Meanwhile, Trump is busy being his usual vomitous racist self.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/842154802058543105
Speak for yourself, Trump. We don’t thank Jackson for his service. We don’t honor his memory. We don’t build on his legacy. And we do not thank god for the US.
A federal judge in Hawaii issued a nationwide order Wednesday evening blocking President Trump’s ban on travel from parts of the Muslim world, dealing a political blow to the White House and signaling that proponents of the ban face a long and risky legal battle ahead.
The ruling was the second frustrating defeat for Mr. Trump’s travel ban, after a federal court in Seattle halted an earlier version of the executive order last month. Mr. Trump responded to that setback with fury, lashing out at the judiciary before ultimately abandoning the order.
Well, frustrating for Trump and his poisonous cronies, but not for anyone else.
The new improved ban was supposed to avoid legal challenges, but oops no that didn’t work out.
Democratic states and nonprofit groups that work with immigrants and refugees raced into court to attack the updated order, alleging that it was a thinly veiled version of the ban on Muslim migration that he had pledged to enact last year, as a presidential candidate.
Administration lawyers argued in multiple courts on Wednesday that the president was merely exercising his national security powers and that no element of the executive order, as written, could be construed as a religious test for travelers.
But in the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general, Doug Chin, Judge Derrick K. Watson appeared skeptical of the government’s claim that past comments by Mr. Trump and his allies had no bearing on the case.
“Are you saying we close our eyes to the sequence of statements before this?” Judge Watson asked in a hearing Wednesday before he ruled against the administration.
Ahhh that’s interesting. So it turns out that all those dogwhistles and outright racist rants came back to bite him. That’s justice.
The lawsuits have also claimed that the order disrupts the functions of companies, charities, public universities and hospitals that have deep relationships overseas. In the Hawaii case, nearly five dozen technology companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Lyft and TripAdvisor, joined in a brief objecting to the travel ban.
Capitalism has its moments.
The judge’s order was not a ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s ban, and the administration has consistently expressed confidence that courts will ultimately affirm Mr. Trump’s power to issue the restrictions.
But the legal debate is likely to be a protracted and unusually personal fight for the administration, touching Mr. Trump and a number of his key aides directly and raising the prospect that their public comments and private communications will be scrutinized extensively.
Multiple lawsuits challenging the travel ban have extensively cited Mr. Trump’s comments during the presidential campaign. He first proposed to bar all Muslims from entering the United States, and then offered an alternative plan to ban travel from a number of Muslim countries, which he described as a politically acceptable way of achieving the same goal.
The lawsuits also cited Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who advises Mr. Trump, who said he had been asked to help craft a Muslim ban that would pass legal muster.
And they highlighted comments by Stephen Miller, an adviser to the president, who cast the changes to Mr. Trump’s first travel ban as mere technical adjustments aimed at ushering the same policy past the review of a court.
I find this deeply satisfying. They’ve cut the ground out from under their own feet. They’ve botched their own plans by being such evil shits.
Bob Ferguson, the Washington attorney general, has indicated that in an extended legal fight, his office could seek depositions from administration officials and request documents that would expose the full process by which Trump aides crafted the ban.
Proud to be an immigrant to Washington state.
George Packer in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:
Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of a President who can no longer discharge his duties but is unable or unwilling to say so. It empowers the Vice-President, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare the President unfit and to install the Vice-President as Acting President. Section 4 has never been invoked. In 1987, when Ronald Reagan appointed Howard Baker to be his new chief of staff, the members of the outgoing chief’s team warned their replacements that Reagan’s mental ineptitude might require them to attempt the removal of the President under Section 4. Baker and his staff, at their first official meeting with Reagan, watched him carefully for signs of incapacity—but the President, apparently cheered by the arrival of newcomers, was alert and lively, and he served out the rest of his second term.
Yiiiiiiiiikes I didn’t know that.
Trump is “alert and lively” – but he’s “alert” to wrong things and he’s lively in wrong and terrible ways. Apathy and lassitude are not the only forms of mental incapacity.
As Packer goes on to say:
After a month in office, Donald Trump has already proved himself unable to discharge his duties. The disability isn’t laziness or inattention. It expresses itself in paranoid rants, non-stop feuds carried out in public, and impulsive acts that can only damage his government and himself. Last week, at a White House press conference, the President behaved like the unhinged leader of an unstable and barely democratic republic. He rambled for nearly an hour and a half, on script and off; he flung insults at reporters; he announced that he was having fun; and he congratulated himself so many times and in such preposterous terms (“this Administration is running like a fine-tuned machine”) that the White House press corps could only stare in amazement.
He’s slightly manic most of the time. In someone with the faults and deficits he has, that’s not a plus.
