INDICTMENT WEEK EDITION
Ed. Note: How is it that my baby can sense exactly when I am sitting down to write, and decide that it is the perfect moment to wake up/cry/insist on being held? My kid has a sixth sense and does NOT want me writing this thing, apparently. Nevertheless, I persisted.
INDICTMENTS!: Monday morning feels like forever ago, and I’m sure you all know what happened: Mueller unsealed indictments of Paul Manafort and his right-hand man Rick Gates for money laundering and tax evasion. His team also unsealed a guilty plea by erstwhile Trump foreign policy aide George Papadopolous, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his attempts to coordinate with Russian officials during the campaign. So, yeah, the Papadopolous story is, for purposes of the larger investigation, the bigger deal here. Lawfare summarizes what we learned on Monday: “To wit, during that period, members of the Trump campaign team were actively working to set up a meeting with Russian officials or representatives. And from a very early point in the campaign, those meetings were explicitly about obtaining hacked, incriminating emails. . . . [A]t the same time as Papadopoulos admits he was working Russian government officials for Clinton emails and for a Trump-Putin meeting, Manafort was allegedly still laundering the money he had obtained by illegally representing one of Putin’s allied strongmen.”
So what do we make of all of this? I think we can safely put to bed the question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the election, because the answer is unquestionably yes. A foreign policy aide spent weeks courting Russian officials, and when told that Russia had “dirt” -- including “thousands of emails” from Clinton -- in its possession, he went to his supervisors at the campaign and urged them to set up a meeting with Putin. Those advisors told him he was doing “great work,” and only dismissed the idea of Trump himself attending such a meeting, saying that someone lower on the totem pole should do it. And then, wouldn’t you know it, policy aide Carter Page visits Moscow a couple of months later and met with Russian officials -- a trip he told Jeff Sessions about. At the same time, a different Russian with high-level government contacts gets invited to Trump Tower to meet with Jared, Manafort, and Don Jr. promising to bring dirt on Clinton and armed with government-approved talking points -- and the campaign (Don Jr.) is eager for that dirt. And then we have the stories about Trump associates seeking out Wikileaks to better distribute the emails that Russians hacked from the DNC. Collusion simply means working together. Given all of this, how can anyone say that the Trump campaign was anything other than eager to work with Russian officials to get damaging information on Trump’s election opponent? Ezra Klein lays all of this out extremely clearly here. (It’s also important to note that “collusion” is not necessarily a crime. But in any other world, it is a massive, unprecedented scandal that should end the Trump presidency.)
MUELLER’S WORK EXPOSES MORE LIES: ThinkProgress points out a “hidden bombshell” in the Papadopolous plea. In March 2016, he attended a meeting at which Trump was present and announced that he could set up a meeting between Trump and Putin. The Times reports that Trump listened with interest, and did not say no to the idea. But earlier this year, when questioned by reporters, Trump said that he had no idea any of his aides, other than Michael Flynn, had any contacts with Russians during the campaign. The plea deal strongly suggests that Trump was lying.
This also adds to evidence that Sessions has lied about his knowledge of Russian contacts. Recall that, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Sessions (unprompted) told Al Franken that he was “not aware of any of those activities,” when asked if he knew of any Trump aide having contact with Russians. And just last month, he reiterated that he was not aware of any “continuing exchange of information between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government,” and that he “do[esn’t] believe they occurred.” (Both of these statements were made under oath.) But Trump aide J.D. Gordon, who was at that March 2016 meeting that Trump and Sessions both attended, told the Times that Papadopolous “went into the pitch right away,” highlighting his talks with a high-level Russian official and proposing to set up a meeting with Putin. Gordon said Sessions supposedly nixed the idea and warned the others not to talk about it “because it might leak.” And Carter Page, another Trump foreign policy aide, told the Times that he told Sessions in the spring of 2016 of his plans to travel to Russia in the summer of 2016. Franken sent a letter to Sessions on Thursday: “This is another example in an alarming pattern in which you, the nation’s top law enforcement official, apparently failed to tell the truth, under oath.”
THE RULE OF LAW BENDS BUT REMAINS UNBROKEN, FOR NOW: This week, a deranged man killed eight people in New York City when he intentionally rammed a truck onto the pedestrian and bike path on the West Side Highway, in an apparent terrorist attack. The attacker was captured alive, after police shot him in the abdomen. Almost immediately after the attack, Lindsey Graham insisted that this man -- a legal U.S. resident who was captured in the U.S. -- should be held as an enemy combatant, without the legal rights afforded to all criminal suspects apprehended in America. Graham explained: “The one thing I like about President Trump, he understands that we’re in a religious war. The last thing I want this guy to hear tonight is ‘You have a right to a lawyer.’ The last thing [he] should hear is his Miranda rights.” John McCain agreed. For his part, Trump suggested the attacker should be thrown into Gitmo, after calling our justice system “a joke and a laughingstock.” Perhaps I am biased, given my profession, but this last statement strikes me as one of the most disgusting and disgraceful things Trump has ever said. At least he was forced just 24 hours later to acknowledge that the “laughingstock” of a justice system is better equipped to try terrorist suspects than Gitmo. And indeed, the DOJ has already charged the suspect, a tacit acknowledgment by Sessions that the federal justice system can easily handle these cases -- something that directly contradicts his (and Trump’s) years of fearmongering about trying terrorist suspects in federal court.
