SATURDAY NIGHT I WAS DOWNTOWN, WORKIN' FOR THE FBI

In 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”  America’s voice of totalitarianism, Fox News, has been working overtime in the past few days to discredit not only Robert Mueller, but even the entire FBI.  Now senior congressional Republicans have joined the chorus.

That’s a pretty good sign that something big is going down in the next few days.  Maybe Robert Mueller is preparing to indict a member of Donald Trump’s family.  Maybe Trump is preparing to fire Robert Mueller.  Maybe both those things will happen, or maybe neither.  It’s possible that I’m misreading the tea leaves.

But there must be some reason that Donald Trump and his enablers have begun to hammer away at their bogus claim that there’s anti-Republican bias in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  That’s obvious bullshit. 

James Comey is a Republican, who famously chose to resurrect Hillary Clinton’s email issues in the last days of the campaign, which arguably won the election for Donald Trump.  Robert Mueller is a Republican, who was appointed as FBI Director by Republican President George W. Bush, and then appointed as Special Counsel this year by Republican Rod Rosenstein, who was appointed Deputy Attorney General by Republican Jeff Sessions, who was appointed Attorney General by Republican Donald Trump.  The new FBI Director, Christopher Wray, is a Republican, also appointed by Donald Trump.  Perhaps you’ve noticed a pattern there.  It’s remarkable that all those Republicans have turned out to be anti-Republican.  Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt.

Defending the FBI doesn’t come naturally to me.  I came of age in the J. Edgar Hoover era.  Hoover spent 48 years (1924-1972), turning the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a corrupt, anti-democratic national police force that was more focused on undermining the civil liberties of American political and social minorities than on rooting out organized crime.  Hoover was willing to go after famous but relatively small-time bank robbers like John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly.  But he was so reluctant to prosecute big-time mobsters that for years, he denied that the Mafia even existed.  It wasn’t until 1957, when local law enforcement in New York busted a conclave of over 60 mob bosses in Apalachin, NY (who’d been summoned by Vito Genovese to ratify his takeover of the Lucky Luciano crime family), that Hoover was forced to acknowledge that maybe there was something to this Cosa Nostra business.

In recent decades, under the leadership of straight arrows like Robert Mueller, the FBI finally began to live up to its original image of incorruptible crime busters.  Maybe that’s the problem.  Politicians with skeletons in their closets are uncomfortable around incorruptible crime busters.  Whatever the reason, Republicans are talking like they want to dismantle America’s domestic criminal intelligence agency. 

I’ve been trying to figure out why they’d want to do that.  The short answer, of course, is that they are desperate to stop Robert Mueller’s investigation.  But that still begs the question of why.  It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans were deeply suspicious of Russia and Vladimir Putin. 

Beyond that unexplained change of heart, Republicans must know that they’ll look bad if they help Trump interfere with the Mueller investigation.  And as recent elections in Virginia and Alabama have demonstrated, Republicans are learning that the closer their identification with Donald Trump, the bigger the Democratic turnout.    

For the past year, as Trump’s mental deterioration has become more and more obvious, I’ve wondered why Republicans don’t invoke the 25th Amendment and replace him with Mike Pence, a bland and tractable party apparatchik who’ll happily do whatever McConnell and Ryan tell him to do. 

I don’t buy any explanation that involves respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or anything else that requires me to believe that Republicans have principles.  The only thing that congressional Republicans respect is their donors’ money.  They’re on the verge of realizing their dream, of passing legislation that will make rich people even richer.  What’s left to do after that? 

I think Republicans know that the jig is up.  At least a few of them – e.g. Nunes and Chaffetz – are likely to be among Mueller’s secondary targets.  All of them see polls showing Trump’s support dwindling, even among his base.  They also see the #MeToo movement, and they know it’s coming for them – if not them personally, then for people like them. 

Some of them have decided to get out while the getting’s good.  Others may try to stick around and see what they can get away with.  Maybe totalitarianism isn’t so bad after all, as long as they’re in charge of it.  If they get away with subverting the Constitution, well, long live the thousand-year imperium.  If someone – Mueller, or state prosecutors, or a Democratic Congress after the 2018 elections – saves constitutional democracy, most of them will still walk away laughing.  Their billionaire patrons will take care of them once they leave Congress.  They’ll find work as lobbyists, or in think tanks, or as commentators on Fox or the new Sinclair network.

And you know what?  Much as I’d like to see most of them behind bars, I’d settle for just getting rid of them.  That’s my best offer to Republicans:  get out of Dodge and spend your time counting your money.  Stay out of the way while the good guys clean up the mess you’ve left behind. 

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG

Fifteen months ago, I was really dumb.  I realize now that I’d unconsciously taken progress for granted.  The world was getting better and would keep getting better.  The improvements often happened more slowly than I liked, and were punctuated by occasional setbacks.  But I assumed the setbacks would be temporary, and we’d keep moving forward. 

I never dreamed that I’d have to worry about Russian espionage, or Nazi and Klan thugs marching proudly in American cities, or the swift destruction of the social safety net, or the realistic prospect of a nuclear war.  Things like that just weren’t supposed to happen.  It’s as if the bubonic plague had suddenly made a comeback, or sabretooth tigers were roaming the streets.

Until 2017, the worst year I’d lived through, strictly in terms of politics, was 1968.  Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, there were riots in major cities, and there was a seemingly endless war in Vietnam.  And the year ended with the election of Richard Nixon as president. 

I never thought any year could top that.  But the awfulness of 1968 seems in retrospect to have been almost normal compared to the insanity of 2017.  Donald Trump is a madman, and his madness has been contagious.  I pay an unhealthy amount of attention to the news, and yet I’m always aware on some level that while I’m focused on Trump Atrocity X, he and his henchmen are working on at least a dozen terrible things that I don’t even know about.  They’re like termites, gnawing away at the Constitution.

Here are a few of 2017’s lowlights.  Two years ago, not even the most pessimistic (or drunk) political commentator would have predicted that:

1.      A major party candidate would conspire with Russia to steal the presidency;

2.      The Republican Party would go completely rogue, abandoning everything they’ve claimed to stand for in the past fifty years (fiscal responsibility, family values, and virtually every other conservative principle);

3.      Police in major American cities would murder Black men with impunity, and get away with it, despite unambiguous video evidence of their crimes;

4.      Nazis and Klansmen would rally openly in American cities, and the president would say that some of them were fine people;

5.      The new president’s closest advisors would be criminals and foreign agents, and all of them would turn out to be bumbling morons;

6.      Republican congressional majorities would choose not to investigate malfeasance in the Executive Branch crimes, and would instead actively work to hamper those investigations;

7.      The president, with the acquiescence of those same Republican congressional majorities, would threaten members of the press, his political opponents, and even branches of the government he’s ostensibly in charge of;

8.      And most importantly, that the president would consistently and relentlessly tells obvious, demonstrable lies in order to persuade his hardcore supporters to believe him rather than the evidence of their own eyes and ears.  And that 30% of the electorate would drink the Kool Aid.

Despite all that, 2017 wasn’t a total loss.  There were also surprising events on the positive side of the ledger. 

1.      Women who were outraged that the Electoral College, an 18th century institution designed to give slave states a bit of an edge in electing presidents, awarded the presidency to a misogynist who got 3 million fewer votes than a highly qualified woman, organized The Resistance.  They rallied the day after Trump’s inauguration and drew larger crowds than he did.  In doing so, they exposed his vanity and insecurity, and punctured his aura of inevitability.

2.      Republicans – the entirety of the leadership, and virtually all of the congressional rank and file – were exposed as frauds.  They lied about having a plan to replace Obamacare.  Their ranks were split between those who were merely venal and those who were outright nihilists.  Collectively, they proved incapable of governing, despite having control of the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

3.      Congressional Democrats, on the other hand, remained unified all year long, and were able to throw sand in the gears of some Republican initiatives.

4.      After a slow start in special elections, Democrats swamped Republicans in all of the important November off year elections.  That’s real evidence that voters are turning on Trump Republicans.

5.      Robert Mueller, long may he wave, has quietly and methodically put the squeeze on Donald Trump, and Trump is clearly frightened.  Trump’s options are limited – pardon his cronies and himself, and/or find a way to fire Mueller – but if he does either, it will likely further erode his base of support.  If Trump believes he can outsmart Mueller, he’s in for a surprise.  I’m confident that Mueller has developed backup plans to counter Trump’s potential moves.  History will convict Trump, even if contemporary Republicans won’t.

6.      And finally, there’s the #MeToo movement.  Women who’ve been ignored or mocked for years are refusing to be shushed, and they’re taking down powerful men in entertainment, the press, and finally in politics.  Democrats have gotten rid of their bad apples, even as Republicans have responded by embracing a child molester in Alabama.  This will not end well for Republicans.  Word on the street is that the Washington Post is preparing to publish a massive expose, identifying 20-30 Congressmen (from both parties) as sexual predators.  I’ll bet that number is low.  Once the Post story comes out, my guess is that many more women will come forward.  In the process, there will be renewed attention on the sexual predator in the White House. 

Remarkably, I find that I’ve circled back to optimism despite all the damage that Trump and his minions have done.  At the end of the yearlong Battle of Britain, when it was clear that Germany’s relentless air attacks had failed to bomb England into submission, Winston Churchill had a message for Adolf Hitler: “We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst and we will do our best." 

If Donald Trump thinks that 2017 was a rough year, he’s really going to hate 2018.

THE PAJAMA GAME

Random thoughts while waiting for Mueller’s next move.