It won’t get better. The notion that, at some point, Trump would start behaving “Presidential” was always a fantasy that has the truth backward: the pressure of the Presidency is making him worse. He’s insulated by sycophants and by family members, and he can still ride a long way on his popular following. Though the surge of civic opposition, the independence of the courts, and the reinvigoration of the press are heartening, the only real leverage over Trump lies in the hands of Republicans. But Section 4 won’t be invoked. Vice-President Mike Pence is not going to face the truth in the private back room of a Washington restaurant with Secretaries Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, and Wilbur Ross, or in the offices of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Republican leaders have opted instead for unconstrained power.
It’s their big chance to destroy the environment, make poor people even poorer, make sure health insurance will never be universal and tax-funded, make it harder for minorities to vote, and end public funding of arts and humanities endowments.
One of the things Rachel Maddow talked about in the segment leading up to the 1040 reveal was the fact that Trump sold a house to a Russian oligarch for way more than it was worth, so what’s that about.
So today I googled for more, and got a Washington Post piece from five days ago.
The front-page centerpiece of Friday’s Palm Beach Post, billed as an “exclusive,” begins with a provocative question: “Why did a Russian oligarch pay now-President Donald Trump $95 million for his Palm Beach mansion?”
The piece offers no clear answer and, despite being a captivating read filled with several new details, it revisits a curious real estate transaction that has previously been probed by the New York Times, CNN and Politico, among others.
$95 million is a LOT of money for one house, even if it is a mansion.
Trump paid $41.35 million for the seaside estate in 2004 and sold it in 2008 for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a fertilizer magnate and majority owner of the AS Monaco soccer team.
There was a real estate bubble between 2004 and 2008…but it was deflating in 2008, and it was never so expanded that it could explain a profit of $43 $53 million in four years unless the seller added a few extra houses. $95 million was a record price and before that, the Post says, Trump was struggling to sell it at all.
(Maison de L’Amitie, as the estate is known, languished on the market for two years before fetching what was, at the time, believed to be the highest price ever for a home in the United States.) Rybolovlev, who has never lived in the 62,000-square-foot house, has claimed at various times that it is a corporate investment, an asset for his family trust or perhaps a 6.2-acre playground for his equestrian-loving daughter.
None of that is an explanation for paying a vastly inflated price.
Since Rybolovlev can’t get his story straight, and he keeps bumping into Trump at airports, is it possible that the answer to the Palm Beach Post’s question about the oligarch’s motive is that he was trying to curry favor with the future president?
If so, Rybolovlev had tremendous political foresight. An alternative explanation is that he was just moving money in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Elena, who in a 2009 lawsuit accused him of “secreting and transferring assets in order to avoid his obligations,” according to the Palm Beach Post.
That still doesn’t make any sense. If you overpay for a house in order to withhold the money from someone else, the money is still lost to you, because you overpaid. Why not buy art works, or multiple houses, or startups, or any number of things that wouldn’t be just donating $43 $53 million to Donnie from Queens?
Unless donating $43 $53 million to Donnie from Queens is exactly what you intended to do.
Today in TwitterDonnie:
Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Wut?
Looking forward to a big rally in Nashville, Tennessee, tonight. Big crowd of great people expected. Will be fun!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Ah yes, his favorite thing: adoring attention from a visible crowd of people. He misses the campaign. He would do that all day every day if he could.
It’s so healthy for the country, too, whipping up crowds of white people into frothing hatred of Other races and everyone on the left.
Someone leaked Trump’s 2005 tax return, minus all the informative attachments, yesterday. I think it was Trump who leaked it, since a hostile party would have included the informative attachments.
President Trump paid $38 million in federal taxes in 2005 on income of $153 million and reported a $105 million write-down in business losses, according to a copy of his tax return first revealed Tuesday night.
Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24 percent and saved millions of dollars in additional taxes by claiming the losses, according to the document, the first two pages of which were obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston and first reported by DC Report, a nonprofit news site he runs, and on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
…
The document offers a rare snapshot of Trump’s personal finances, considering he has refused to disclose his tax returns to the public. The White House issued a statement chastising MSNBC for reporting on Trump’s taxes — “totally illegal,” read the statement — but also confirming top-line numbers from the return and defending Trump.
Still, Trump tweeted early Wednesday that the report was “FAKE NEWS” and asked: “Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, ‘went to his mailbox’ and found my tax returns?”
That’s so Trump. He’d never heard of the reporter, so he assumes that no one else has either. Pulitzer shmulitzer, am I right?
The newly revealed pages from his 2005 return do not detail his financial ties, but they do seem to disprove the theory that some Democrats advanced in last year’s campaign that Trump avoided paying any federal income taxes during that period.
That’s another reason I think he’s the one who leaked the page. (It’s one page really, one page with two sides.)
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, tweeted, “Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is& that he paid $40mm in taxes! #Taxes”
See? He leaked it himself. Another reason to think so: a new pretext for shouting at the press.
China has cleared the way for Trump to provide pimping services there.
China has granted preliminary approval for 38 new Trump trademarks, paving the way for President Donald Trump and his family to develop a host of branded businesses from hotels to insurance to bodyguard and concierge services, public documents show.
