#WE'RE a failure for reelecting him

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 13, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 14, 2024

Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.

Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.

The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.

Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.

When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.

Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're gonna look at it. We're gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're gonna look at everything.”

Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.

If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.

Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.

That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.

The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.

But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.

Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”

Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King,” and he has published an “enemies list” of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances.

Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.

The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.

Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”

There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.

In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”

Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.

Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.

Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.

And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”

So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.

Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.

If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[misfitwashere]

December 13, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

DEC 14

Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.

Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.

The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.

Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.

When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.

Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're gonna look at it. We're gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're gonna look at everything.”

Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.

If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.

Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.

That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.

The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.

But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.

Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”

Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King,” and he has published an “enemies list” of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances.

Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Timesreported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.

The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.

Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”

There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.

In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”

Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.

Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.

Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.

And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”

So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.

Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.

If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.

—

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson 12.13.24

Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.

Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.

The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.

Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.

When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.

Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're gonna look at it. We're gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're gonna look at everything.”

Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.

If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.

Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.

That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.

The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.

But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.

Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”

Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King,” and he has published an “enemies list” of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances.

Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.

The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.

Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”

There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.

In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”

Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.

Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.

Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.

And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”

So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.

Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.

If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.

—

[boardnroom]

1  Trump Descending

“This is something which has never happened to a President before, it is all Democrat-inspired in a totally Democrat location, New York City and State, completely controlled and dominated by a heavily reported enemy of mine, Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Trump

The administration of America is as complex an undertaking as ever seen in history. There is a common sense resistance to its enormity which is usually professed with anecdotal instances of waste, corruption, and stupidity. Its targets are chosen politically. 

But the concept of this administration, of the American state, of the American empire must admit that its size and complexity reflects the enormous contradictions of a political economy of private ownership in a world where the vast majority depend on just that economy while owning practically none of it.

When opponents within his own party as well as the other denounced Trump as unfit for office this is what they were talking about. Small-time moguls hatch their deals in a world that, while also capitalist, has little else to do with either the ownership or the administration of this system. They and he lack the hard won expertise or colossal wealth that are the usual qualifications for this post. He also lacks, despite claims, any level of political genius.

The policies by which America is administered are hashed out in constant competition between weighted points of private interest. Nevermind how they are weighted. At any one time a texture of agreement is in place and in the care of a system of officials whose reference is to this texture for acting rather than their private interests. Corruption, naturally, exists but it is just that, corruption, not system. 

System maintenance requires education. Positions require certification. The number of people involved is a large slice of the population, larger than the ruling class but far smaller than the working majority. As a class it lies between, on one hand, the owners of everything and, on the other, those whose work is supervised in its entirety or who otherwise fend for themselves. As a class it never included Trump, never recognized him as qualified, and never tolerated him. When the time came for him to cajole support for his putsch the response was unanimously negative.

Not that there is no support for him. Where his support extends into the police, the military, and Republican officeholders it is infra legal, positioned in an unofficial web to overthrow the established order. Why? What situation are we in where the White House can organize a coup, organize it with such a lack of skill, and have it fail almost entirely by its own hand?

Trump appears to have believed that by satisfying those who already own everything with tax cuts, loose money, and deregulation he would be given complete command over the administrative system. He could leverage his passionate support among the Kleinbürger to invent an election landslide. He could create enough chaos that an opening would appear through which he could march on Rome.

It never happened. Trump's mass base is frightened enough, their status is fragile enough, they are ready to call down heaven's wrath. But the bourgeoisie is not. For them safety is still found in the familiar.

2 Two Parties

We badly need a Republican Party. We need a two-party system. It’s not healthy to have a one-party system. 

Biden

Trump's failure leaves the Republicans in a mess. His reelection was conducted under the banner of a last ditch resistance to socialism. But the socialists haven't taken the field. The final battle he proclaimed is a crisis of capital. His opposition party, the Democrats, has a mass base that it can rely on for now and it has retained the confidence of capital. But a two party system, the American two party system, requires room for accumulation. Without it only one survives.