Trump supporters and some media folks are obsessing about the specific charge that Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to. They’re missing the point. By itself, the charge of lying to the FBI doesn’t mean much, except that it demonstrates that Flynn knew that the Trump campaign was guilty of some serious wrongdoing and was desperate to cover it up. This was a plea bargain, for crying out loud. Lying to the FBI is not the only crime Flynn committed. It was simply the crime whose sentence was consistent with the deal Flynn struck with Robert Mueller. Mueller is hunting bigger game than Mike Flynn. His goal is to find out what Flynn was trying to cover up, and in return of a lesser charge with a lighter sentence, Flynn has agreed to tell him.

Enter Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, to try to muddy the waters. First came a faux controversy over the authorship of the Saturday tweet in which Trump essentially confessed to obstructing justice. The tweet in question, which came from @realDonaldTrump’s twitter account, included this remarkable statement: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies.” If Trump knew Flynn lied to the FBI and then tried to get the FBI (through then-Director James Comey) to drop its investigation, that’s obstruction right there.

Now Trump’s people are trying to walk it back, claiming that the tweet was written by John Dowd. I’m not convinced that’s true – the tone is fairly Trump-like, and the use of “pled” rather than the preferred “pleaded” is unlawyerlike. But I’m also not convinced that it matters. Unless Trump is claiming that Dowd commandeered his phone and sent a rogue message without his approval, then the authorship is irrelevant. A tweet written for him by an attorney is no different than a speech written for him by a speechwriter. If he said it or sent it, it’s on him.

By Sunday, Trump was in full panic mode. He attacked the FBI and the Department of Justice (or “Justice” Department, as he put it). These attacks make him look weak, as though he isn’t in control of the agencies who report to him. Which may be true, but still isn’t a great look for a big important guy like Donald Trump. Perhaps more importantly, it puts his new FBI Director, Christopher Wray, in an awkward position. The FBI loved James Comey, and they’ll be waiting to see whether his replacement comes to their defense. The FBI has a lot of incriminating information on the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Trump has no idea of the trouble they could bring down on his head if he gets them really mad.

By Sunday, Trump’s defenders seemed to be conceding his guilt. Their new defense is that the God-Emperor can do no wrong. As the head of the Justice (or “Justice”) Department, whatever he does is, by definition, just (or “just”). That is not a defense that will hold up in court, and if that’s the best his attorneys can come up with, they’d be well advised to start negotiating a plea bargain immediately.

Meanwhile, the press has done a good job of filling in the blanks in the Flynn indictment. Jared Kushner was quickly identified as the Very Senior transition official giving Flynn his marching orders. It looks like KT McFarland is the Senior transition official, and that McFarland consulted several other campaign luminaries, including Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Stephen Miller, and Kellyanne Conway, before advising Flynn on dealing with Russia during the transition. McFarland’s two main qualifications for a senior leadership position in Trump’s inner circle were that she’d been a Fox News analyst, and had a long history of hating Hillary Clinton.

Josh Marshall points out that Kushner, McFarland, and Miller (along with Dan Scavino and official Trump pants steamer Hope Hicks) were with Trump during his “lost weekend” at Bedminster in early May, when he made the fateful decision to fire James Comey. Trump only hires the best people.

Finally, you may be wondering about the Cary Grant lookalike in the photo that accompanies this post. Is he the next James Bond? The new Batman? Sadly, no. It’s Texas Republican Congressman Blake Farenthold. He‘s been identified as the congressman who used $84,000 taxpayer dollars to settle a sexual harassment suit by his communications director (who is not the lady in the photo). Farenthold’s background is pretty much what you’d expect – he got his start in politics as a right-wing talk radio host. The citizens of Corpus Christi and environs keep sending him back to Congress despite the fact that this photo has been part of the public record since his first campaign. Stay classy, Republicans.

THE TOAST OF THE TOWN

THE TOAST OF THE TOWN:  I love, L-U-V, the way Robert Mueller has handled the indictments so far.  There’s an initial shock, then a pause, and then new information that sends a clear message to his real target, Donald Trump.  And the message is:  You’re screwed.  In October, Mueller announced the Manafort/Gates indictments and let the White House gloat about how those crimes had nothing to do with Trump.  And then Mueller dropped the news about the George Papadopoulos guilty plea. 

On Friday, Mueller announced that Mike Flynn had pleaded guilty to a relatively minor procedural offense, and the White House once again took a victory lap, even referring to Flynn as an Obama administration official.  When Mueller released the actual charges, though, they indicated that Flynn was prepared to testify that a “senior” and “very senior” member of Trump’s transition team had ordered him to communicate with the Russians.  NBC has identified Mr. Very Senior as Jared Kushner.  The nominal head of the transition team was VP-Elect Michael Pence, so perhaps he’s Mr. Senior.  We’ll know soon.

An article in Slate by Jed Handelsman Shugerman (link below) suggests that Mueller and his team also crafted Manafort’s and Flynn’s indictments so as to limit the value of any pardons Trump might decide to offer.  Manafort and Flynn could have been charged with additional crimes.  Shugerman suggests that Mueller made a strategic decision not to do so, for the time being, at least, to leave the door open for state prosecutors (who are beyond the reach of Trump’s pardon power) to bring those additional charges without running into a defense of double jeopardy.   

I look forward to admiring similar handiwork in the coming indictments against Very Senior and Senior campaign officials.

Beyond pardons, the other weapon that Trump theoretically has at his disposal is simply to fire Mueller and disband his team.  That would essentially be an admission of guilt, but Trump and congressional Republicans are probably beyond caring at this point. Republicans are nihilists now.  Their only goal is to grab as much loot as they can carry while running for the door.  Ignoring one more constitutional crisis won’t faze them.

But Mueller’s team could continue to function outside the Justice Department.  They could pack up their files and move to New York, where they could work for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  It was widely reported last August that the two men were collaborating on the Manafort investigation. 

My feeling is that Mueller has left Trump without viable options.  He can blow everything up immediately – fire Mueller, pardon everyone he cares about, and hope that his usual smoke and mirrors routine will be enough to allow Republicans to hang on to the House of Representatives next November.  Or he can wait and watch Mueller’s legal team squeeze his family and his associates like a boa constrictor. 

Trump’s not a guy who’s good at waiting and watching, so if I were a betting man, I’d wager that he pardons his family and himself of all federal charges.  But that won’t save them.  They’ll all face criminal charges in other jurisdictions.   As #NeverTrump Republican Rick Wilson has said, Robert Mueller is holding a royal flush, and Donald Trump is trying to bluff with a pair of twos.

Mueller will get an opportunity to tell his story somewhere, and then it will be up to us, as citizens, to throw the rascals out.  It sounds melodramatic, but the elections of 2018 and 2020 will decide whether we keep our democracy or continue our descent into oligarchy.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/12/robert_mueller_s_deal_with_michael_flynn_neutralizes_trump_s_pardon_power.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_tw_top

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST:  The single charge against Mike Flynn – ten years for lying to the FBI – doesn’t look like much, but it’s a huge step forward for Robert Mueller, and gut punch for the Trump crime family.  Flynn could have been charged with much more serious crimes, including espionage.  The fact that he’s getting off relatively lightly means that he’s provided evidence against one or more higher-ups.  There are only four of those:  Donald Trump, Don Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Mike Pence.  

Good times for the good guys.

PARDON ME BOY

My friend Corinne points out that, whatever Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, the current House of Representatives is highly unlikely to impeach him, which is all too true.  It is also true that there’s an irredeemable core of Trump support that might be as much as 30% of the electorate, and perhaps as much as 75% of House Republicans.  Having said that, though, I wonder if, as the dominoes keep falling, we might see enough Republicans in the House, especially those who have decided not to run for re-election, decide to go out in a blaze of glory, finally putting country over party.  I wouldn’t bet money on that outcome, but it’s at least within the realm of possibility.  A simple majority vote is all it would take to send the issue to the Senate for trial.

My theory is that Flynn’s testimony will, at a minimum, provide enough evidence to indict Kushner and Don Jr.  We know that opinions differ on whether it’s possible to indict a president whose currently in office.  I’d love to see Mueller try to indict Trump and force the Supreme Court to make the call.  But failing that, Mueller can at least name Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator.  If Trump were then to pardon his family, or anyone else indicted as a co-conspirator, there’s a Supreme Court decision (Ex Parte Grossman 267 U.S. 87 (1925)) which suggests that such a pardon would be an impeachable offense.  Or so I’ve read; attorneys out there can correct me if I’ve misinterpreted the decision.

Otherwise, impeachment will have to wait until after the 2018 election.  But while impeachment is my preferred remedy, my Plan B has always been New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  A fair amount of the illegal activity happened in New York, where it broke state as well as federal laws.  My guess is that Kushner is in deep doodoo in his home state. 

Jared does not strike me as a standup guy.  If he’s faced with a long prison sentence, particularly if the sentence is coupled with asset forfeiture, I think he’d turn on his in-laws in a heartbeat.  Or maybe two or three heartbeats. 

However long it takes, I'm optimistic that the good guys will win.  Trump has ways to delay his day of reckoning, but eventually he's going down.

KEEPIN' ALL MY SECRETS SAFE TONIGHT

Thanksgiving Day brought news that Mike Flynn’s attorney has withdrawn Flynn from a joint defense agreement (in which the information their attorneys share is protected by a form of joint attorney-client privilege) with Donald Trump.  This seems significant.  But assuming for the moment that it’s true, what does it mean?

The simplest conclusion (on which the New York Times and others have based their analysis) is that it means Flynn has flipped, and is now telling everything he knows to Robert Mueller, in exchange for a lighter sentence for his son and himself (both of whom may have been facing some very serious, “die in prison,” charges, including espionage).  If this is true, it’s bad news for Donald Trump and his crime family.