Trump’s lawyers in China applied for the marks in April 2016, as Trump railed against China at campaign rallies, accusing it of currency manipulation and stealing US jobs. Critics maintain that Trump’s swelling portfolio of China trademarks raises serious conflict of interest questions.
Oh, sure, but nobody who can do anything about them will do anything about them.
If President Trump receives any special treatment in securing trademark rights, it would violate the U.S. Constitution, which bans public servants from accepting anything of value from foreign governments unless approved by Congress, ethics lawyers from across the political spectrum say. Concerns about potential conflicts of interest are particularly sharp in China, where the courts and bureaucracy are designed to reflect the will of the ruling Communist Party.
Dan Plane, a director at Simone IP Services, a Hong Kong intellectual property consultancy, said he had never seen so many applications approved so quickly. “For all these marks to sail through so quickly and cleanly, with no similar marks, no identical marks, no issues with specifications – boy, it’s weird,” he said.
Well they just want to maintain good relations with the US head of state. Oh wait – you mean that’s the conflict of interest right there. That sounds like the special treatment in securing trademark rights that he’s not allowed to get unless Congress approves it.
The trademarks are for businesses including branded spas, massage parlors, golf clubs, hotels, insurance, finance and real estate companies, retail shops, restaurants, bars, and private bodyguard and escort services.
Nothing undignified or sleazy there, no indeed.
The Times reports from the hall of mirrors where it gets to correct the lies of Trump and Trump’s people about what the Times has reported in the past that Trump and Trump’s people are citing as justification for Trump’s lies about Obama’s dastardly wire tapps [sic] of Trump Tower.
Two senior White House officials suggested on Monday that President Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama had tapped his telephone was not meant to be taken literally, arguing that Mr. Trump had been referring more broadly to a variety of surveillance efforts during the 2016 campaign when he made the incendiary accusation.
“He doesn’t really think that President Obama went up and tapped his phone personally,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.
In fact, Mr. Spicer said, when Mr. Trump charged in a Twitter post last weekend that Mr. Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” he was referring generally to surveillance activities during the 2016 race — not to an actual telephone wiretap.
“The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, ‘wiretapping,’” Mr. Spicer said, using his fingers to make a gesture suggesting quotation marks. “That spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”
Hahaha yeah sure Spicey, the president was “very clear” that he wasn’t saying what he was saying. It’s always “very clear” what he means by those random quotation marks he sticks in for unfathomable reasons in apparently arbitrary places. It’s not at all that he has the bad habit shared by many semi-literate people of using quotation marks whose meaning is undetectable. Some people use “them” sort of like pepper “or” hot sauce, to add a bit “of” flavor. It’s not true – it’s a lie – that Trump was “very clear” that the quotation marks on “wiretapping” meant “not really wiretapping.” In fact such a reading would render the tweets gibberish, since they were all about his outrage at that very wiretapping. If he really meant “wiretapping”…then what was the outrage about?
No, Spicey, that won’t fly.
The remarks were the first time the White House sought to explain the accusation Mr. Trump made in a series of posts on Twitter saying Mr. Obama “was tapping my phones” and calling the former president a “bad (or sick) guy.”
The explanations came as the Justice Department asked the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who had given a Monday deadline to produce proof of Mr. Trump’s claim, for more time “to determine what if any responsive documents exist.”
How much time? A little under eight years, perhaps?
Then there were Kellyanne Conway’s exciting new claims about spy microwave ovens and stuff.
The unusual and shifting explanations from Mr. Spicer and Ms. Conway reflected the contortions that members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle have employed to explain the president’s explosive accusation, which he has yet to address personally. Neither Mr. Trump nor anyone at the White House has presented any evidence for the claim, instead asking Congress to investigate it as part of its inquiry into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.
Both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have requested that the Department of Justice provide evidence it may have for Mr. Trump’s charge, but Mr. Spicer said on Monday that the president had not instructed the department to furnish any.
He suggested that Mr. Trump had relied on multiple news reports, including in The New York Times, to make his charge.
And there we enter the Hall of Mirrors, where the Times gets to explain that the Times never said what Spicey implied.
“It is interesting how many news outlets reported that this activity was taking place during the 2016 election cycle, and now are wondering where the proof is,” Mr. Spicer said.
The Times and other news outlets have reported extensively on surveillance in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign, particularly related to Russia’s efforts to influence the election. But The Times has never reported that intelligence or law-enforcement officials were themselves spying on Mr. Trump. What The Times and other news organizations have reported is that American intelligence agencies have communication intercepts that officials believe show contacts between associates of Mr. Trump and Russian officials during the campaign.
Still, several far-right websites, including Infowars, which traffics in conspiracy theories and whose eccentric operator, Alex Jones, has interviewed Mr. Trump, have erroneously asserted that The Times and others had reported that the president was under surveillance.