That was Trump's message in 2016. The Republican Party must become the single party or it will disappear. Their insurance policy was to be judges of demonstrable loyalty. Together with control of the countryside, support of extractive capital, and the repressive arms of the state, it would be enough within the 18th century remnant structures of America to turn the tide. To wipe away the power of the administrative state. But the instruments were not adequate. Both the Trump faction, unsurprisingly limited, and the party it struggled to master tripped.

The reelection campaign was able to successfully raise the spectre of an aggressive left by using the summer's demonstrations. Taking place everywhere other than where Trump's supporters were congregated, he could paint an image not contradicted by his listeners' experiences. Everywhere else it fell flat. Everywhere else he was seen as a liar who fucked up the pandemic. Instead the party has been forced to express its will to power as a refusal to acknowledge the vote against it. It dreams of conspiracy and it whips its persisting forces at the state level to squeeze its opponents numbers enough to cling to what is left of its position.

But the reason the Republican Party lacks credentials to govern a one party state is the weakness of its class base, not the faults of its leader. Despite proclamations to the contrary the party lacks ground in the working class. What it has is in contradiction with its satraps. Its classical ideological infrastructure is in contradiction with its new ideology and efforts are underway for a duplication of the entire mess. But the party cannot be both incipient fascism and bipartisan imperialist. Choosing Trump was a symptom of its decline, its continuing clutching to a fallen boss is unavoidable.

Within the GOP all reactionary currents are given shelter now. If capital loses faith in its own governing there is where it will find the troops for a fascist state. Some pieces of the bourgeoisie are ready for this but they lack, for now, a critical mass of support. And they have no assurance the critical mass will not be with its opposition.

So we are left with the one of the two parties that doesn't want to govern on its own. The nightmare that the GOP instilled in its voters of a Democratic Party controlled by the far left is false. As a party the Democrats are entirely faithful to capital and to empire. It is the Republicans who, by processing faith in a political-economy that doesn't actually exist, have broken with the political order that sustains American capitalism.

The one party rule of GOP prophecy is the expression of their own disqualification and the admission that the working class will not sustain capitalism in America without the historic compromises that are intellectual property of the Democrats. At the same time it is amongst the Republican rank and file that the fantasy of a seizure of power by a revolutionary party gathers its greatest enthusiasts.

But the Democratic Party will never give up the search for its political sibling. Without it the party is face to face with a class that will not cooperate with what will be asked of it as the pace of crisis accelerates.

But to see the outlines of this situation we need to look at the evolution of empire in the past century.

3  Three Empires

Milley told a group of senior leaders, "Here's the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they're boogaloo boys, they're Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We're going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren't getting in."

attributed to Gen. Milley

This is the story of three empires. They are not the empires of kings and queens where one nation conquers and exploits its colonies alongside its rival empires. Although they are born of such empires. These are empires that each claim the entire globe. They arose when the old ones were discarded, undone by the great war. There were three because, as Vico has it, three is the number of excess. And, as they all claimed to be universal, three were indeed too many.

The first to fall was the empire of death. Defeat in the great war deposed the old monarch of its homeland but preserved the old social structure. It was stripped of all its conquests and left to embrace the only realm that remained, havoc. The cruelty that others were allowed in their hinterlands this one inflicted on its neighbors.

It was defeated by an alliance between the other two. Its land was divided and its claim to the world went underground. It emerges where imperial power is threatened, a demonic ghost of empire. Brought to its end by suicide it bequeathed the world, with its rockets, the scientific means for global suicide.

The next to suffer collapse was the empire of the party. It arose by deposing the ruling class of an imperial power, exhausted by the great war. Its universal claim was founded in the labor movement. They who were nothing were now to be all. But the great war had rejuvenated capital and the workers' party remained subordinate to it, either directly or by the necessity to compete with its power. The alliance of the party with capital defeated the Axis but left capitalism in place with its own universal imperial form, an empire of capital. 

The postwar confrontation between the two remaining claimants to universal political power took its form from the underlying confrontation between labor and capital. As long as capital is in the possession of a single class neither it nor labor can be independent of the other. Although the cold war always had the potential to destroy human civilization it was never a confrontation between cleanly divided opponents.