Remember that protecting Mike Flynn was an uncharacteristically high priority for Donald Trump, who has never been known for his loyalty to former employees.  He asked James Comey point blank not to pursue charges against Flynn, and fired him when he refused to comply.  It’s fair to wonder why Trump would go to such extremes if Flynn didn’t have some pretty damaging information to barter with federal prosecutors. 

Heather Digby Parton wonders whether Trump was dumb enough to sign off on Flynn’s scheme to kidnap the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen and turn him over to Turkish authorities in return for $15 million.  She admits that’s wild speculation, and I only include it here because I can’t resist quoting her summary: “This plot would easily be one that Trump and his crazy pal Flynn would think was very, very clever. Flynn had a vendetta against the Intelligence Community and Trump is a fucking moron.”

But wait!  Another theory has been advanced about the sudden severing of ties between Flynn and Trump.  Perhaps Flynn’s attorney has learned that one or more of Trump’s lawyers have been charged with obstruction of justice, and he wants to keep them far away from his client, who is already in enough trouble.  If this is true, it too is bad news for Donald Trump and his crime family.

The case for the second scenario is this.  Consider the late October indictments of Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates, which were followed later that day by a third indictment, of one George Papadopoulos, who appears to have had nothing to do with the crimes Manafort and Gates were charged with.  Why, we might wonder, did Mueller unseal all three indictments on the same day, along with the information that Papadopoulos had been cooperating with Mueller for months?

Scenario number two posits that Mueller was using Papadopoulos to bait a trap for Trump’s attorneys.  He gave them something serious to worry about, such as whether Papadopoulos had been wearing a wire in conversations with White House personnel, and if so, who in the White House might have said something incriminating.  It’s not inconceivable that one of these lawyers might have taken the bait and either deliberately or inadvertently broke the law.  If so, it would mean that at least one of Trump’s attorneys is himself in serious legal trouble.

The good news is that either scenario is bad news for Donald J. Trump and his co-conspirators.  And there are a lot of co-conspirators. 

In fact, there are so many criminals in Donald Trump’s orbit that it’s hard to keep track of them all, and what they’ve allegedly done.  You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, as the saying goes.  Luckily, Seth Abramson provided just such a scorecard on his twitter feed last week.  Here are Abramson’s top 25 investigative angles (complete with likely suspects and/or witnesses) in the Trump-Russia scandal.

1.      Hacking of DNC/Clinton (Guccifer, Stone, FancyBear et. al.);

2.      Illicit Sanctions Negotiations (Page, Sessions, Papadopoulos, Kislyak et. al.);

3.      Clandestine GOP Platform Changes (Gordon, Manafort et. al.);

4.      Clandestine Foreign Agents in Government A (Flynn, Gulen, Turkish officials et. al.);

5.      Clandestine Foreign Agents in Government B (Manafort, Gates, Deripaska et. al.);

6.      Data Analytics Collusion and Social Media Propaganda (Kushner, Mercer, Cambridge Analytica et. al);

7.      Obstruction of Justice A [Comey Firing] (Trump, Yates, Sessions, Miller, Comey, Lavrov, Kislyak, Hicks et. al.);

8.      Obstruction of Justice B [Trump Jr. Statement] (Trump, Trump Jr., Miller, Hicks et. al.);

9.      Making False Statements and/or Perjury A (Sessions);

10.   Making False Statements and/or Perjury B (Flynn);

11.   Making False Statements and/or Perjury C (Kushner);

12.   Making False Statements and/or Perjury D (Page);

13.   Making False Statements and/or Perjury E (Papadopoulos);

14.   Money Laundering (Manafort, Gates, et. al.);

15.   Espionage [Putin Backchannel] (Kushner, Flynn, Kislyak, et. al.);

16.   Clandestine Trump Tower Moscow Agreement [2013 to 2017] (Trump, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, Kremlin officials et. al.);

17.   Clandestine Trump-Putin Meeting Plans (Clovis, Papadopoulos, Dearborn, Page, Mifsud, Millian et. al.);

18.   Clandestine Outreach to Pro-Putin Ukrainian Officials (Manafort, Deripaska et. al.);

19.   Possible Trump-Rosneft Collusion (Steele, Page, Lavrov, Peskov et. al.);

20.   Kremlin Kompromat [Trump Indiscretions] (Trump, Schiller, Agalarov, Ritz Moscow staff, Trump org employees, Ritz visitors, Sarka et. al.);

21.   Kremlin Kompromat [HRC/Ukraine] (Veselnitskaya, Kaveladze, Akhmetshin, Goldstone, Emin Agalarov, Kushner, Manafort, Trump Jr.);

22.   Clandestine Trump-Putin Meeting Plans B (Torshin, Rogozin, Clarke, NRA et. al.);

23.   Emoluments Violations [Russian Investors] (Eric Trump, Don Jr., Ivanka Trump, Kushner, Dodson, Gorka et. al.);

24.   WikiLeaks (Trump, Assange, Trump Jr., Kushner, Rohrabacher et. al.);

25.   Suspicious Contacts in Other Nations (Papadopoulos, Kammenos, and Putin in Greece; Gordon, Page, Orbán, Finkelstein, and Schmitz in Hungary; Papadopoulos in the UK and Israel)

Our 45th president appears on the list four times, but that’s only good enough, or bad enough, to tie for second place with Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr.  Jared Kushner, jack of all trades and master of none, tops the list with no fewer than six mentions.  Among the famous names, Mike Flynn brings up the rear with three mentions.  All The President’s Men, 21st century edition – the President’s son and son-in-law, his campaign manager, and his Director of National Security, plus the Colluder in Chief himself. 

Donald Trump has spent the past year proving the truth of Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”  These guys were minor league grifters who could probably have continued to fly under the radar, paying the occasional multi-million dollar fine, but staying out of jail – until Donald Trump decided to run for president.  When he stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight, it was soon clear that he wasn’t ready for prime time.  He’s tried to bluff, bully, and buy his way out of trouble.  Robert Mueller isn’t impressed.

Remember that, because Mueller runs a tight ship, everything here is just speculation.  So far.

One value of a list like Abramson’s is that it reminds us of the complexity of Mueller’s task.  No one is more impatient than I am for a tsunami of indictments, but I trust Mueller and I’d rather he did it right than did it fast.

HOLIDAY RE-RUNS: TALKING TURKEY REDUX

Last year at Thanksgiving, I was in a foul mood.  The last thing I wanted to do at holiday gatherings was listen to jubilant Trump voters crow about their victory.  So I developed a strategy that I hoped would turn that triumphalism against itself.  I never got a chance to use it, because I didn’t run into any Deplorables during the holidays last year.  And I was appropriately grateful for that!

This year, a fair amount of air has leaked out of the Trump balloon.  The press can always find Cult 45 members who’ll swear eternal fealty to Trump.  But serious polls show that among rank and file GOPers, there’s buyer’s remorse going on.  Not that they’d vote for Hillary, heaven forfend, but some of them understand that their boy has a few more issues than they’d expected.

But on the off chance that you (or I) are forced to interact with a True Believer over the holidays, I decided to update my original post.  My advice is to avoid criticizing Trump directly and force Trump supporters to defend him.  Here are a few questions to stimulate that sort of conversation.

1.      Do you admire Trump’s long history of sexual assault, infidelity, and pussy-grabbing? Which one of those things do you like the most? For men: Do you wish you could get away with those things too? For women: Would it be OK if your husband or father did those things?  [If they deny that the Access Hollywood conversation with Billy Bush happened, here’s a YouTube recording you can play for them.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7PM9kwFwnc

2.      Are you impressed by the way Trump lies so easily, changing his story at will, even when there is video evidence to prove he’s being untruthful? Do you wish you could lie and get away with it like he does? Which of the other Ten Commandments would you like to be able to get away with breaking?

3.      Do you admire the way he’s cheated his business partners? Or the fact he’s walked away from four bankruptcies while leaving his partners and creditors holding the bag? Do you wish you could cheat people and get away with it like he does?

4.      Do you like his attacks on minorities? Which minority group is the worst, Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, or Gays? After Trump deports Mexicans and Muslims, which group should he deport next? Which African country should be forced take the African-Americans we deport? Should we send Jews to Israel, or to the European country their ancestors came from? And where should we deport Gay people?

5.      How much do you hate science? Which branch of science do you hate the most? Which animal do you hope goes extinct first, tigers, rhinos, elephants, or gorillas?

6.      Do you hate Democrats more than you hate pedophiles?  What exactly do you admire about pedophiles?

7.      Do you agree with Donald Trump that if a man who’s been accused of sexual harassment denies the charges, we should believe him and doubt his alleged victims?  If so, do you believe Bill Clinton’s denials? 

8.      On November 19, 2017, a Trump supporter said on CNN, “If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him, 'Hold on a second. I need to check with the President if it's true.'”  Who do you trust more, Donald Trump or Jesus Christ?  Would you support doing away with Christmas and making Donald Trump’s birthday a big national holiday?  Which of our current holidays would you give up for a national Trump Day?

I’m grateful for everyone who reads what I write.  I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

MAN SMART, WOMAN SMARTER

I admit I didn’t see this coming.  When 63 million voters gave Donald Trump a pass on “grab ‘em by the pussy,” I thought we were entering a new dark age of sexual harassment.  A year later, what we’re seeing looks more like the French Revolution.  2017 will be remembered as the time when women said, “ENOUGH!”  Vive la Resistance!

Predictably, the misogynist Right is trying to orchestrate a backlash.  They’re attacking the #MeToo Movement from two angles.  First, they raise the specter of false accusations.  Then they cite the Jezebel Spirit of every woman, against which red blooded men are apparently helpless.  They assert that Mike Pence’s neo-Puritanism is the only reasonable response to those concerns.  The only way that men can protect themselves against the Temptations of Eve is to avoid hiring women in the first place. 

