean bone in their body?

Whatever. At any rate there’s your lazy column about how “nigger” isn’t really a bad word after all scribbled on the back of a fag packet by the chief professional attention-seeker at Spiked!.

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When you’re in business with Donald Trump

Jul 11th, 2017 5:25 pm | By

Sports journalist Christine Brennan asks officials at the U.S. Golf Association, assembled to speak at the opening news conference before the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open at Trump National, if the USGA has a position on sexual assault. You’d think it would be a softball question, wouldn’t you…but no.

But when you’re in business with Donald Trump, the man who appeared on the infamous Access Hollywood videotape bragging that he could sexually assault women without having to worry about the ramifications, your values start to fade.

Your principles waver. Your admirable efforts to try to attract women and girls to a game with a long history of discriminatory and exclusionary practices run head-long into your need to prostrate yourself at Trump’s feet.

And so, in what was a truly remarkable moment in sports news conference lore, three supposed leaders of the USGA sat dumbfounded, unable to utter even one word against sexual assault, while the fourth, a spokeswoman, said the foursome was there to talk about “the golf competition,” but would be happy to discuss the “important question …afterwards.”

Hours later there was an email response saying the necessary things…now that no one was watching any more.

This at a time when golf in the US is not doing as well as you’d think with all these billionaires around.

The game isn’t going away, but it’s certainly not growing. In fact, with the Tiger and Phil era now just about over, TV ratings are falling — as participation has for the better part of a decade.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to former LPGA Commissioner Charlie Mechem, a beloved steward of the game, who said this in an April LPGA news release:

“Although the game of golf is enjoying expansion and growth in other parts of the world such as Asia, there are disturbing signs that golf and the golf business are in a rather precipitous decline in the United States. We must do everything we can to proactively grow the game of golf and restore this game to its rightful place as the greatest sport in the world.”

The largest untapped market for golf is girls and women, especially the daughters of Title IX, millions upon millions of them, who will remain athletic for their entire lives, presumably with a fair share of disposable income.

The USGA desperately needs at least some of them.

On Tuesday, it did everything in its power to turn them all away.

Oh well. There’s always croquet.

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Trump Jr. previously claimed

Jul 11th, 2017 4:47 pm | By

The Atlantic underlines how passages from the emails demonstrate that Don Junior was lying in his previous accounts of that meeting.

In a June 3, 2016, email, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist and acquaintance of Trump Jr. wrote to him:

The Crown prosecutor met with [musician Emin Agalarov’s] father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.

This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.

The final sentence is essential because it shows that Trump Jr. knew going into the meeting that the purpose was to receive information damaging to the Clinton campaign. Trump Jr. had previously denied that he knew what the meeting was going to be about before he entered it.

He’s been lying, you see. Lying and lying and lying. Not lying about sex in the president’s study, but lying about meeting with a representative of a hostile power to get information damaging to the rival candidate. He’s been lying his face off about that.

In a later email, dated June 7, Goldstone wrote to Trump Jr. that he wished to “schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” That’s important because Trump Jr. previously claimed that he did not know that the woman, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was Kremlin connected.

Lying and lying and lying. He’s a big ol’ liar, as well as a bully.

Finally, the emails make clear that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a White House senior adviser, and Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, were both copied in, meaning they too would have been aware of the purpose of the meeting and of Veselnitskaya’s identity. Kushner failed to disclose the June 9 meeting when applying for security clearance, but more recently did disclose it, as did Manafort. Both Kushner and Manafort are under investigation for business dealings and in relation to a broader investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

For being sleazy fucks, in short.

Trump Jr.’s decision to release the full emails, after previously lying about his discussions, is yet another watershed moment. It provides the most solid evidence yet that members of the Trump campaign’s inner orbit were ready and willing to collude with the Russian government, and it proves that the Trump campaign knew that the Kremlin supported Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton. (In mid-July, weeks after the meeting, Trump Jr. appeared on CNN, where he blasted the notion that Russia backed his father as “phony” and “disgusting.”)

Because he’s a lying liar who tells lies.

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The emails read like something out of a cheap spy thriller

Jul 11th, 2017 4:31 pm | By

The Post says yes, this is a big deal.