In the empire of capital there was also the party. The witch hunt was, and is, a pantomime of capital exorcising the demon of worker control that it can never shake because it is capital which has summoned it to begin. And in the empire of the party the administrative apparatus cannot relinquish its role in accumulation, an accumulation that, however separate, will remain subordinate to global capital.

This social falsehood stripped the party of its universal claim and led to its ideological breakup and political dissolution. But the party persists. As a system for capital accumulation it is even demonstrating success in comparison to its old rival. But it does so within the old national formation with no more claim to the allegiance of the workers of the world than the freemasons.

Which brings our attention back to America, homeland of the empire of capital and its political fairground. Here the party which was most dedicated to the witch hunt, which never failed to shout down its opponents as weak in the defense of the empire, which prayed nightly for the triumph of capital, that party has pledged itself to a figure who slanders the entire imperial superstructure. This is not by chance.

The abolition of the only remaining rival to world dominion was celebrated as the triumph of capital but just as capital requires labor to exist its empire lacks support with no opponent. The balance of military power remains as it was and continues to lose relevance economically. Political power, on the other hand, has been transformed. The former homeland of the party has publicly abandoned its claim. Over time it has adapted to a classical form of empire and maneuvers over a classic sphere of influence.

It is the empire of capital, now without global limits, that is the last to grasp its own disappearance. The claim to universal imperial authority was always no more than a claim, a false universal. It was sustained by the conflict with other false universals. When there were three empires they were made solid by the ability to make war. When there were two left standing war became impossible and they both began to dissolve. What now remains for the homeland of the only empire that has never been forced to admit it's gone?

The imperial scaffolding of American power remains. Its mass political support is split. Not as it was between two parties but between one party that encompasses its traditional ideological form and another that comprises its fascist negation. The refusal to admit that the world has shed its false empires is key to the survival of the Democratic Party. Its ruling class stratum relies on the economic advantage, to the extent it remains, of the US position at the head of a fractured capitalist alliance. Its voters count on the classical payoff of empire, marginal exemption from the austerity required in tribute from all those who it doesn't need to cement its political authority.

This alliance possesses an enormous ideological structure but its practice is accounting. And its accounts have adapted to a non-imperial world. Its ideology, however, whether sincerely believed or just recited, only keeps itself busy by controlling those political parties that are loyal to the alliance and can still rally mass support. In the old imperial heartland of America that's the Democratic Party.

In its postwar heyday the two party system provided stability to an unstable economic form. To hold the loyalty of organized labor and the administrative mass, the middle class of legend, it relied on levels of growth that are no longer possible. What is growing now is catastrophe. On the right catastrophe feeds a revival of allegiance to the empire of death, a preference for apocalypse over actual humanity. While on the left what is needed is sensed but only immanently. 

In our world three empires contended. The world has been assembled in the process. Any claims of victory falter before the accumulation of ruin that all can see. From three empires what is required now is a positive absence of empire. The process is underway at levels seen and unseen (when what is unseen becomes seen it indicates there is more to come). Our situation is unfolding but not incomprehensible provided we can read through the imperial filters that have been handed down to us.

“I believe humanity will continue to live and struggle with the difficulties that it faces. It has had many difficulties in the past, it has overcome them all. The difficulties that it faces today may seem to be immense, and they are immense, but the qualifications of people for settling their difficulties are as great, and are bound to be as great as the difficulties. I have to leave you with that; that the large majority of the population are against what is going on, they have no confidence in the regimes that exist. This is not Marxism, this is not socialism, this is not revolution. This is a common understanding of what is taking place in the world around us. This is what I’m speaking about. Mankind is faced with survival or destruction and I believe that the large majority of people will turn for survival and will in time take the steps that are necessary to recover what has been in danger in previous centuries, and which can continue if only we get rid of those who insist on maintaining power which they cannot handle.” 