Despite the high WTF quotient of that position, it would be a mistake to underestimate the appeal of neo-Puritanism.  It’s likely that (as we’ve seen with racism and fascism) there’s an undercurrent of Puritanism in this country, focused less on enforcing traditional virtues and more on supporting a traditional patriarchal worldview.  Puritanism is one manifestation of patriarchy, and patriarchy always winds up blaming women for any friction between the sexes.  

As Exhibit A, I offer Pastor Franklin Raddish of the Capitol Hill Independent Baptist Ministries.  Raddish supports Roy Moore because “there’s a war on men.” Not only that, but “more women are sexual predators than men.  Women are chasing young boys up and down the road, but we don't hear about that because it's not PC.”  I haven’t seen any women chasing young boys on my block.  But maybe things are different in Alabama.  (Well, of course things are different in Alabama.)

With that long prologue out of the way, I’d like to share a memory from 1980, when Senator Ted Kennedy decided to challenge sitting President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination.  I don’t remember the author or the publication, but I do remember having read an article with one specific comment that has stuck with me for 37 years.  The author was an ardent feminist who was supporting Kennedy.  She recounted a conversation with another feminist who was dismayed, and asked how any feminist could support such a notorious womanizer.  He cheats on his wife!  And what about Chappaquiddick?  The author replied, “That’s easy.  Marry Carter.  Vote for Kennedy.”

Since I tend to be a pragmatist myself, I was impressed with her reasoning.  (Oh by the way, for you young folks, spoiler alert: Carter won the nomination, but lost the election to Ronald Reagan.)

I would elaborate upon that unknown feminist’s remarks this way.  We know that we’ve had great leaders whose sex lives have been sketchy.  Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his teenage slave, Sally Hemings.  FDR had a mistress.  Outside of elective politics, Martin Luther King, Jr. was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. 

It’s not that their infidelity made them good leaders.  It’s that the character traits required to be a good husband are different than those required to be effective as a leader of a political party or a political movement.  Different roles demand different skillsets, though they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

OK, and so what? 

My guess is that we’ll soon learn that there are more sexual harassers in Congress.  Maybe quite a few of them.  Some of them will be Democrats.  Both parties will have to decide whether to purge their bad apples or leave them in office, at least until the next election.  We can be pretty sure that the Republican Party’s top priority will be to preserve its congressional majorities, even if it requires them to overlook some pretty vile behavior.  

The Democratic response is less predictable, and making the right decision may be more complicated than it seems.  Why?  Consider all the damage Trump and the Republicans have been able to do in the ten months since his inauguration.  Can we really afford to risk giving the bad guys another two, four, or even six years to work their mischief while we recruit a new generation of harassment-free candidates? 

I understand the impulse to wipe the slate clean and start over, and I’m reluctantly coming around to the view that Al Franken should resign, now that a second woman has come forward to accuse him of ass-grabbing.  As long as he’s in the Senate, Franken will be the poster boy for the Republican Whataboutist defense of Trump and Roy Moore.  But I’ll be honest.  A big part of my comfort with saying goodbye to Al Franken is because his successor would be appointed by a Democratic governor.  

I still believe that if Democrats treat people like Franken (the ones who admit they’ve done wrong and are willing to take their medicine) no differently than scum like Roy Moore and Donald Trump (who deny everything and threaten their accusers), there will likely be unintended and unpleasant consequences.  A year later, we may realize that we’ve taken one step forward and two steps back.   

YOU GOT YOUR DEMONS, YOU GOT DESIRES, WELL I GOT A FEW OF MY OWN

Already this fall, we’ve seen dozens of prominent men exposed as sexual predators.  It started in show business and has now spread to journalism and politics.  It seems certain that this is the beginning, rather than the end, of those revelations.

I hadn’t thought to write about this topic, because I’m a guy, and women should drive this particular conversation.  But when it comes to offering opinions, I can resist everything except temptation.  A recent Facebook post by Mira Shani posed what I think is an important question.  She first asked what her women friends thought about Louis C.K.’s apology.  Since I’m not a woman, I stayed out of that conversation.  I can take a hint.

As it happens, I’d heard of Louis C.K., but I’m unfamiliar with his work.  I don’t watch TV, and the only film I’ve seen in his IMDb acting credits was American Hustle.  Whatever his contribution to that film was, I don’t remember it.  I looked at his letter, and for the record, it struck me as better than most, although that’s a really low bar.  He admitted that the allegations against him were true, and that they were serious.  He expressed remorse (although as many have noted, he didn’t use any variants of the words “sorry” or “apologize”). He ended by saying that it was time for him to shut up and listen.

On a scale of 1-10, I give his confession an 8.  But I’m more interested in another question that Mira posed, which was how those who’d previously enjoyed his work should relate to it now.  The remainder of this post is me elaborating on that question, and then trying to answer it.  So here goes.

Is it desirable, or even possible, to separate the artist from the art?  Are we obliged to revise our evaluation of the work of artists (and people in other fields) who turn out to be deeply flawed in some way?  And is being a sexual predator uniquely disqualifying in a way that other non-virtuous behavior (for instance substance abuse, adultery, or murder) is not? 

Some of the men currently under the microscope will get their comeuppance in court, and deservedly so.  In 21st century America, it ought to be pretty simple.  Sexual predators should go to jail.  If the statute of limitations has passed, they ought at least to suffer social sanctions.  Ditto for those who are “merely” sleazy but who haven’t broken any laws.  Their professional peers should shun them. 

The problem with shunning is that, while prison sentences have an end date (which is sometimes until you die), there are no rules about how long should social punishment should last.  We don’t have a model for that right now, and I think we’re going to need one.

In other words, is there a way for someone like Louis C.K. to pay his debt to society and then resume his work?  Or should he receive the equivalent of a life sentence, and be shunned by all right-thinking people until he’s dead and forgotten?

Here are my current views on those issues.  I should note that these questions focus on how to think about the perpetrators rather than about the victims, but for the record, I’ll say that our sympathies should first be with the victims.

Politicians who are guilty of sexual harassment (or worse) shouldn’t get a pass.  If they’ve broken the law, they should be subject to legal penalties just like private citizens.  Even if their misbehavior isn’t criminal (for instance, Thursday’s revelations about Al Franken) their actions should be taken into account when voters judge their fitness to hold office. 

I think Al Franken has been a good Senator, and I’d hate to lose him.  What we know about the Franken incident so far suggests that it’s nothing like what Roy Moore did.  Moore has tried to smear his victims, while Franken has issued two apologies, the second much better than the shorter first one.  He has asked that the Senate start an ethics investigation of him, and has promised to cooperate.  His statement was both a confession and an apology, and on a scale of 1-10, I’d give it a 10.  But if we learn that Franken engaged in repeated incidents of groping, then I think the only honorable thing he can do is to resign. 

I could cite examples of similar, or worse, Republican behavior, but I’m not going to resort to a both-sides-do-it argument.  Democrats are supposed to be better than Republicans, after all.

And that leads me to a couple of points I want to make about Bill Clinton.  First, it’s worth remembering that at least one of his alleged crimes has been investigated.  And not just investigated, but investigated by a hostile, unabashedly politically motivated Republican prosecutor.  Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr did his best to give congressional Republicans a reason to impeach Bill Clinton.  He looked into Juanita Broaddrick’s charge of rape and couldn’t make a case for prosecution.  That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course.  But the notion that Bill Clinton’s accusers have been ignored is fake news. 

Second, whether or not there are prosecutable cases against Bill Clinton, it’s clear that back in the day, he was kind of a sleazy guy.  His presidential achievements are one thing, and future historians will write his legacy.  In the meantime, Democrats should stop making excuses for him and usher him offstage, permanently.  No more convention speeches, no more headlining fundraisers.  Get him out of the spotlight.

It shouldn’t be that hard to find qualified candidates who can keep their pants on and their hands to themselves.  More women candidates would be a good start. 

Moving on from politics, let me say a few words about art and artists.  I’ll use one of my heroes, John Lennon, as an example.  

In an interview with Playboy in 1980, shortly before he was murdered, Lennon acknowledged that “I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women….  I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."  Apparently, he wasn’t much of a father, either.  Julian Lennon, his son by his first marriage, has said that Paul McCartney was more of a father figure to him than Lennon himself.  By Lennon’s own account, he was addicted to heroin in 1968-69; and he spent another 18 months in 1973-74 in an alcoholic haze.

Knowing all that, am I obliged to throw away my Beatles records?  I say no.  I think it is possible to separate the artist from the art he or she produced.  Of course, if the “art” consists of glorifying rape or other harmful activity, then I’m out. 

Usually.  Although to be honest, there are songs about reprehensible activity that I enjoy, even though I’ve never done those things myself and don’t want to do them.  They include songs about everything from drugs to murder and robbery.  And about seduction (which is such a quaint term now), though none I recall about rape.  Maybe for some people, those songs serve as a gateway drug to acting out real crimes.  For others, maybe they function as a safety valve, letting a milquetoast like me get those anti-social impulses out of my system. 

Still, although my life has been very different than theirs, I can recognize pieces of myself in both Roy Moore (reluctance to admit and take responsibility for embarrassing behavior) and John Lennon (his impulse to avoid thinking about his behavior rather than fix it).  If I knew anything about Louis C.K., I’d probably see something familiar there as well.

One of the lessons you learn when you reach adulthood is that nobody’s perfect.  All your idols have feet of clay – your parents, Gandhi, Lincoln, and even me.  Especially me.  Just in case anyone was in doubt about that.