In a story dated March 6, Infowars cited a Jan. 19 article in The Times detailing how American law enforcement and intelligence agencies were examining intercepted communications as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and Trump associates.
“Flashback: NYT admits wiretaps used against Trump,” the headline read. The story noted that The Times “didn’t specifically mention that Trump himself, or Trump Tower, was bugged,” but the caveat has not stopped Mr. Trump’s supporters from insisting that The Times was a source for the president’s tweet.
Of course, there’s a sense in which that can be perfectly true. Trump is thick as a plank, so he could easily have misunderstood something he read, or believed something Alex Jones said, and in that way “sincerely” derived his story from the Times reporting.
The chain could go like this:
The Times reports on surveillance in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign–>Alex Jones translates that to “the Times reports on wiretaps on Trump by the Obama administration”–>Trump translates that to “the Times reports that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.”
Trump is the one with the nuclear codes.
Donnie from Queens showing his usual dazzling self-awareness and insight.
It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives. Be nice, you will do much better!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2017
Ah yes, he’s such an expert at avoiding rudeness. He’s so good at being nice. Du wut he sez, nott wut he duz.
Poor Angela Merkel. She has to go visit Trump on Tuesday. Yuck. I hope he doesn’t try to hold her hand.
German officials say the detail-oriented Merkel, 62, has been preparing assiduously for her trip to Washington.
She has watched Trump’s speeches and [pored] over his interviews, including a lengthy Q&A with Playboy magazine from 1990 in which he floats many of the controversial ideas he is now trying to implement as president, they say.
Members of her entourage have also analyzed Trump’s encounters with other leaders – including Britain’s Theresa May, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and Canada’s Justin Trudeau – and have had exchanges with some of their counterparts on how to handle the unpredictable former reality-TV star, the officials added.
“We have to be prepared for the fact that he does not like to listen for long, that he prefers clear positions and does not want to delve into details,” said one senior German official.
Sigh. In other words, they have to be prepared for the fact that he’s a giant stupid baby, who refuses to do the most basic tasks that the job requires. He has no attention span, he’s lazy, and he wants everything made simple and easy as if it were a toddler’s dinner cut up into itty bitty bites. It’s so shaming.
One of the biggest concerns in the chancellor’s camp before the visit is the potential for surprises.
Japan’s Abe had an awkward 19-second handshake with Trump, while May was criticized in some sections of the British media for holding hands with Trump during a stroll at the White House, apparently after he reached out to steady himself.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Trump last month, he and his team spent the day before running through endless scenarios, lines of questioning and role-plays to ensure they were prepared for any scenario.
But in the end, they were still taken aback when Trump spoke off the cuff at their news conference on the sensitive issues of settlements and a future Palestinian state.
In other words he has no idea how to behave, and no inclination to find out, so he’s almost certain to do something inappropriate and embarrassing, or rather, many such things.
Saturday Night Live went after Ivanka Trump this time.
Yet again this weekend, “Saturday Night Live” trotted out Alec Baldwin doing a Donald Trump impression for its cold open. And yet again, that wasn’t even close to its harshest political sketch.
That distinction this week was reserved for “Complicit,” a faux Ivanka Trump perfume ad that is liable to really ruffle some feathers.
The basic idea is pretty clear: As an outspoken woman known to be very close to her father, she is complicit in the things Trump does — and for not doing something about them.
Daddy boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, Daddy calls Senator Warren “Pocahontas,” Daddy accuses Obama of a felony based on something somebody said on Fox News. Daddy lies, Daddy cheats, Daddy steals. Daddy wants to take health insurance away from poor people, Daddy wants to make rivers and streams dirty again, Daddy hates brown foreigners. Ivanka’s right there with him.
SNL last week ran a very similar sketch about Republicans being unwilling to stand up to President Trump. But the decision to go after Ivanka Trump is certainly an interesting one — and one that her father is very likely to take notice of. Back when Nordstrom dropped her line, Donald Trump tweeted about it and Kellyanne Conway appeared to break ethics rules by telling people to buy Ivanka Trump’s products.
So the Trump people solved the problem by firing Preet Bharara.
On Friday, acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente began making calls to 46 prosecutors asking for their resignations. Such requests are a normal part of a transition of power from one administration to another, and about half of the 94 Obama-era U.S. attorneys had already left their jobs.
But Boente’s call to Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, appears to have left some confusion in its wake, in large part because President Trump met with Bharara soon after the election and had asked him to stay on.
During Friday’s call, Bharara asked for clarity about whether the requests for resignations applied to him, given his previous conversation with Trump, and did not immediately get a definitive answer, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
So that sounds less like a show of defiance from Bharara than simply uncertainty about what was going on. It also sounds like clumsy rudeness and incompetence on the part of the Trump people…but perhaps I’m being too generous, and they meant to be rude and abrupt-for-no-reason.