Still, Trump continued to attack the DOJ and FBI all week, angrily insisting that the DOJ should be investigating and prosecuting Hillary Clinton. But Benjamin Wittes sees a silver lining: In an interview this week, Trump said, “[T]he saddest thing is, because I am the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing and I am very frustrated by it.” In any other moment, the spectre of a president demanding the prosecution of his political opponents would be earth-shattering, crisis-inducing stuff; as Wittes puts it, “In these radio comments and these tweets, Trump is announcing just how badly he wants to corrupt the DOJ.” But the silver lining, the reason for hope and pride, is Trump’s frustration -- his acknowledgment that he is, in fact, constrained by chains. “The chains are the workaday women and men of federal law enforcement, and their expectations that the political echelon at the Justice Department will shield them from becoming the President’s janissaries and enforcers.” Wittes’ entire take is worth reading.
ON TAXES, RICH GET A WINDFALL -- BUT IT COULD BE WORSE: Yesterday, the House GOP finally released its tax plan, after a few days of delays to figure out their untenable position:
“Republicans have promised their donors $5 trillion worth of tax cuts. But their budget only allows for revenue loss of $1.5 trillion. What they call “tax reform” is a process of trying to stuff the $5 trillion tax cuts into a $1.5 trillion bag.” From my not-super-well-informed reading, the plan certainly heavily favors the mega-wealthy, but it could be worse. There are even a few things that seem like good ideas, most notably starting to cut back on the mortgage interest deduction, a tax break that skews heavily to the wealthy and helps distort the housing market in dangerous ways. And it keeps the highest tax bracket at 39.6%, although it raises the income threshold for that bracket to $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for couples. But it has some deeply regressive elements, like repealing the estate tax and getting rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax. “There is perhaps no better example of how much this will benefit the rich than that fact that Donald Trump would have paid $31 million less in taxes in 2005 (the one year for which we have his tax returns) without the AMT.” It also punishes the millions of Americans with student loans, barring them from deducting the loan interest from their income (but it does allow people to open college savings accounts for their “unborn children”). And it has a host of majorly unpopular provisions to try to pay for its massive cuts for corporations and the rich, repealing the deduction to offset adoption costs; the deduction for costs to small business to make their business accessible to the disabled; the deduction for long-term medical care and other illness-related expenses; even the tax incentive to hire veterans. All while raising taxes on the middle class: The exemplar middle class family the House GOP is holding up to show a tax cut -- a family making $59,000 would see a $1,182 tax cut, they say -- would in fact get slammed with a tax increase by 2024. As Chait puts it, “The plan reads as if it was reverse-engineered from 30-second political attack ads.”
It is important to note that “the bill will almost certainly not remain in its current form.” That’s because of the Senate’s rules. The Senate’s budget reconciliation rules -- where Republicans can pass legislation with only 50 votes and do not have to rely on Democrats -- apply only where a proposed bill does not add to the deficit after 10 years. So the GOP has two options to pass its tax bill: (1) make sure the tax cuts don’t add to the deficit, or (2) make the tax cuts temporary, expiring after 10 years. (So the Bush tax cuts, for example, expired after 10 years.) With unified GOP control of the government this year, they were intent on passing permanent -- and thus deficit-neutral -- tax cuts. But the House plan adds trillions of dollars to the deficit, and they have no idea how to solve the problem to get permanent tax cuts without Democratic votes. As Chait writes, they appear to have essentially given up: “The months they have spent trying to maneuver around Senate rules and avoid the mistake of the Bush years have come up mostly empty. They are going to leave it to the Senate to devise an answer to a problem they could not solve. In its most important aspect, then, the House tax-cut plan is a complete failure of governing.” (Note that McCain, Collins, and Corker have all made statements suggesting they will oppose this bill: McCain has insisted on bipartisanship and regular order; Collins opposes eliminating the estate tax; and Corker has vowed to vote down any bill that adds to the debt. If they remain true to these positions, then the bill has no chance of passing the Senate.)
Endorsements:
- For New York voters: On Tuesday, along with voting for our next mayor, we have the chance to vote for a constitutional convention to rewrite the state’s constitution. There are definite risks to holding a convention, and there are lots of very reputable groups urging you to vote against it (including the New York Times and the New York Civil Liberties Union). But I am endorsing it, though not without a bit of trepidation. The bottom line is that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix the disaster that is New York’s politics, primary of which are election reform (specifically, gerrymandering and campaign finance). My boss, Richard Emery, wants the constitutional convention to abolish the legislature entirely and replace it with an entirely new unicameral body, and he makes a convincing case for it here. As he puts it, “A clean slate is literally the only way to build a new culture of transparency and responsiveness in legislative activity that can fulfill the promises that politicians in New York invariably break.” There are risks, of course. The convention could be taken over by lobbyists, corporate interests, and/or far right-wingers. But any changes the convention comes up with will be put back on the ballot to be voted up or down by New York voters, and I feel relatively confident that the Forces of Justice could successfully mobilize to defeat a disastrous constitution (then again, facing off against big moneyed interests is scary, and 2016 taught us that we can’t ever be sure what will happen with an election). So the risks are real, but so are the upsides. Right now, the entire government is run by the Three Men in a Room. That is an insane, corrupt, disgusting way to run what should be one of the most progressive and enlightened states in the country. So I encourage you to vote YES on the constitutional convention -- and then to stay super engaged to make sure we pick the right delegates and put pressure on them to make the right decisions. (On the other hand, this Working Families Party column urging a No vote raises some very good points…)
- I am not one to endorse Joe Scarborough, but he lays out a very clear timeline of Team Trump’s involvement with Russia that makes this whole thing much clearer and simpler, so check it out.
- Find out what prompted Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stein to write the following chilling sentence: “Make no mistake: With this filing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department has declared war on attorneys and groups who dare to oppose it in court.” (Seriously, read this.)
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