If we want to be responsible citizens, we need to understand that nobody’s perfect, and a good place to start is with ourselves.  As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1 & 3), “Judge not, lest ye be judged.  And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Once we can approach our job as citizens with the appropriate humility, then we can assess the behavior of others, protecting the innocent, restraining the guilty, and even trying to have compassion for them – but not at the cost of letting them harm more victims.

Our job as responsible consumers of art is to avoid confusing the artist with the art.  We should have compassion for the artist’s suffering when art comes out of pain, but we shouldn’t identify with the suffering and try to emulate it. 

When his enemies brought an adulterous woman to Jesus and dared him to criticize the Mosaic penalty for adultery – death by stoning – he said (John 8:7): “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

I'm not there yet, but I'll be a better person when I can have as much compassion for Roy Moore as I can for John Lennon.

SOMEONE'S GOT IT IN FOR ME, THEY'RE PLANTING STORIES IN THE PRESS

My friend Corinne asks this about Donald Trump: “What if he is the "useful idiot"? Suppose he didn't actually know that he was being used as a tool by Russia? Manafort knew, Flynn knew, Stone knew, Page knew. Sessions knew but hid his head in the sand. Bannon probably knew but didn't care because Trump was a useful idiot for him, too. The youngsters didn’t know they were being manipulated but liked feeling important. Putin used the greedy people to bring in the stupid people and that includes Trump. Is it an impeachable offense to be a useful idiot?” 

Good question.  Here’s my theory.  I think that “useful idiot” is exactly the way Vladimir Putin thinks about Donald Trump.  That’s why they recruited him in the first place, a decade or more ago. 

Trump spent most of his adult life losing money on his real estate projects; his major achievement as a business man was to figure out how to profit from his multiple bankruptcies and leave his unlucky investors and business partners holding the bag.  But eventually, American banks refused to loan him money.  He had to look overseas for financing.

I recommend a Slate/Jacob Weisberg podcast (link below) for an explanation of how Trump transitioned from a failed hotelier/casino magnate to a prosperous life of letting Russian oligarchs, use his casinos and construction projects to launder money in return for a piece of the action.

Money laundering was Trump’s entry level job as a useful idiot.  He had to have known that was happening, because the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City was charged with 106 counts of money laundering in the 1990s.  Typically, Trump paid his fine (the largest such fine any casino had ever paid up to that point) without admitting liability.  Trump obviously believed that rules were meant to be broken, as long as the profits exceeded the fines.  

And that’s how the Trump-Russia connection began.  Trump was just another half-bright New York businessman who thought he could make some easy money by working with the mob.  Only in Trump’s case, it was the Russian Mafiya, and they were intimately connected to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. 

It seems clear that something happened in Moscow during Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in 2013 that gave Putin additional leverage over The Donald.  The (as yet unverified) version of those events that makes the most sense to me is that the Russians have compromising video on Trump, which likely did NOT involve urine, but probably involved underage girls.  There’s no reason to believe that Putin saw Trump as a future president.  More likely, he was just following the KGB script, gathering kompromat and putting it aside in case it might come in handy someday.

Then Trump decided to run for president, and things got complicated.  The evidence I’ve seen suggests that most of Trump’s inner circle (especially Flynn and Manafort) had their own connections to Russia, and their own agendas for Donald Trump’s presidency.  Trump is famously not a detail guy, and it’s entirely plausible that he failed to understand the import of some of their machinations.

I’d be willing to believe that he was ignorant of the details of Flynn’s work with Turkey, for instance, or Manafort’s plan to use his access to Trump to get back on the good side of the Ukraine oligarchs to whom he owed money.  It’s plausible that he didn’t know (or care) about the mysterious last-minute change in the Republican Party platform about the Ukraine.

But when it came to the hijinks of his old friends (Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani) and family (Jared and Don Jr.), I find it impossible to believe that he wasn’t aware that they were working with Russians (including their pawns at Wikileaks) on some sort of skullduggery.  The extent of his involvement – whether he just got an occasional heads up from Jared and Don Jr., or participated in some of the planning – has yet to be revealed.  But simply on the basis of his famous “Russia, if you’re listening” request for help in finding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, he had to have known that something was going on.

Then there’s Trump’s post-campaign obstruction of justice.  He fired Sally Yates, Preet Bharara, and James Comey – basically anyone in a position to investigate him or his family and friends, and who refused to pledge personal loyalty to Trump.  He was the principle author at least one of Don Jr’s false accounts of the meeting with Russian agents in July, 2016.  I can’t imagine any plausible explanation of those actions that doesn’t include some guilty knowledge of collusion between senior members of his campaign and Russia.   

Has Donald Trump been Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot?  I say yes, obviously.  Trump has been remarkably useful to Russia in weakening America’s influence around the world.  On the other hand, if Trump’s clown car full of misfits had been 10% smarter and 10% more subtle, they’d have been 100% more useful to Putin.  That’s the tradeoff between useful and idiot.

Would being a useful idiot be an effective defense against impeachment?  Lordy, I hope not.  The Constitution lists these impeachable offenses: “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”  It wouldn’t be hard to make a case for treason.  Certainly, if a Republican Congress saw a Democratic President do what Trump has done, they’d happily yell “treason.”  Ditto for bribery, as Trump has obviously profited from foreign gifts and business done at his hotels. 

“High crimes and misdemeanors” basically means whatever Congress is upset about on a given day.  But conspiring with a hostile foreign government to rig a presidential election seems like it would qualify, as would obstruction of justice.

Setting aside the improbability of the current House of Representatives’ voting a bill of impeachment in the first place, it strikes me that Trump’s best defense might be diminished mental capacity.  It has the advantage of being almost certainly true, and it’s also what his political foes have been saying for the past year. 

What if Trump went to a joint session of Congress and said this: “You know what, guys, I hate to admit it, but I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was, and I’m also suffering from dementia.  I was totally oblivious to the fact that pretty much every single member of my inner circle, including my family, was in league with our traditional enemies.  I’m chagrined!  In good conscience, the only thing I can do is throw myself on your mercy.  I’ll resign as president and let Mike Pence take over.”

It’s hard to imagine Trump pursuing any form of that defense.  As Mueller tightens the noose, the more stubborn and belligerent he gets. 

And how would his base react?  They think Trump is playing 8-dimensional chess, always many steps ahead of his hapless enemies in the media.  How would they rationalize a guilty plea?  Would they take to the streets with Tiki Torches?  Go on mass shooting sprees?  Both of those outcomes are well within the realm of possibility. 

In a world where 29% of Alabama evangelicals say that credible reports that Roy Moore was a child molester would make them MORE likely to vote for him, and in a world where half the Republicans polled last August said they’d be willing to postpone the 2020 presidential election if Trump wanted it, anything might  happen.  It no longer makes sense to call members of Trump’s base Deplorables.  They’re Incorrigibles. 

I believe that Trump will get his comeuppance sooner or later.  I think the fact that he’s been Putin’s useful idiot will help convict him, not exonerate him.  I worry about the Incorrigibles, but we outnumber them, and we can’t let them bully the rest of us.

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/trumpcast/2017/11/paul_manafort_money_laundering_and_the_trump_organization.html

WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES

To paraphrase a point that Josh Marshall made on Twitter Saturday, it’s hard to be skeptical about collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016 when you can watch it happening live in 2017 every time Donald Trump encounters his bff Vladimir Putin.

Trump knows that Putin is lying when he denies interfering in our presidential election.  He knows it because he knows that his campaign, including members of his own family, worked with Russians to sabotage that election. 

Congressional Republicans know it, because a few of them were involved in the sabotage.  Other Republicans are willing to trust the unanimous conclusion of all 17 American intelligence agencies.  And most of them know it because they’re smart enough to add 2 + 2 and get reasonably close to 4. 

The problem is, they know it and they just don’t care.  The vast majority of Republicans in Congress care more about cutting taxes for rich people than they do about the oath they took to uphold the Constitution.

The same is true in the crazy world of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.  Congressional Republicans knew all along that he was crazy.  Now they know he’s a crazy pedophile.  Deep down, Republican voters in Alabama know it too, and they don’t care.  They’ve spun out various talking points, ranging from “the victims are lying” and “the victims were asking for it,” all the way that to “Democrats are worse than child molesters,” and “maybe pedophilia isn’t all that bad.” 

As Republican consultant Rick Wilson said on Twitter last Friday, “A meaningful % of my party are insisting nothing is real in a carefully research story with four on the record statements from victims. In related news, a meaningful % of my party believed Hillary Clinton was part of a child cannibalism and sex ring in a pizza restaurant.”

Fox News and Donald Trump have constructed a nearly airtight bubble of fake news for Republican true believers.  When Trump or one of his allies gets caught –in anything from a simple mistake to a complex crime – they first ignore it, then deny it, and then blame the victim.  Flood the zone with excuses and counter-theories, and then wait for a new scandal to break in a couple of days.  In Trump’s America, there’s always at least one new scandal every week.

The American press is simply not wired to process this much scandal, and eventually stops trying.  They’ll report that X statement is false, and Y statement is false, and Z statement is false.  But most of them are unwilling to connect the dots and call a liar a liar. 

They’ll report that Roy Moore was a child molester, but they’ll stop short of acknowledging that the Republican Party is willing to welcome, or at least tolerate, a pedophile in its ranks as long as it means one more vote in support of tax cuts for the super-rich. 

When pattern recognition gets short-circuited, all the press has left is play-by-play commentary.  And the problem with play-by-play commentary (which is pretty much what I do in this space) is that it leaves Donald Trump in control of the narrative, even when it’s unfavorable to him.

Control of the narrative – or keeping your eyes on the prize, in other words – will become increasingly important as the investigations of the Trump-Russia election sabotage expand. 