When asked Friday whether Bharara was also being asked for a resignation letter, one White House official not authorized to speak publicly said, “Everybody’s gone,” and would not engage further on the issue. Two people close to the president said the president’s chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Attorney General Jeff Sessions want a clean slate of federal prosecutors and are unconcerned about any perception that the White House appears to have changed its mind about Bharara. The ouster of former president Barack Obama’s federal prosecutors is about asserting who’s in power, these people said.
It’s about asserting who’s in power despite having decisively lost the popular vote and unprecedentedly low ratings in the polls, along with the ever-expanding knowledge base about Putin’s influence on the election.
So now Fox News is not only the chief source for Trump’s wild assertions, it’s also giving Trump instructions on what to do. Fox News.
The Trump administration moved on Friday to sweep away most of the remaining vestiges of Obama administration prosecutors at the Justice Department, ordering 46 holdover United States attorneys to tender their resignations immediately — including Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan.
…
The abrupt order came after two weeks of increasing calls from Mr. Trump’s allies outside the government to oust appointees from President Barack Obama’s administration. Mr. Trump has been angered by a series of reports based on leaked information from a sprawling bureaucracy, as well as from his own West Wing.
Several officials said the firings had been planned before Friday.
But the calls from the acting deputy attorney general arose a day after Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator who is a strong supporter of President Trump, said on his evening show that Mr. Trump needed to “purge” Obama holdovers from the federal government. Mr. Hannity portrayed them as “saboteurs” from the “deep state” who were leaking secrets to hurt Mr. Trump.
Sean Hannity is telling Trump what to do now.
Several Democratic members of Congress said they only heard that the United States attorneys from their states were being immediately let go shortly before the Friday afternoon statement from the Justice Department. One senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of the United States attorney in that state, said that an Obama-appointed prosecutor had been instructed to vacate the office by the end of the day.
Although it was not clear whether all were given the same instructions, that United States attorney was not the only one told to clear out by the close of business. The abrupt nature of the dismissals distinguished Mr. Trump’s mass firing from Mr. Clinton’s, because the prosecutors in 1993 were not summarily told to clear out their offices.
There’s a difference between saying “Hi, we’re a new administration, we’re replacing all of you, thank you for your service” and saying “Get out by the end of today.”
It is not unusual for a new president to replace United States attorneys appointed by a predecessor, especially when there has been a change in which party controls the White House.
Still, other presidents have done it gradually in order to minimize disruption, giving those asked to resign more time to make the transition while keeping some inherited prosecutors in place, as it had appeared Mr. Trump would do with Mr. Bharara. Mr. Obama, for example, kept Mr. Rosenstein, who had been appointed by George W. Bush.
The abrupt mass firing appeared to be a change in plans for the administration, according to a statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“In January, I met with Vice President Pence and White House Counsel Donald McGahn and asked specifically whether all U.S. attorneys would be fired at once,” she said. “Mr. McGahn told me that the transition would be done in an orderly fashion to preserve continuity. Clearly this is not the case. I’m very concerned about the effect of this sudden and unexpected decision on federal law enforcement.”
Trump doesn’t understand concepts like “orderly” and “continuity.” Only libbruls care about things like that.
And while I was reading that article, the Times flashed a breaking story – one of the lawyers told to quit isn’t quitting:
Preet Bharara, the Manhattan federal prosecutor who was told to submit his resignation along with 45 others on Friday, has no plans to do so — forcing a potential showdown with President Trump and the Department of Justice.
Mr. Bharara, whose office is overseeing a case against a top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and an investigation into people close to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, has told several people that he did not hand in a resignation on Friday, as he was ordered to do by the acting deputy attorney general, Dana Boente.
He also does not intend to do so over the weekend, he said in conversations with associates, a move that could force the hand of the Trump administration.
Meaning what? Trump will send in the National Guard to escort him out? I don’t see that happening.
Mr. Bharara was asked by Mr. Trump to remain in his current post in a meeting in late November, a few weeks after the presidential election. Mr. Bharara met with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower, and then addressed reporters afterward, saying that he had been asked to remain and had given the president his promise to do so.
But Mr. Bharara was one of the 46 holdovers from the Obama administration who abruptly received a call on Friday telling him to vacate.
So Trump personally asked him to stay, and then included him on a list of people abruptly ordered to gtfo. Trump or Sessions or whoever could just say oops, Bharara was on the list by mistake, he stays. Trump or Sessions or whoever could even apologize, which would be the right thing to do, since Trump personally asked him to stay.
But I guess with Sean Hannity issuing instructions it’s a little silly to expect reasonable behavior.
Scott Pruitt is hard at working turning the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Destruction Agency.
Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, has moved to stock the top offices of the agency with like-minded conservatives — many of them skeptics of climate change and all of them intent on rolling back environmental regulations that they see as overly intrusive and harmful to business.
…
To friends and critics, Mr. Pruitt seems intent on building an E.P.A. leadership that is fundamentally at odds with the career officials, scientists and employees who carry out the agency’s missions. That might be a recipe for strife and gridlock at the federal agency tasked to keep safe the nation’s clean air and water while safeguarding the planet’s future.