The emails between President Trump’s oldest son and an intermediary for the Russians provide the clearest indication to date that Trump campaign officials and family members were at least prepared to do business with a foreign adversary in the mutual goal of taking down Hillary Clinton.

No one should presume to draw definitive conclusions from the contents of the emails as to possible jeopardy for Donald Trump Jr., where the overall investigation that includes various threads is heading, or most specifically how it will end. That remains the purview of special counsel Robert Mueller and investigators for the House and Senate intelligence committees. But in terms of public disclosures, what came out Tuesday was as stunning as anything to date, described by people closely watching on the outside as both breathtaking and surreal.

One thing the news does, Dan Balz writes, is blow away Big Don’s claim last weekend

that “nobody really knows” whether the Russians meddled in the U.S. election and if they did whether they did so with the intent of helping him and hurting Clinton.

Funny, Little Don knew that was bullshit at the time, but did he alert anyone? He did not.

The emails read like something out of a cheap spy thriller or perhaps even as a falsified document designed to lure and entrap a willing but unsuspecting victim.

That’s what I said. I said it read like something a CIA agent might say to test someone.

They also happen to lay out information that is transparently damaging and that undermines those who have dismissed suggestions of possible collusion or cooperation between Trump associates and the Russians as fanciful or deliberately misleading.

But her emails!

Oh wait, that won’t work any more, will it.

The language in the messages to Donald Trump Jr. is conspiratorial and explicit. The president’s son was offered “official documents” that would “incriminate Hillary Clinton” and that would be “very useful to your father.” Trump’s son was also informed in the email that the information being offered was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

That’s why I italicized it and then bolded it.

Image result for smoking gun

Trump’s son said Tuesday he was releasing the emails in the interest of transparency, but that decision came after the New York Times informed him that their reporters had the contents and were preparing to publish. Day by day, thanks to the Times’s reporting, Donald Trump Jr. has been dissembling about how and why a meeting with a Russian lawyer came about.

And after Don Senior has always been so nice to the Times, too.

When reporters from the Times first approached him about the meeting, he said it was primarily about adoption, then later conceded that he had been told the purpose was to present damaging information about Clinton. Now it turns out there was an explicit connection to the Russian government. His rapidly changing explanations left White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus hung out to dry with his comment on Sunday that it was a meeting about adoption.

Well, lie down with Trumps, get up with syphilis and a 50 year prison sentence.

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Sticks to jab into the soft spots in our culture

Jul 11th, 2017 12:08 pm | By

Adrian Chen at the New Yorker looks at what HanAssholeSolo and his apology tell us about the harassment culture on Twitter.

The apology is a fascinating document, in part because it is addressed to his fellow Internet trolls. “My fellow redditors,” he wrote. “First of all, I would like to apologize to the members of the reddit community for getting this site and this sub embroiled in a controversy that should never have happened.” The_Donald is a community of more than forty thousand users that has become the beating heart of Trump’s online grassroots army, producing a steady stream of bite-sized pro-Trump propaganda tuned perfectly to go viral. Within this community, the Internet is treated as a venue for bombastic Trumpian fantasy, completely detached from the real world. Users see themselves as engaged in a great “meme war” and call Trump their “God Emperor.” The derision and scorn heaped on them by outsiders—Quartz has described The_Donald as “a cesspool for unabashed racism”—only seems to make them stronger. Provoking strong reactions is seen as an end unto itself. HanAssholeSolo apparently subscribed to that philosophy until the moment that he felt public scrutiny coming down on him.

“I would also like to apologize for the posts made that were racist, bigoted, and anti-semitic,” he wrote. “I am not the person that the media portrays me to be in real life, I was trolling and posting things to get a reaction from the subs on reddit and never meant any of the hateful things I said in those posts.” As he told it, he had lost himself in the thrill of virtual provocation: “As time went on it became an addiction as to how far it could go with the posts that were made.”

It was tempting to write these words off as a lazy shirking of responsibility. Surely, only a psychopath would think that using the N-word or posting a photo of a burning Quran were harmless acts. Every few months, it seems, there’s a new psychological study that shows a connection between doing terrible things online and doing terrible things in real life. (The Times’ Anna North recently wrote about a study linking online trolling with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.)