The House Intelligence Committee, in particular, is likely to be the source of some deliberate misinformation.  That’s because some Republican members of the committee are working with Trump – and some may even be among Mueller’s targets.  They recently interviewed Donald Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, and guess what?  Details of his testimony were leaked.  But it looks like there were fake quotes leaked by one of the Republicans on the Committee in order to get the press to bite, and then allow Team Trump to slam them for reporting fake news.

Jesus said (John 8:32) “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  The sad thing about Trump’s base is that they’ve insulated themselves against the truth.  Unless they wake up, they’ll never be free.

OH SINNER MAN, WHERE YOU GONNA RUN TO?

It looks like Roy Moore is one of THOSE kind of Christians, the kind who’s in it for underage girls.  You’ve probably heard by now that no fewer than four women have accused Roy Moore, Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, of making sexual advances to them when they were teenagers, thirty or more years ago.  One was 14 at the time.  The Washington Post, which broke the story, had a total of 30 sources, all of whom, including the victims, spoke on the record. 

A few years ago, Moore would have felt a sudden urge to step out of the spotlight and spend more time with his family.  Or at the very least, claim that he’d repented and been forgiven.  But this is the Age of Trump, when God’s primary concern is tax cuts for the rich.  So like Trump, Moore fought back.  He blamed his accusers, as well as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mitch McConnell.  One of those last three things is not like the others.

Since the Republican Party is full of folks who righteously condemned Bill Clinton for his extra-marital affairs, you might expect them to be horrified by Moore’s pedophilia.  But what really horrifies them is the prospect of losing a Senate seat.  In the Age of Trump, the letter of the law applies only to Democrats.   God will understand if Republicans cut a few corners in order to make sure that super-wealthy get the tax cuts they so richly deserve.

At this point, the Republican Party itself has chosen to remain silent, waiting to see whether the scandal has legs.  A few individuals have defended Moore, and a few others have urged him to drop out of the race. 

The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg never had any use for Moore.  Goldberg worries that Moore’s presence in the Senate would provide a never-ending stream of controversy and distraction for a Republican Party that struggles to stay on task even in the best of times.  Now that the latest charges have pushed some Republican Senators over the edge, Goldberg wrote sarcastically that “It’s good to know where the line is. You can set up shady charities for profit. You can call for religious tests and champion theocracy. You can cutely flirt with the idea that homosexuals have no rights — I don’t mean gay marriage, but the right to life — you can be removed from the bench, twice….  This is all acceptable for many conservatives. But, molest a little girl? That at least is too much.”

But it’s not too much for Steve Bannon and Breitbart.  They were quick to note that the age of consent in Alabama is 16, so three of the victims technically weren’t minors. They were simply victims of routine sexual harassment, and conservatives apparently don’t consider that a big deal.  Breitbart is even OK with a little pedophilia, as long as it doesn’t become a habit. 

In saner times, this would be the end of Moore’s already checkered career.  As Goldberg noted, there were already reasons aplenty to shun him.  But this is the Age of Trump, and if Moore stays in the race, conservative Christians will find a way to support him.  After all, didn’t St. Paul say (Romans 3:23), that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”?  And didn’t Jesus forgive sinners? 

Of course, when Jesus forgave sinners, he added a postscript:  go and sin no more.  James, the brother of Jesus, said (James 2:20) “faith without works is dead.”  What would faith without works – behavior inspired by faith – look like?  The example that James offered was that of an outwardly pious Christian who refused to help the poor and hungry.  Refusing to help the poor and hungry is a big part of Roy Moore’s platform.

Keep that in mind if Moore decides to play the Jesus card in an attempt to save his candidacy.

THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

It was one year ago, right after it became clear that Donald Trump had won the presidency, that I began writing political posts on an almost daily basis.

On election night, November 8, 2016, I was in a state of shock.  I wrote this: “I’m ashamed to be an American.  I don’t know what else to say. Don’t mourn, organize? Love conquers all? Yes, the sun will still come up tomorrow, but it will shine on a more dangerous world.”

The next day, I wrote: “Last night when I went to bed, the thought that rose to the surface was, “This is like a death in the family.”   This morning, the advice I’m giving to myself is:  don’t let a death IN the family turn into the death OF the family.  Don’t give up.”

Fast forward a year, and this morning I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief, as off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere turned into a collective kick in the ass for Donald Trump and the politicians who tried to surf in his sleazy wake. 

The governor races were the big story, and deservedly so, but a couple of the down-ballot races were delicious.  Bob Marshall was a conservative Republican in the Virginia House of Representatives, and author of a bill that would force transgendered individuals to use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificate.  John Carman was a conservative Republican who held the office of Atlantic County NJ Freeholder.  During January’s Women’s March, he tried to be funny on Facebook, asking whether the marchers would be home in time to cook dinner.  Carman also wore a confederate flag patch on his motorcycle jacket.  Trumpers have been full of themselves all year long. 

But karma’s a bitch (or it can be if you’ve been a bitch yourself.)  Yesterday, a transgendered Virginia woman named Danica Roem beat Bathroom Bob, and an African American New Jersey woman named Ashley Bennett beat Confederate Carmen.  Glory, hallelujah, and amen. 

Not that this is over.  In historical terms, it’s more like the Allied victory in the Second Battle of El-Alamein in November, 1942, the first important win for the good guys in a war that would last another three years.  That victory inspired Winston Churchill’s famous quote, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

My gratitude to everyone who worked on the campaigns that concluded yesterday – whether in getting people registered, getting out the vote, or simply voting for the right people. 

Now we know that Trump and his allies are vulnerable.  Let’s keep working, each in our own way, to take back Congress in 2018, and kick Trump out of the White House in 2020.  Or if Robert Mueller gets rid of Trump first, then we can kick Mike Pence out of the White House in 2020.

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HIS-TO-RY

It’s been a long time since I thought in any detail about the Watergate scandal, but it seemed like a good time to refresh my memory and bring some historical perspective to the Trump-Russia scandal.    

In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, both in terms of popular and electoral votes.  When he took the oath of office for his second term in 1973, Nixon’s approval stood at nearly 70%.  But as Proverbs 16:18 says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

Donald Trump, as you surely remember, lost the 2016 popular vote by approximately 3 million, while winning in the electoral college.  His approval rating right after his inauguration was 48%, which was worse than any other president in the history of the Gallup Poll. 

Although it appeared that things were touch and go at the time, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the start of the Senate Watergate hearings in May, 1973 was the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency.  In the four months between the inauguration and the onset of those hearings, Nixon’s approval rating had dropped below 50%.  The one bright spot for Nixon at that point was that only 19% of the public supported removing him from office.  

I’m going to call last Monday’s indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller the contemporary equivalent of the start of the Senate Watergate Committee.  Donald Trump’s approval rating today stands at 33%, his all-time low.  Support for impeachment has already reached 49%.  Nixon’s pro-impeachment numbers didn’t get that high until three months before he was forced to resign.

Nixon’s approval numbers kept trending down as the summer of 1973 turned into fall, with a corresponding rise in support for removing him from office.  Those two trend lines intersected right after the Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973.  That was when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General both resigned in protest.  Nixon’s approval ratings never got above water after that.  When he was finally forced to resign on August 8, 1974, his approval rate stood at 24%, while 57% wanted him gone

Does the history of Watergate offer any useful lessons as we wait to see how the Trump-Russia scandal plays out?   I mean apart from the obvious conclusion that Donald Trump should draw, that firing Robert Mueller would be a terrible idea?  There are two things that struck me as worth highlighting.

Spending some time thinking about 1973-74 reminded me of how iffy things often looked during Watergate.  It was an emotional roller coaster right up to the end.  Not only did it sometimes seem that Nixon would get away with it, there were also legitimate fears that he would start a nuclear war to try to save his presidency.   The Secretary of Defense even ordered his generals to ignore any nuclear launch order until they got approval from him or the Secretary of State.   

It’s also easy to forget that Richard Nixon had his base, just as Trump does today.  Talk radio in 1973 was nowhere near the juggernaut that it is now, but it was around.  Even then, it was a haven for right wingers.  Clarence Manion and Paul (“now you know … the rest of the story”) Harvey called the investigation was a witch hunt.  William F. Buckley and the National Review thought it was a leftist plot to force Nixon to govern as a liberal.  Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire (who also wrote speeches Vice President Spiro Agnew until he was forced to resign in a bribery scandal that had nothing to do with Watergate) wound up as a syndicated columnist for the New York Times.  His life’s work became to rehabilitate Nixon by trivializing Watergate.  He added a “-gate” suffix to every political scandal that came along.  Safire was also one of the Times’ early Hillary Clinton haters, a habit that has persisted at the Times to this day.

Everything I’ve read suggests that it’s a virtual certainty that, while some work remains to be done, Robert Mueller already has ample evidence that Donald Trump, his family and his cronies, are criminals.  And not only are they criminals, they’re stupid criminals.  Thus far, they’ve been able to buy or bully their way out of trouble.  It won’t be so easy this time around.

At this point, even if Trump were to fire Mueller, I’d expect Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint one of the members of his team as its new leader and tell them to carry on.  And they’d have Mueller’s firing to add to the evidence of obstruction of justice. 

Of course, the usual suspects are plotting.  The Washington Post reports that Roger Stone and Steve Bannon are advising Donald Trump to fight back.  Stone’s brilliant idea is to have Trump appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton and the bogus uranium “scandal,” and then argue that Mueller was implicated in the uranium transaction because he was the Director of the FBI at the time.  This, Stone claims, would allow Trump to say that Mueller had a conflict of interest and force him to recuse himself from the rest of the Trump-Russia investigation.  Apart from its prima facie absurdity, the difficulty with this plan is that it has been leaked, and its motivation has been made public.  Any court would rightly see it as a transparent attempt to obstruct justice.