“He’s the most different kind of E.P.A. administrator that’s ever been,” said Steve J. Milloy, a member of the E.P.A. transition team who runs the website JunkScience.com, which aims to debunk climate change. “He’s not coming in thinking E.P.A. is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Quite the opposite.”
And he’s not a scientist. EPA is, or should be, a very science-heavy department. Putting non-scientists (and anti-scientists at that) in charge is a short road to reality-denial.
To put it another way, the fact that EPA protections get in the way of business interests does not in any way mean they are unnecessary to protect the environment.
Gina McCarthy, who headed the E.P.A. under former President Barack Obama, said she too saw Mr. Pruitt as unique. “It’s fine to have differing opinions on how to meet the mission of the agency. Many Republican administrators have had that,” she said. “But here, for the first time, I see someone who has no commitment to the mission of the agency.”
Someone who in fact has a commitment to the destruction of the agency.
Another transition official under consideration by Mr. Pruitt for a permanent position is David Kreutzer, a senior research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the conservative Heritage Foundation who has publicly praised the benefits of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That view stands in opposition to the broad scientific consensus that increased carbon dioxide traps heat and contributes to the dangerous warming of the planet.
But, you know, sunbathing in Minneapolis in January.
The agency’s policy agenda is snapping into focus: Last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin the legal process of dismantling a major Obama-era regulation aimed at increasing the federal government’s authority over rivers, streams and wetlands in order to prevent water pollution. Also last week, Mr. Pruitt ordered the agency to walk back a program on collecting data on methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells.
This week, Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin the legal process of unwinding Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations aimed at curbing planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants, and Mr. Pruitt is expected to announce plans to begin to weaken an Obama-era rule mandating higher fuel economy standards.
A draft White House budget blueprint proposes to slash the E.P.A. budget by about 24 percent, or $2 billion from its current level of $8.1 billion, and cut employee numbers by about 20 percent from its current staff of about 15,000.
Booya! Dirty water and a heating-up planet. Thanks, Donnie!
Words and meanings. So slippery.
Like, the things that people who work for Trump say when reporters ask about the wiretap tweets.
“I don’t know anything about it,” John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said on CNN on Monday. Mr. Kelly shrugged and added that “if the president of the United States said that, he’s got his reasons to say it.”
Well yes, of course he has his reasons to say it – but are they good reasons? Reasons can be anything. His reasons can be that he’s an angry petulant narcissistic little man who hates and resents Obama because Obama is so much better than he is on pretty much any dimension you can think of. His reasons can be that he’s a loathsome malevolent racist shit who hates Obama for loathsome malevolent racist shitty reasons. His reasons can be that he’s totally fucking up his presidency and he’s angry about that and he felt like lashing out.
His poor staff though. He does these things and they have to jump as if electrocuted.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts, viewed with amazement outside the West Wing bubble, often create crises on the inside. That was never truer than when Mr. Trump began posting from his weekend retreat at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida shortly after sunrise on Saturday.
His groggy staff realized quickly that this was no typical Trump broadside, but an allegation with potentially far-reaching implications that threatened to derail a coming week that included the rollout of his redrafted travel ban and the unveiling of the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act.
It began at 6:35 a.m. with a Twitter post reading: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
Three other posts quickly followed, capped by a 7:02 rocket that read: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
That led to a succession of frantic staff conference calls, including one consultation with the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, as staff members grasped the reality that the president had opened an attack on his predecessor.
Aw. There they were, sleeping late on a Saturday morning, and wham they had to jump up and have a bunch of conference calls. Nobody wants to wake up that way, especially on a Saturday.
Mr. Trump, advisers said, was in high spirits after he fired off the posts. But by midafternoon, after returning from golf, he appeared to realize he had gone too far, although he still believed Mr. Obama had wiretapped him, according to two people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
Wow. He was all happy about it for hours. He’s that thick. It took him nearly all day to realize you actually shouldn’t accuse a former president of a felony with no evidence. On Twitter.
People close to Mr. Trump had seen the pattern before. The episode echoed repeated instances in the 2016 presidential campaign.
During the primary contests, Mr. Trump seized on a false National Enquirer article that raised a connection between the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Later, Mr. Trump justified it to skeptical campaign aides by saying, “Even if it isn’t totally true, there’s something there,” according to a former campaign official.
I guess that’s his much-vaunted (by him) skill at “negotiation”? He puts out a flaming lie as a starting point and then bargains down so that he’s left with a smaller lie? As if that’s what truth is, something you can negotiate?
Trump told a new defamatory lie about Obama today.
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017
The official POTUS account retweeted the lie.
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
— President Trump 45 Archived (@POTUS45) March 7, 2017
113 of the 122 were released by the Bush administration.