C.L.R. James

[ex trivio - out of the street, from the mob; from trivium - the meeting of three roads]

[bountyofbeads]

We’ve been very weak’: House Democrats decry their oversight of Trump, push Pelosi on impeachment

By Rachael Bade and Josh Dawsey | Published September 22 at 3:14 PM ET |

Washington Post | Posted September 22, 2019 6:05 PM ET |

Democrats’ frustration with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s unwillingness to impeach President Trump is reaching a fever pitch following reports that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate a political rival — a step the California Democrat declined to endorse Sunday.

An increasingly vocal group of House Democrats are starting to dismiss their own oversight of Trump as feckless, even accusing their colleagues of emboldening the president by refusing to stand up to what they see as lawless behavior.

At the very least, these Democrats say, the House should be taking more aggressive action to break the unprecedented White House stonewalling, possibly even fining defiant Trump officials, an idea Pelosi dismissed this year.

“At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president���s lawbreaking behavior — it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a longtime impeachment backer, tweeted late Saturday night. “It is one thing for a sitting president to break the law. It’s another to let him. . . . The GOP’s silence & refusal to act shouldn’t be a surprise. Ours is.”

Even House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), an impeachment skeptic and Pelosi ally, suggested impeachment might be inevitable and called reports of Trump requesting that a Ukrainian leader investigate a business connected to former vice president Joe Biden’s son “the most profound violation of the presidential oath of office.”

Trump suggested Sunday that he mentioned Biden and his son Hunter in a phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has denied that he did anything wrong amid questions about whether he used his power to seek help from a foreign country for his reelection bid.

“I have been very reluctant to go down the path of impeachment . . . this would be an extraordinary remedy of last resort, not first resort,” Schiff said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But if the president is essentially withholding military aid at the same time that he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader into doing something illicit that is providing dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign, then that may be the only remedy that is coequal to the evil that that conduct represents.”

Pelosi clearly is feeling the pressure. In a rare Sunday afternoon “Dear Colleague” letter — sent to Republicans and Democrats — the speaker called for the director of national intelligence to turn over the whistleblower complaint detailing Trump’s interactions with Ukraine. Pelosi threatened an unspecified escalation in House action if they refuse — but notably stopped short of impeachment.

“If the administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the president, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation,” she wrote.

The growing calls to impeach Trump — or do something bold to confront the White House — follows an embarrassing week for House Democrats. Many feel increasingly helpless in fighting the White House’s obstruction as Pelosi looks to the courts to uphold congressional subpoenas, a process that has taken months and could drag out for years.

On Tuesday, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, infuriated Democrats with his behavior at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, mocking lawmakers on the panel, talking over them and promoting his own potential Senate campaign. 

Several Democrats on the panel privately pressed House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) to hold Lewandowski in contempt on the spot, an idea Pelosi later endorsed — spurring their sense of urgency. But Nadler’s staff, which wanted to keep the focus on Trump, said the logistics of doing so immediately were too complicated, if not impossible — a decision that upset members so much that the committee held an “emergency meeting” to allow members to vent on Friday, according to multiple lawmakers.

“To clear up a technical point: House rules do not permit us to hold anyone in contempt on the spot,” wrote one Judiciary staffer in an email to placate committee aides. “Which is not to say we do not understand the strong impulse to punch this guy in the mouth.”

The Washington Post obtained a copy of the email.

The sense of powerlessness only compounded later in the week following reports that an intelligence community inspector general determined that a whistleblower complaint against Trump constituted an “urgent concern,” which would typically be provided to Congress under law. But The Post reported White House counsel Pat Cipollone was involved in helping block the complaint from Congress — as he has blocked numerous former White House aides from complying with congressional subpoenas in their investigations of Trump. 

“The total disregard that this administration has for the separation of powers, the failure to recognize Congress as a coequal branch of government, and the inability for them to follow the law is stunning,” said Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.). 

By the end of the week, lawmakers involved in the investigations of Trump were for the first time openly saying they looked ineffective and worried that their inquiries — and unwillingness to impeach or push back in a timely manner — were undermining Congress’s role as a third branch of government. 