Bannon’s plan is more prosaic.  He wants Trump to defund Mueller’s operation.  But that’s easier said than done.  In September, Florida’s Rep. Ron DeSantis submitted an amendment to a spending bill that would limit the funding for the Special Counsel’s investigation to six months.  House Republican leaders refused to bring the amendment to the floor for a vote.  At this point, with indictments rolling in, it’s hard to imagine that Republicans could muster a majority to pass that sort of legislation.  (Besides, if Mueller runs short of cash, I’ll bet he could raise millions of dollars via GoFundMe in a heartbeat.)

But the most desperate advice has come from the Wall Street Journal, which, to its everlasting disgrace, published on op-ed urging Trump to fire Mueller and issue a pre-emptive pardon to everyone, including himself.  Yes, that’s the ticket – blow up the Constitution and take your chances on surviving the backlash.  

Of course, there’s one other option, which happens to be the one his attorneys are recommending – just chill.  Let Mueller get on with his work and see what happens.  That would be the smart thing to do.  But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so the smart thing seems the least likely scenario.  Especially since Steve Bannon is also said to be urging Trump to replace his current legal team with a bomb thrower.  Bannon likes big dramatic explosions, and you get the impression that if he can’t blow up Mueller, he’d settle for blowing up Trump.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Robert Mueller may be ready to hand down more indictments very soon.  To quote Donald Trump, Jr., “if that’s what you say, I love it.”

LIKE A BIRD ON A WIRE, LIKE A DRUNK IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR

I was in my mid-20s and had just moved to Tucson when revelations from the Watergate scandal began to look serious enough to warrant talk about impeachment.  I learned a little about constitutional law in 1973 and 1974, just by watching the televised Senate Watergate hearings. 

Now I’m picking up some cool new legal terminology from Robert Mueller.  “Proactive cooperator,” for instance.  George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty earlier this month to lying to the FBI about working with Russia as a member of the Trump campaign, was arrested in July.  But the arrest was kept secret for three months, and it’s interesting to speculate about why.  Out of all the theories I’ve read, my favorite is the “proactive cooperator” hypothesis.

This theory posits that Papadopoulos agreed to cooperate with the FBI almost immediately, and he became what the indictment that was unsealed on Monday called a proactive cooperator, which often means that in return for leniency, the perp agrees to wear a wire while talking to higher value targets so that the FBI has a recording of them saying incriminating things.

Papadopoulos wouldn’t have had enough juice to talk to Donald Trump directly.  But with a script from Mueller’s team, he would have been able to call some bigshots in the Trump campaign, tell them that the FBI was after him, and ask for advice.  If that’s what actually happened, and if anyone he spoke to suggested that he lie or promised to help cover for him, Mueller has them dead to rights. 

Whether or not that theory proves to be valid, we do know that Papadopoulos received some email encouragement from people higher up in the Trump campaign.  The indictment speaks of a “high ranking campaign official” and “another high-ranking campaign official,” and lastly, a “campaign supervisor.”  The Washington Post says that Mr. High Ranking is Corey Lewandowski; Mr. Another High Ranking Official is Paul Manafort, and Mr. Supervisor is Sam Clovis. 

Lewandowski and Manafort are familiar names.  They both did stints as Trump’s campaign manager before giving way to Steve Bannon.  You would be hard put to find three more unsavory characters to run your campaign. 

Lewandowski is known for having anger management issues.  In March, 2016, he manhandled a Breitbart reporter in Florida, and a protestor in Tucson.  He tends to annoy those he doesn’t assault, and as a result, hasn’t lasted long in gigs as a political commentator.  Donald Trump apparently remains fond of him, and his access to Trump allowed him to find a niche as a lobbyist. 

Manafort’s expertise is money laundering and advising dictators.  Despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars passed through his hands over the past decade, by 2016, all he had to show for it was $17 million dollars in debt – not to banks, but to scary Ukrainian oligarchs.  The only thing he did really well during this period was to stay out of jail.  The last thing he should have done was to take a high-profile position in a presidential campaign.  But he was desperate, and he volunteered to work for free as Trump’s campaign manager so he could pay off his debts by leaking confidential information to those oligarchs.  And Donald Trump, who hires only the best people, gave him the job, apparently without vetting him.

Sam Clovis is a little less famous.  He looks like Jabba the Hut’s stunt double.  He’s also Trump’s nominee to be Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture.  What are his qualifications for that office?  He’s a Tea Party yokel who hosted a right-wing talk radio show in Iowa.  Since there’s plenty of agriculture in Iowa, and since science is mostly fake news, Trump decided that Big Sam was good to go.  His lack of scientific credentials is actually a plus.  The quality of his work wouldn’t suffer if he were forced to do his job from prison rather than a government office or laboratory.

Trump’s Unholy Three highlight one of the differences between the Trump-Russia scandal and Watergate.  They probably wouldn’t have even made the cut as one of the third-rate burglars who did the original Watergate break-in.  Haldeman and Ehrlichman wouldn’t have touched these phonies with a ten-foot pole. 

Nixon and his cronies were despicable, but they were fairly smart.  Not as smart as they thought they were, obviously, but compared to the grifters and bigots in the Trump entourage, they look like criminal masterminds. 

The Watergate investigations took two years to play out.  Comparatively speaking, Robert Mueller is working at warp speed. That’s partly because he seems to have put together a real all-star team of legal talent, and partly because the most of the people he’s investigating are idiots.  And for both of those things, we should be grateful.

YOU MAY GET DISGUSTED, START THINKIN' THAT I'M STRANGE

The dominoes have begun to fall, and one of them – Paul Manafort – was an obvious target.  Donald Trump and some of his enablers in the press are claiming vindication, since the charges against Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates relate mostly to events that took place before Manafort joined Trump’s campaign. 

Unfortunately for Trump, there are a few problems with the narrative that the Manafort indictment is the end of the story.  It’s wishful thinking, and Trump’s lawyers know it, even if he doesn’t.  A more logical assumption is that Manafort has been uncooperative, and that this indictment is Mueller’s signal that he’s not going to fool around.  Manafort is 68.  He’ll either cooperate with the investigation or spend the rest of his life in prison.

But the biggest problem for Donald Trump is that while he and his stooges were taking a victory lap, Mueller dropped the news that there was a third indictment.  Oh by the way, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor in Trump’s campaign, had been charged with, and had already pleaded guilty to, lying to the FBI about working with Russians to find dirt on Hillary Clinton – after he was hired by the Trump campaign. 

Manafort is a pretty big fish, and I assume that Mueller’s not finished with him.  But for the moment, the Papadopoulos guilty plea is the biggest story of the day.  It destroys the Republican talking point that there was no evidence of collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia.  How’s this for evidence?  A grand jury weighed the evidence and returned an indictment, the accused pleaded guilty, and a judge signed off on it.  The Fox-Breitbart Axis of Weasels can wave their collective arms and try to change the subject, but they can’t change that fact.

But wait – there’s more!  The really interesting thing about Papadopoulos’ indictment is that it recommends a sentence of zero months.  That means that Papadopoulos has flipped.  He’s told Mueller everything he knows.  I wonder who else in the Trump campaign stretched the truth a wee bit during their interview with the FBI?  I’ll bet they’re sweating bullets right about now.

My verdict?  This was an absolutely spectacular start for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team.  I look forward to watching this play out.

WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN' GOIN' ON

Batten down the hatches, friends.  Something big is about to happen.  You can tell it’s big because Donald Trump is absolutely terrified.  He’s screaming “fake news” and demanding that the investigation focus on Hillary Clinton, not him.  He’s pleading with his followers to “DO SOMETHING!” 

This morning, he renewed his insistence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is on a witch hunt.  Well, guess what?  It looks like Mueller has found a witch or two.  And just in time for Halloween. 

One of Mueller’s grand juries has filed its first charges in the investigation.  As of Sunday noon, MST, the identity of the individual or individuals, as well as the nature of the charges, remain sealed by order of a federal judge in Washington, D.C.  News reports indicate that those charged could be taken into custody as early as Monday. 

But there are indeed fake news stories in circulation.  They’re aimed at Hillary Clinton and they’re coming from Trump and his pals Sean Hannity and Roger Stone (whose Twitter account has been suspended because he threatened some CNN people).  OMG!  The Steele Dossier!  The uranium!

Here are the facts about those two issues, as best I understand them.  It turns out that the Steele Dossier originated with the Washington Free Beacon, which belongs to right wing Republican billionaire Paul Singer.  In 2015, the Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research on behalf of Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign.  Then Rubio’s campaign went belly up, and Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination.  At that point, the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign needed opposition research on Donald Trump.  They hired Fusion GPS to do the job, and Fusion built upon the work that they’d already done for Republicans.    

The moral of the story?  Both parties do opposition research.  It’s part of 21st century campaigning.  It’s an unlovely process, but in and of itself, it’s neither unusual nor illegal.  It would only be illegal if someone acting on behalf of a foreign government – say, Russia, just to pick a random example – contributed money, time, and/or labor to someone’s campaign.  Which is what they did – for Donald Trump, not for Hillary Clinton. 

Here’s how Crooked Media’s Jon Favreau summarized the argument that Trump and his sock puppets are making.  Hillary’s evil plan had three parts.  Part one was to fund the Steele Dossier.  Part two was that, once Clinton had information about the Pee Tape allegations and other evidence of collusion with Russia, she kept it secret.  Part three was to lose the election.  By Jove, it was a fiendishly clever strategy. 

