So it seems like last week was a great week to be away, as nothing major happened in the news. It really was the perfect time to be in Ontario, Canada without cell service and away from Twitter and regular access to NPR, since it was just a super normal slow summer news week. What a relief!
SCHEDULING NOTE: Today at 7pm, the Senate closed for the August recess, to resume business on September 5. That means that we get AN ENTIRE MONTH where nothing incredibly terrible could possibly happen in Congress. No more attempts to pass health care, at least for the next 4 weeks. So take this moment to breath a bit more freely, and to give yourselves, your friends, and your fellow activists around the country an enormous pat on the bag and congratulations for the unprecedented fight that has been waged to protect this country over the last six months. (Chait: “The movement to save Obamacare takes its place among the great social causes in American history.”)
WHITE HOUSE CONVERGES WITH CONSPIRACY THEORY: In 2016, a young DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was murdered in D.C. His killing remains unsolved, like many murders in DC, but his name became famous this spring in the fever swamps of the right wing -- and among all Fox News viewers. That is because a conspiracy theory arose in which Rich -- not Russia -- was thought to be the person who leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks. The Right liked this story because (i) it exonerated Trump from allegations of colluding with the Russians; (ii) it supported their fevered insistence that Democrats (and Hillary Clinton in particular) are murderous fiends who shot this guy in cold blood out of retribution; and (iii) the Right loooooooves conspiracy theories. In fact, the Right is nothing but conspiracy theories at this point. Fox News threw gasoline on the fire in May when it published a story saying that “federal investigators” had confirmed that Rich was in contact with Wikileaks. This claim was soon debunked, and after a week, Fox was forced to retract the story. (However, no one has been disciplined or punished in any way for the story.) On Tuesday, NPR reported that a lawsuit by the private investigator involved in the case alleges that the White House itself was involved in the perpetuation of this conspiracy theory. The lawsuit was filed by Rod Wheeler, a Fox contributor who was hired by a wealthy Trump supporter, a man named Ed Butowsky, to investigate the murder. Wheeler claims that a month before the false Fox story ran, he and Butowsky met with Sean Spicer at the White House to discuss the Rich murder. (This meeting happened on April 20. On May 16, Spicer falsely claimed that he was not aware of the Rich story at all.) “The first page of the lawsuit quotes a voicemail and text from Butowsky boasting that Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story just before it went to air and was published.” The eventual story that was posted by Fox relied significantly on Wheeler, but soon after it was published, Wheeler claimed that Fox had put words in his mouth and invented quotations attributed to him; Wheeler’s suit claims that the whole story was manipulated and pushed by Butowsky. He quotes a voicemail Butowsky left him just days before the Fox story was published, in which Butowsky tells Wheeler, “We have the full, uh, attention of the White House on this. And tomorrow, let's close this deal, whatever we've got to do." Butowsky also texted Wheeler: "Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It's now all up to you." Coaching Fox on how to frame the story, Butowsky sent an email to Fox producers explaining, “One of the big conclusions we need to draw from this is that the Russians did not hack our computer systems and ste[a]l emails and there was no collusion" between "Trump and the Russians." The Washington Post has a good timeline on all of this.
So why does this matter? According to Chait, the most disturbing part of this story is the “seamless integration of the White House with the fever swamp. This represents a historical milestone of sorts. Trump’s administration has fully erased the boundary between legitimate conservatism and the most disreputable paranoid discourse on the far right.”
P.S. Tonight it was revealed that Mueller has convened a federal grand jury -- a second one, in addition to the one in Virginia looking into Flynn -- and has issued subpoenas specifically about the Don Jr. meeting. The news was reported by the WSJ but it is behind a paywall so I haven’t really learned more than the sentence above. Here’s a good Twitter thread by a UNH professor explaining what a federal grand jury does and the pitfalls that Trump associates could fall into, and precisely why this is such a big deal. Seems like a pretty good analysis, but at this point that’s all I can really say. (I don’t understand why this guy says that Mueller could issue indictments “at any time”; a federal grand jury moves slowly.) But other than cautioning that the opening of a GJ does not at all mean that charges are inevitable, I don’t have much more to add at this point.
TRUMP PERSONALLY LIED TO THE PUBLIC ABOUT DON JR’S MEETING: On Monday night, the Washington Post reported that “Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had ‘primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children’ when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations.” This was, of course, a lie: The meeting had been set up under the promise that the Russians would reveal “dirt” on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s efforts to support Trump. AND, what’s more, Trump dictated this statement on his way home from the G-8 meeting, where he and Putin had discussed the issue of Russian adoptions (ie, sanctions) -- meaning that even Trump had to know that adoptions were linked to sanctions and that this was very much a pressing political issue for the Russians. Josh Marshall has many interesting thoughts on this story that you should read. His main takeaway is that this is more proof that there really is a there there: that Trump was involved in criminal or criminal-adjacent conduct, and that he knows it: “Trump intervened and overruled his advisors and lawyers who wanted a more candid and complete statement because ‘transparency’ is only an effective strategy if the drip drip drip of revelations is more damaging than the story itself. The bank robber has no interest in transparency. . . . The truth is bad. That’s why President Trump leaned on James Comey to drop the investigation into Mike Flynn. That’s why President Trump fired James Comey. That’s why President Trump has tried to bully Attorney General Jeff Sessions into resigning. That’s why President Trump continues to threaten to fire Robert Mueller. That’s why he overruled his advisors and issued a false statement in his son’s name.” Marshall also wonders if the idea to say that Don Jr’s meeting was about adoptions came straight from Putin (and whether Trump and Putin actually discussed what they should say about the meeting), a somewhat plausible theory given the timing.