There’s also of course the complicated discussion about legality and rights and preventive detention and the possibility or impossibility of knowing what people are going to do in the future. We could just imprison all human beings because they might do something bad in future, but it wouldn’t be a good plan. But in any case he lied on the facts.
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, of the 693 former Guantánamo Bay detainees who were transferred to other countries by July 2016 — dating back to when the Bush administration opened the prison in Cuba in January 2002 — 122 are “confirmed” to have engaged in militant activity after their release.
However, the overwhelming majority of those 122 men, 113 of them, were transferred under President George W. Bush, not President Barack Obama.
Notably, about half of the men deemed recidivists are dead or in custody.
Ok so why is Bush’s number so much higher? The answer should interest Trump.
One reason is that most of the former Guantánamo detainees in the world departed the prison under Mr. Bush: 532 of the 693 former detainees who left the prison alive departed under Mr. Bush. That is because Mr. Bush decided in his second term that, as he wrote in his memoir, “the detention facility had become a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies,” and he started trying to close it.
But it is also true that in terms of percentages, Bush-era releases have been more likely to cause problems than Obama-era releases: About 35 percent of Bush-era transfers are confirmed or suspected of causing problems, while about 12 percent of Obama-era transfers fall into one of those two categories, according to the intelligence director’s office.
The difference is because the Bush administration struck diplomatic deals to repatriate large batches of prisoners to countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan in bulk, and many recidivists come from those batches. By contrast, the Obama administration developed an individualized review process by six agencies to determine whether to recommend transferring each detainee. Over time, it also developed more careful diplomatic and monitoring plans with receiving countries to ease their reintegration into society that reduced, but obviously did not eliminate, the risk of recidivism.
So what they’re saying is that the Obama admin did a better job of vetting each detainee. Huh.
The White House Monday attempted to defend President Trump’s unfounded claim that former president Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower near the end of the presidential campaign, sending out a series of administration officials — both on and off camera — to reiterate the assertion without providing supporting evidence.
Heh heh – to reiterate the assertion without providing supporting evidence. That’s elegant. Yes, Trumpisters, that is correct: mere repetition does not make a claim true. Donnie’s saying it in the first place didn’t make it true, and neither did endless re-saying it.
On Monday, senior administration officials contorted themselves trying to defend the president’s claims, which seemed to emanate largely in response to a rant on conservative talk radio and in an article on Breitbart News, the conservative website that Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, used to lead.
Speaking to reporters from the White House briefing room without cameras present, White House press secretary Sean Spicer referred reporters to his weekend statement calling on the House and Senate intelligence committees to investigate the wiretapping charges as part of their broader probe of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He refused to add clarity or context to Trump’s Twitter missives, saying neither the president nor the White House would comment further until the congressional investigations are completed.
“I’m just going to let the tweet speak for itself,” Spicer said. “I think the president speaks very candidly.”
Sigh. He may well speak candidly, but that’s not the issue. The tweet does speak for itself: it’s crazed malevolent bullshit. Neither of those observations makes it true.
An unfortunate deputy press secretary had to do most of the contorting, and it sounds painful.
Sanders admitted that she had not discussed the matter with the president, and she lacked answers to a series of questions. When asked Monday by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if the president accepted that Comey had refuted his tweets, Sanders responded: “You know, I don’t think he does.”
Like Spicer, Sanders claimed Trump’s accusations are supported by media reports, even though a list of such articles provided by the White House contained no such evidence. She also attempted to recast the president’s words with a softer tone.
“Look, the president firmly believes that the Obama administration may have tapped into the phones at Trump Tower,” Sanders said on the “Today Show” on NBC Monday. “This is something that we should look into. We’d like to know for sure.”
He firmly believes that it may have – that covers all the bases.
“Look,” Sanders said on the Today Show, “I haven’t had the chance to have the conversation directly with the president, and he’s at a much higher classification than I am, so he may have access to documents that I don’t know about, but I do know that we take this very seriously.”
Hahahaha oh god offering one’s own passionate conviction as evidence for the truth of external facts. It doesn’t matter how seriously anyone takes Trump’s deranged lie; their serious-taking doesn’t make it true that Obama bugged Trump’s phones.
They’re trying so hard to lash down the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Trump’s thrown the new version of the Pointlessly Spiteful Travel Ban Targeting Muslims Just for the Fun of It out there. Now it’s no new visa applications from an assortment of random majority-Muslim countries, as opposed to hahaha you have to get right back on the plane and go away from here.
President Trump signed a new travel ban Monday that administration officials said they hope will end legal challenges over the matter by imposing a 90-day ban on the issuance of new visas for citizens of six majority-Muslim nations.
In addition, the nation’s refugee program will be suspended for 120 days, and the United States will not accept more than 50,000 refugees in a year, down from the 110,000 cap set by the Obama administration.
What’s the actual point of all this?
Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, sent out an email asking people to sign a petition in support of the new order.
“As your President, I made a solemn promise to keep America safe,” the email signed by Trump said. “And I will NEVER stop fighting until we implement the policies you — and millions of Americans like you — voted for.”