Trolls often justify their offensive behavior by insisting that they are simply doing it for “the lulz”—the laughs—and that they use offensive language as sticks to jab into the soft spots in our culture. I used to believe that such a detached approach was possible. The adherents of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged from the same message boards that would later feed into The_Donald, were fond of homophobic and sexist language even as they supported political goals generally in line with liberal values of equality and social justice.

But what “soft spots in our culture” is it possible to jab by calling women cunts and whores? Surely the only relevant “soft spots” are the ones that see it as a bad thing to bully subordinated people – and why would we need to poke those particular soft spots? Why not keep our jabbing of soft spots for soft spots that we actually don’t want, like rot in an apple? What work of de-rotting or firming up or disinfection is performed by targeting women or brown people or foreigners on Twitter? I just don’t see any point in that form of poking at soft spots.

These days, though, when I think of the lulz, I think of the notorious troll Andrew (Weev) Auernheimer. In the early twenty-tens, Aurenheimer was hailed as a geek hero for embarrassing technology companies such as A.T. & T. and LiveJournal by exposing security vulnerabilities with a trollish bravado. He also said a lot of racist and anti-Semitic things, but his many liberal supporters wrote these off. He was just trolling, they thought. Over time, however, his statements became more extreme. Today, he is a very sincere neo-Nazi and a frequent contributor to the white-supremacist blogosphere. After CNN announced that it had discovered HanAssholeSolo’s identity (the network chose not to publish his name), Auernnheimer called for a harassment campaign against CNN employees and staffers. “We are going to track down your spouses,” he said. “We are going to track down your children.”

Yet some libertarians were saying look out, look out, CNN is a powerful corporation, look out. Yes, CNN is a powerful corporation, but individual CNN reporters are not. They’re not the right kind of soft spot to jab, especially when the president of the US is so busy jabbing them himself.

Over the past few years, this kind of troll radicalization has become commonplace. In 2015, Joseph Bernstein, a writer for BuzzFeed, noticed a burgeoning online political movement that wove together two strands of the Internet’s message-board subculture. One strand comprised “threatened white men”—racists and anti-feminists who spread their extremist ideology online because it wasn’t acceptable anywhere else. The other strand was made up of nihilistic Internet trolls, like Auernheimer, who said that they were in it for the lulz. These individuals were prodigious creators of memes and online culture that often succeeded in crossing over into the mainstream. The new hybrid movement, which Bernstein called the Chanterculture, after the notorious message board 4chan, redirected this anarchic collective creativity toward political ends. It combined “age-old racist and sexist rhetoric with bleeding-edge meme culture and technology,” Bernstein wrote. Eventually, Chanterculture helped create the conditions for the rise of the alt-right.

And so we got Donald Trump. It’s all been a bit of a disaster, hasn’t it.

I have little doubt that, on some level, HanAssholeSolo genuinely viewed his online actions as detached from reality. The use of pseudonyms is an important feature of the Chanterculture, and while the users themselves often make appeals to safety or privacy, the effect of all these pseudonyms is to create the illusion of the Internet as a place where we can be something other than ourselves. On the wide-open plains of the Internet, the Chanterculture argues, offensive speech is not a problem, because one can simply turn off the computer or visit another Web site.

Ah but no, you see, because many people who use the Internet use it as themselves, with their names attached, often because that’s part of their work. Just visiting another Web site does nothing for people in that situation.

This idea feeds directly into the ideology of the alt-right, whose adherents see online outrage sparked by words, which they believe are little more than characters on a screen, as proof that the real goal of “social-justice warriors” is to silence them.

For HanAssholeSolo, though, his gif episode showed him what most of us instinctively know—that our online lives are intricately woven into our real ones, and that freedom of speech is not an excuse for a lack of empathy, even “behind a keyboard.” This was “an extreme wake up call,” he wrote in his apology. “To people who troll on the Internet for fun, consider your words and actions conveyed in your message and who it might upset or anger. Put yourself in their shoes before you post it.”

Not long after it was posted, HanAssholeSolo’s apology was erased from Reddit, along with the rest of his posts, but it lives on preserved as a screenshot on the Internet-culture database Know Your Meme. One would like to imagine that other trolls might read it and quit their idiotic hobby. Of course, this is hopelessly naïve. The trolls have gone pro.