DON’T PIN YOUR HOPES ON JOHN KELLY: As of last week, Reince Preibus is out and John Kelly is in, and he is already receiving high marks: Kelly “has the rare ability to rein in Trump” (Ryan Lizza); firing Scaramucci “signals that Kelly is moving quickly to assert control over the West Wing” (Washington Post); “Kelly has the skills to impose needed discipline in the White House” (USA Today). But over the last 6 months as head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kelly has revealed a sinister side that we should not forget. As Dara Lind explains, Kelly “is perfectly in line with the brand that first brought Trump to campaign success: the idea that the world is a terrifying place full of people (mostly foreigners) who want to undermine social order and the American way of life, and that the tough American men who stand up to them shouldn’t be too closely questioned about how they keep those threats at bay.” She recalls a speech he delivered in May that she calls “shockingly martial,” in which he said: “Make no mistake — we are a nation under attack. We are under attack from criminals who think their greed justifies raping young girls at knifepoint, dealing poison to our youth, or killing just for fun.” His tenure at DHS was marked not just by rhetorical extremism but by actual, on-the-ground consequential cruelty, as the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer explains: “In six months, Kelly eliminated guidelines that governed federal immigration agents’ work; vastly expanded the categories of immigrants being targeted for deportation; threatened to abandon the Obama-era program that grants legal status to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children; and has even broached the idea of splitting up mothers and children at the border to “deter” people from coming to the U.S. Under Kelly, immigration arrests in the U.S. increased by forty per cent and D.H.S became one of the few branches of the federal government that has been both willing and able to execute Trump’s policy priorities.” This is a man who, like Trump, views the world in xenophobic, near-apocalyptic terms and will act (and has acted) according to those beliefs. If we’re looking for someone to keep Bannon’s darkest instincts at bay, I don’t think this is the guy.
#HEADDESK x1000: You may have seen that the transcripts from Trump’s calls with Mexico President Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, from the first weeks of his presidency, were leaked to the Washington Post. They are as bananas as one would expect. But really, please read Jon Chait’s parsing of the Australia call, titled “Australian Prime MInister Slowly Realizes Trump Is a Complete Idiot.” You won’t regret it.
Good News of the Week: On Monday, 9 of the 11 judges on the DC Court of Appeals ruled against EPA Destroyer Administrator Scott Pruitt, ordering that the EPA must enforce an Obama-era rule limiting methane pollution. Pruitt had wanted a 2-year pause “so the agency could ‘look broadly’ at regulations and review their impact.”
Low-Profile Outrage of the Week: Radley Balko at the Washington Post brings our attention to this horrific injustice in Alabama, where the state is refusing to pay compensation to a man who was wrongfully convicted and spent THIRTY YEARS on death row before being released two years ago. In Alabama, a wrongfully convicted person has to apply to a committee for compensation, but even if the committee grants it (which it did in this case), the state legislature has to specifically authorize money to pay (which, obviously, it simply doesn’t do). “Meanwhile, since Hinton’s release the Alabama legislature has passed a different bill related to capital punishment — the Orwellian-named ‘Fair Justice Act,’ which aims to limit the appeals of death row inmates and speed up executions. As Hinton himself wrote in an op-ed, had the Fair Justice Act been in place at the time of his conviction, he’d almost certainly be dead.”
Also This: “By our count, by the end of August, Trump will have spent all or part of 53 days in office at leisure, compared with 15 days for Obama through August 2009. What’s more, Trump will have played at least 33 rounds of golf, nearly double Obama’s 17 rounds — and that’s even before Trump gets to his vacation spot, an actual golf course.”
Endorsements:
- This kick-ass campaign video for Amy McGrath, a retired Marine veteran and the first woman marine to fly an F-18 in combat. She’s running for Congress in Kentucky.
- This short video summarizing one of my law firm’s biggest and most consequential cases (and that I had nothing to do with, to be clear). A true story of good against evil. Check it out!
- Fun video of the week: White House is really, really good at stepping on its own message.
- This op-ed by Lindy West, arguing that abortion cannot be a “compromise” area for Democrats. I am not sure I agree with her bottom line, but it is a very well-written piece that raises a lot of tough questions in my own head, and I’d encourage you to read it and grapple with it. This paragraph is particularly poignant:
But there is no model of economic equality that does not reckon with “identity politics.” There is no economic equality without the ability to terminate a pregnancy. There is no economic equality without the overthrow of white supremacy. What good is an economic opportunity if large swaths of the population can’t access it? Telling minority groups that it’s their responsibility to sit back and wait, to subordinate their needs for the good of the party — that implies that “the party” is not theirs as much as everyone else’s. And it sounds a lot like the people we’re trying to defeat.
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