Since voters put Democrats in power in 2018 — a move many interpreted as the public’s desire for a check on the president — a special counsel identified possible instances of obstruction of justice by Trump; federal prosecutors have all but named him as being involved in a campaign finance violation that sent his former lawyer Michael Cohen to prison; his business has openly accepted money from foreign officials staying at his hotels; and he has allegedly pushed Ukraine to go after the 2020 Democratic candidate leading in national polls. 

“We have said the president must be held accountable, and ‘no one is above the law,’ including the president of the United States,” said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.). “We have to not only say that; our actions have to reflect that.”

White House lawyers have sought ways at every turn to block documents or witnesses from congressional investigators under the direction from the president, who decries the probe as unfair and mocks Nadler, according to current and former administration officials. The calculation, according to White House officials, is that there will not be much of a price to pay for obstinance from the general public. Democrats, after all, have been unable to move public sentiment in favor of impeaching Trump.

Two White House officials said they are also not worried about defying or mocking Nadler because Pelosi has made it clear she is not interested in impeachment and the House Democratic Caucus is split about what to do to counter Trump.

In the 235-member Democratic caucus, a majority of 138 favor impeachment, according to a Post analysis.

“Why would we help them try to embarrass the president?” one person familiar with the effort said.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

With Pelosi unwilling to impeach Trump, Democratic rank-and-file members are frantically looking for something to fortify their investigations. On Friday, Judiciary members pressed Nadler to invoke Congress’s long-dormant inherent contempt authority that would allow Congress to jail or fine people for defying subpoenas. 

The power hasn’t been used in more than 100 years. Pelosi, leadership and other House lawyers were dismissive of the idea when investigators first floated it last spring. But Judiciary members are once again trying to force the issue. 

“Our side says it's ‘legally questionable,’ ‘it hasn't been used in forever,’ and ‘blah, blah, blah,’ ” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a member of the panel, who argues Trump’s legal team frequently has used last-ditch efforts and bogus explanations to block testimony — and the House should do the same.

“I say do it,” he continued. “Let them argue in court that they take the position that it's legally questionable. We back off of everything! We’ve been very weak.”

The frustration with the Democratic approach extends to members of Pelosi’s leadership team.

“We need to develop other tools because our tools are not working,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Judiciary panel member who is co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. “We cannot allow the administration to simply continuously stonewall Congress with no consequences.”

Lieu is pushing for the use of inherent contempt.

Even Schiff, who came to Congress in part by defeating a Republican who voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, said on Sunday that relying on the courts may not work for Trump, Ukraine and the undisclosed whistleblower complaint.

“We cannot afford to play rope-a-dope in the court for weeks or months on end,” Schiff said. “We need an answer if there’s a fire burning it needs to be put out, and that's why we're going to have to look at every remedy . . . we're going to have to consider impeachment, as well, as a remedy here.”

The whistleblower complaint has Congress and Trump at an impasse. Here’s what the law says.

By Deanna Paul | Published September 22 at 2:10 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted September 22, 2019 6:10 PM ET|

The Trump administration, Congress and the media are consumed by a whistleblower complaint lodged last month with the inspector general of the intelligence community.

Although the whistleblower’s identity and substantive details of the complaint remain unknown, some specifics have begun taking shape. As The Washington Post reported last week, the report centered on several conversations involving President Trump and Ukraine, and a promise to a foreign leader so concerning that it drove a U.S. intelligence official to file the complaint.

In an unprecedented move, acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire refused to share the complaint with congressional intelligence committees, even after receiving a subpoena, claiming that the law did not require him to do so. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) accused Maguire of violating the law.

As tensions between Congress and the Trump administration mount, intelligence whistleblower laws are under a national spotlight.

Are intelligence whistleblowers protected by law?

A whistleblower is a person who exposes information or activities that are unlawful, unethical or in violation of a company’s policy. Federal whistleblower protection laws and most states’ laws make it illegal to retaliate against an employee who reports employer violations or misconduct.

Intelligence whistleblowers face additional hurdles and more severe consequences — not only termination of employment but also the threat of criminal prosecution — because of the confidential nature of information that their concerns could include.