Yep.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


A very bright young man

Jul 11th, 2017 11:01 am | By

Republicans in Congress are assuring us there’s nothing to see here, move along.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said any time you’re in a campaign and you get an offer from a foreign government the answer is “no.”

Some Republicans — including Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley — defended Trump Jr.’s tweet as an example of transparency.

“I think the transparency is the proper thing to do and I think he’s shown that he wants everybody to know what the situation is, as I have found them on so many stories since the election,” Grassley told CNN.

Ah yes the transparency! So transparent, very forthcoming, much clarity. That’s why he told us all about it right after the New York Times told us all about it. It just doesn’t get any more transparent than that.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah described Trump Jr. as “a very bright young man,” but not a member of his father’s administration. He responded to Kaine’s accusations of treason with, “You got to be kidding.”

“He’s not in the administration,” Hatch said. “He may be the son of the president but he doesn’t have the authority to speak for the president. Look, I think this is overblown.”

Oh yes, definitely, Trump obviously keeps his adult children scrupulously separate from his presidency.

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Don Junior publishes all the evidence on Twitter

Jul 11th, 2017 10:00 am | By

I was planning to go in a less-Trump-allthetime direction today but the Times’s latest cannot be ignored.

The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Boom. There go all Don 2’s lies about what they told him and how he saw the offer. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.

Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.

If the future president’s elder son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.

He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”

You know…it’s what you would do if you were a CIA agent testing a citizen’s willingness to work with a hostile foreign power. Spelling it out like that basically tells young Don: be very clear about what you’re getting into, Junior. Make no mistake about who we are and what we want.

So what did young Don do? He said hooray yes let’s do this thing.

Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.

On June 9, the Russian lawyer was sitting in the younger Mr. Trump’s office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, just one level below the office of the future president.

…

…the email exchanges, which were reviewed by The Times, offer a detailed unspooling of how the meeting with the Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came about — and just how eager Donald Trump Jr. was to accept what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.

what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.

The Justice Department, as well as the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, is examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

And two days ago Don Senior told us that he “strongly pressed” Putin on the subject twice but that Putin “vehemently denied” it – as if that meant Putin were telling the truth. Hours later his son flips over the apple cart. Russia was involved and Don Junior has provided the evidence.

…in recent days, accounts by some of the central organizers of the meeting, including Donald Trump Jr., have evolved or have been contradicted by the written email records.

After being told that The Times was about to publish the content of the emails, instead of responding to a request for comment, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out images of them himself on Tuesday.

“To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails” about the June 9 meeting, he wrote. “I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet.”

Brilliant. Just really brilliant.

On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter that it was hardly unusual to take information on an opponent. And on Tuesday morning, he tweeted, “Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!”

Is there not a single competent lawyer on the payroll? Not one lawyer to tell him to shut the fuck up this instant? It’s like watching a child climb onto a windowsill on the 25th floor.

Updating to add: the Times has updated the story with a game-changer from Don Senior:

At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, read a statement from President Trump in which he defended his son. “My son is a high-quality person, and I applaud his transparency,” the president said.

There ya go. End of story.

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Steve Bonaparte

Jul 11th, 2017 9:08 am | By

I learned a new fact about Steve Bannon this morning. It’s a rather exhilarating fact.

Bannon became a vital figure in Trump’s orbit during the early days of his political rise. The two met late in 2010, when David Bossie, the veteran conservative activist, brought Bannon along on a trip to Trump Tower to offer advice about how Trump might prepare for a presidential run. Like Trump, Bannon was a businessman and born deal-maker. With experience on Wall Street and in Hollywood, he was nothing if not high energy, a mile-a-minute talker with a volcanic temper who rarely slept and possessed a media metabolism to rival Trump’s own. And Bannon, too, had a healthy self-regard. On his office wall hung an oil painting of Bannon dressed as Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries, done in the style of Jacques-Louis David’s famous neoclassical painting — a gift from Nigel Farage.

No. Really?

I don’t suppose we’ll ever get the chance to see the original, if it exists, but pending that glory the Daily Beast has given us a version:

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY KELLY CAMINERO

Their attitudes toward Russia differ slightly though.

 

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