Perhaps you’ve noticed a tiny little flaw in that in that theory.  But a logical theory isn’t the point.  The point is to give the press something besides Trump-Russia to talk about.  Which the press has dutifully done. 

OK, but what about all that uranium that Hillary Clinton gave to the Russians?  Twenty percent of our total supply, in exchange for a $145 million donation to the Clinton Foundation?  That would have been really bad, if it happened, which it didn’t.  As Snopes.com notes, the deal wasn’t Clinton’s to approve or disapprove.  The issue is complicated, which makes it easy to lie about, especially to Trump’s base and Clinton haters in the press who are predisposed to believe the worst.  Snopes explains it better than I can here; check out the link below if it’s important to you. 

The bottom line is that claims about Clinton’s connections to the Steele Dossier and the uranium sale are part of Trump’s disinformation campaign designed to distract attention from the Mueller investigation.  Outside of the Trump Bubble, such distractions will only work until real indictments come down, and that day of reckoning is coming. 

It will be interesting to see who has the honor of being the first recipient of Mueller’s indictment(s), since he’s working in a target rich environment.  As I write this, no one seems to know.  It’s customary when prosecuting white collar crimes to give a heads up to the attorney of the accused, a courtesy call saying “you and your client need to be at the courthouse at 9:00 a.m. sharp on Monday,” or something like that.  Apparently, no one in Trump’s orbit has received such a call. 

Perhaps Mueller thinks there’s a risk that the accused will leave the country.  Or if the charges involve someone in the Trump family (looking at you, Jared Kushner), Mueller may have wanted to avoid a pre-emptive pardon.  Or maybe he just wants to make all the bad guys sweat a little.

Informed speculation has settled on four names.  Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn are two obvious targets.  Jared Kushner is a third.  And the fourth is Mike Flynn, Jr., if Mueller suspects that Moscow Mike himself is withholding information, and that an indictment of his son will convince him to do the right thing. 

The good news is that we’ll find out soon enough.  No matter who has the honor of going first, the initial indictments won’t be the last. 

The bad news is that Donald Trump will not go gentle into that good night.  He seems intent on interfering with Mueller’s investigation.  His Sunday morning tweets suggest that he hopes congressional Republicans will do his dirty work for him.  He may have some success in the House of Representatives, but I doubt that the Senate goes along.  But the truth is that the congressional investigations aren’t where Trump’s problems lie. 

His real problem is Robert Mueller.  My gut feeling is that sooner or later, Trump will take matters into his own hands and fire Mueller while issuing blanket pardons to everyone involved, including himself.  Then we’ll have a full blown constitutional crisis on our hands, and Republicans will  face a classic party vs. principles decision. It’s a sad commentary on the Republican Party that the question even needs to be asked, much less that the answer is in doubt.

https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-uranium-russia-deal/

WHEN THE TRUTH IS FOUND TO BE LIES

In my life, there have been three Pearl Harbor moments.  By that I mean incidents, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, that took everyone by surprise, and were big enough to change the course of history.  The first was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the second was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the third was the election of Donald Trump on November 8, 2016. 

Now the third disaster has reopened memories of the first.  Donald Trump promised to release ALL the hitherto classified information on the Kennedy Assassination.  Predictably, he went back on his word.  Some new information has been released, but as long as anything remains secret, no official explanation is completely credible. 

I’m surprised at how pissed off I am about this particular broken promise. 

The Kennedy assassination had a profound effect on me and my generation.  It was the event that officially threw cold water on the post-war American Dream.  The murder of a president was bad enough, but then the alleged assassin was himself murdered – while he was in police custody, surrounded by armed policemen.  And then the official investigation somehow made things worse.  The Warren Commission Report ignored and suppressed evidence in reaching its pre-ordained conclusion – lone gunman, no conspiracy, nothing to see here, just move on.   

I’d be shocked if Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t involved in the assassination.  The evidence I’ve seen suggests that he was at the very least one of the shooters, and maybe the only one.  When he was arrested, he described himself as “a patsy,” someone set up to take the fall for others.  Maybe he was lying.  Maybe not.  In my view, the jury is still out on whether he acted alone or had help, directly or indirectly.  But one thing I’m sure of is that there was a cover up, even if it was only to hide the rank incompetence on the part of the FBI and CIA in the months and days before the assassination.

One Warren Commission skeptic was none other than President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson told one of his speech writers that "I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger."  Johnson was dismayed when he learned about the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.  He put it this way:  the CIA “had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”  Johnson thought the assassination was a revenge killing.  That information remained secret until after Johnson’s death, of course.  For public consumption, the new President endorsed the Warren Commission’s lone gunman theory.  Nothing to be gained from a public airing the intelligence community’s dirty laundry, after all.

Personally, I favor Norman Mailer’s theory.  He suggested that In 1963, the CIA had overreached.  They were involved in too many plots in too many places.  They had too many agents, some of whom were double agents, and even triple agents.  They employed too many shady characters (including hard core Mafiosi) as informants.  They couldn’t keep track of it all.  As a result, they couldn’t be certain that someone connected to them was NOT involved in the assassination.  And they sure as hell didn’t want investigators, government or civilian, poking around in all that mess.  They had every incentive to blame the whole thing on Lee Harvey Oswald, who was conveniently dead.  And who may, of course, have actually been guilty.

That’s my opinion now, with the benefit of hindsight.  When reporters began to poke holes in the official account of the assassination, I was 17.  All I knew then was that the most powerful grown-ups in my world were lying to me.  We take that for granted now.  In 1965, it was a shock.  If you wonder why my generation is prone to believe in conspiracy theories, this is where it started.  Vietnam is where it came of age, but that’s another story, albeit involving many of the same characters.

My question is this.  In 2017, what national security issue could possibly outweigh the benefit of resolving the crime of the 20th century once and for all – especially if Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the lone gunman?  Lyndon Johnson is dead.  Fidel Castro is dead.  Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, and Handsome Johnny Roselli are dead.  The whole damn Soviet Union is dead.  Every last member of the FBI, the CIA, and the KGB who might have had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, its investigation or coverup, is dead.  I’d love to hear the State Department, the CIA, and the FBI explain why they still need to keep secrets from a half century ago.

For you young folks, this short video with a soundtrack by Steinski & Mass Media called “The Motorcade Sped On” will give you a four minute summary of the Kennedy assassination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjyFwbSNh4o

CHICKS, KICKS, CATS, COOL - SCHOOL!

CHICKS, KICKS, CATS, COOL – SCHOOL!  Gene Spesard posted his responses to a quiz about your senior year in high school and asked others to respond.  I graduated from Wichita Southeast High School, class of 1965.  The image is from my 1962-63 yearbook.  I’m in the top row, 5th from the right.  The friend I refer to below is top row, 3rd from the right.

1. Did you know your current partner? No.  I met Vicki in Tucson in 1978.
2. What kind of car did you have?  I usually drove my mom’s ’59 Volvo.  She bought me a brand new ’65 Volkswagen after I graduated.
3. What kind of job did you have junior/ senior year? I had summer jobs.  The one I remember was handyman at the Kansas Milling Company, a flour mill.  I inhaled so much flour dust over the summer that I came down with asthma.  That job probably saved my life.  When I was drafted, I took a note from my doctor about the asthma to the physical, which got me a deferment and kept me out of Vietnam.
4. Were you a party animal? No.  My best friend graduated a year early, and I spent my senior year keeping mostly to myself.  I learned a lot that year, reading at least five books per week and beginning to explore various kinds of music outside the Top 40 during the 1964-65 school year, but I was pretty much a loner.
5. Were you a jock or nerd?  I was an introvert who always had his nose in a book, as they said back in those days.
6. Were you in choir/Band? Nope.  I played sousaphone in 7th grade.  I wasn’t good at it, and gave it up as soon as the year ended.
7. Did you ever get suspended from school?  Of course not.  I had an independent streak, and refused to exert myself in classes I didn’t like (math, science, physical education), but I enjoyed my other classes and would never have done anything to get myself kicked out of school, even briefly.
8. If you could go back would you? To do it over again?  Nah.  Not unless I could take some of my hard-earned maturity with me.  I’d do a lot of things differently if I could.  But I’m happy enough with the way things turned out for me.  Why tinker with the past and maybe wind up with a different future?
9. Do you still talk to the person that you went to prom with?  What is this “prom” of which you speak?  Fifty-two years later, I’m only in contact with two people from my graduating class.  The only reunion I’ve gone to was the 50th, and then only because those two friends promised to show up.
10. Did you skip school?  In the 9th grade, I used to avoid Gym class every chance I got, which was fairly often.  The coaches didn’t seem to care.  Apart from that, though, I only missed school if I was sick.
11. Go to all the football games? Didn’t go to any of them, or any other sporting events either.
12. Favorite subject? English and Latin.  I took four years of Latin, and never regretted it.  And to this day, I still speak reasonably fluent English.
13. Do you have any of your year books? All three of them.  In Wichita back then, elementary school was K-6th grade, junior high was 7-9, and high school was 10-12.
14. Did you follow the career path you imagined?  All I knew about careers in 1965 is that I didn’t want one.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  In my senior year, they had a Career Day, and I went to hear Paul King from KLEO-1480 talk about a career as a disc jockey.  Getting paid for playing records sounded like a good idea.  Ultimately, though, I followed the path of least resistance and kept going to school for the next ten years.  As an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, I got a job in the library, working as a student assistant for $1.00 an hour.  When I graduated (and got my draft deferment), I took a paraprofessional job in the library, making $3,400 a year.  The more I interacted with the librarians there, the more unfair it seemed that they were making three times as much money as I was when it was clear (to me, anyway) that I was at least three times smarter than they were.  Thus it was that in 1973, I moved to Tucson to seek my fortune as a professional librarian.