But guess what – immigrants from majority-Muslim countries are a barely detectable risk factor for Safe America. They’re stringently vetted before they get here, and in any case terror attacks just don’t make up a significant fraction of causes of death here. Meanwhile, Trump is working on taking health insurance away from millions of people – that right there is a much more of a blow against Safe America than immigration is. Trump is also working to undo what few gun control regulations there are. He’s also working on gutting or shutting down the EPA. He moved to make our water much more toxic. Yes that’s right: he wants us to have water that is more toxic. What was that about a a solemn promise to keep America safe again?
President Donald Trump just signed an executive order to roll back President Barack Obama’s clean water rule. That environmental regulation was issued in 2015 to give the federal government authority to limit pollution in major bodies of water, rivers, streams, and wetlands.
Death by polluted water is not as dramatic as death by gunfire or bomb, but it kills a lot more people.
So, yeah. His “solemn promise” was just more of his bullshit. He’s working to kill more of us.
Ishaan Tharoor on how Trump is like other authoritarian rulers:
Observers such as Russian dissident Garry Kasparov see the grim parallels to overtly authoritarian rulers. Kasparov, a staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has said that Trump reminds him of the demagogic Russian leader. By targeting Obama, Trump is embracing an old tradition.
The tradition of going after one’s predecessor in power is very familiar to anyone from an authoritarian regime. Purges, scapegoating, etc.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 5, 2017
One of the fixed contradictions of the strongman ethos is that he and his followers must always play the victim, even when holding power.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 5, 2017
Trump doesn’t worry about contradictions, of course, because he doesn’t know there is such a thing.
America’s deep political polarization means that millions of people will believe Trump’s tweets over the efforts of scrupulous fact-checkers.
“Conspiracy thinking has been normalized in American politics in a way that almost nobody could have expected a year ago,” wrote American political scientist Paul Musgrave. “Today, it is plausible to think that U.S. politics could soon resemble cultures that most Americans once regarded as conspiratorial or paranoid.”
Like Turkey perhaps?
Mahir Zeynalov, a Turkish journalist and critic of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wrote last year about the way both Erdogan and Trump successfully bludgeon the press to spin their own message.
“The reason why the fact-checking mechanism in these societies does not work is because polarization is so high that no one believes what the other camp is saying,” wrote Zeynalov. “If CNN or the New York Times claims that Trump is lying, they’re immediately branded as dishonest liberal media.”
That has indeed become the default response of the Trump administration in its short time in power. An editorial this past week in German newsweekly Der Spiegel delved into how such tactics eventually lead to a divided and befuddled public: “The effect of all of this is that truth and lies are being blurred, the public is growing disoriented and, exhausted, it is tuning out.”
The editorial also raised the connection to Erdogan’s Turkey: “Erdogan and Trump are positioning themselves as the only ones capable of truly understanding the people and speaking for them. It’s their view that freedom of the press does not protect democracy and that the press isn’t reverent enough to them and is therefore useless,” wrote Der Spiegel. “They believe that the words that come from their mouths as powerful leaders are the truth and that the media, when it strays from them, is telling lies. That’s autocratic thinking — and it is how you sustain a dictatorship.“
Emphasis Tharoor’s.
Karen Tumulty at the Post has also noticed Trump’s eccentric methods.
Donald Trump’s presidency has veered onto a road with no centerlines or guardrails.
The president’s accusation Saturday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had tapped his phone “during the very sacred election process” escalated on Sunday into the White House’s call for a congressional investigation of that evidence-free claim.
The audacious tactic was a familiar one for Trump, who has little regard for norms and conventions. When he wants to change a subject, he often does it by touching a match to the dry tinder of a sketchy conspiracy theory.
This is what I’m saying. His two-step process is “audacious” or just plain bonkers.
People who can throw nukes shouldn’t carry on that way.
But the voice of a U.S. commander in chief carries far greater weight than that of just about anyone else on the planet. Trump’s detractors say the way he uses that platform has worrisome implications that go far beyond the sensation he creates on social media and his ability to dominate the news.
Ya think?
“We have as president a man who is erratic, vindictive, volatile, obsessive, a chronic liar, and prone to believe in conspiracy theories,” said conservative commentator Peter Wehner, who was the top policy strategist in George W. Bush’s White House. “And you can count on the fact that there will be more to come, since when people like Donald Trump gain power they become less, not more, restrained.”
Nor does Trump appear to have a governing apparatus around him that can temper and channel his impulses.
In short he’s a clear and present danger.
“When the president goes off and does what he did within the last few days, of just going ahead and tweeting without checking on things, there’s something wrong. There’s something wrong in terms of the discipline within the White House and how you operate,” Leon Panetta, a White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton and CIA director during the Obama administration, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
What I’m saying. You don’t just make shit up, or see some unreliable clown make shit up, and treat that as reliable.