The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1998 and incorporated at the creation of the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General in 2010, fashioned a special set of procedures for employees to report misconduct that guarantee classified information remains classified.

Under the statute, an intelligence whistleblower is protected from retaliation so long as he or she follows the protocol when filing a complaint.

How does an intelligence whistleblower file a complaint?

The employee submits the complaint to the inspector general of the intelligence community. The inspector general is required to review it within 14 days and then determines whether the complaint is of “urgent concern,” which is defined as involving conduct “relating to” the “administration or operation of an intelligence activity within the authority of the Director of National Intelligence involving classified information.”

If the complaint appears credible, the inspector general is required to forward it to the director of national intelligence, who then has seven days to send the complaint and any accompanying information to congressional intelligence oversight committees. If the inspector general decides it’s not credible, or if he or she does not act on the complaint, the whistleblower can contact the congressional intelligence committees directly but must tell the inspector general and seek guidance from the director of national intelligence to contact the committees securely.

What happened here?

On Aug. 12, an intelligence community employee submitted a complaint to acting inspector general Michael Atkinson, who concluded the report was urgent and credible and forwarded it to Maguire.

Maguire, however, did not send it to the intelligence committees within seven days, as the statute requires, and failed to give the whistleblower guidance on how to securely contact the committees directly. Since then, Maguire has also refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the House Intelligence Committee, compelling him to produce an unredacted copy of the whistleblower complaint.

In a Sept. 17 letter to Schiff, Maguire’s general counsel, Jason Klitenic, said the whistleblower complaint was determined not to be an “urgent concern.”

The law did not require the director of national intelligence to forward it to Congress because it involved “conduct by someone outside the Intelligence Community and did not relate to any ‘intelligence activity within the responsibility and authority of the DNI,’ ” he claimed.

Klitenic also said the complaint involved “confidential and potentially privileged communications.” Disclosure would violate the president’s authority to control classified information and the whistleblower and inspector general were barred from sending the information directly to Congress, he said.

Can he do that?

The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act has no provision for what should happen if the inspector general determines something is of urgent concern but the director of national intelligence refuses to forward it to Congress. The scenario has never come up before.

But some legal experts say that, because the law doesn’t directly address this issue, it means the inspector general has the final say.

“The DNI cannot countermand the inspector general’s determination,” Jesselyn Radack, a national security lawyer known for her defense of whistleblowers, told The Post.

Here, though, there’s an additional wrinkle: The director of national intelligence also consulted the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel

Robert Litt, former general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, explained in a piece published by Lawfare: “[Office of Legal Counsel] opinions are considered to be binding and authoritative interpretations of law within the executive branch. So if OLC in fact formally opined that this complaint was not an ‘urgent concern’ as defined in the statute, the DNI could take the position that the IG must follow that interpretation.”

What about the Trump administration?

Thus far, The Post reports, the White House has stopped short of asserting privilege over the complaint, though Klitenic suggested in his letter that it would try to prevent Maguire from complying with committee subpoenas.

A hallmark of past administrations has been vast presidential power to control disclosure of classified information; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both championed whistleblower protections yet reiterated that the Whistleblower Protection Act did not undercut the president’s authority.

“The executive branch has always asserted the right to withhold deliberative material or presidential communications from Congress,” Litt wrote, concluding that it’s possible the privilege could protect the president’s communications with foreign leaders.

“The extent of such a privilege — and in particular whether it would protect communications that might constitute bribery — is untested,” he said. “But if the White House asserted such a privilege, the ODNI would be bound to honor it.”

In a Twitter thread Thursday, Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, similarly said that this was the “standard executive branch position” of many administrations and “should control here.”

“The president’s power to act in confidence is at its absolute height when he has a classified conversation with a foreign leader,” Goldsmith wrote. “This isn’t a defense of Trump; it’s a defense of the presidency.”

Can the whistleblower or inspector general disclose the complaint to Congress anyway?

Employees of the executive branch aren’t required to follow the White House’s guidance.

Still, legal experts are divided on whether the whistleblower and/or the inspector general could be prosecuted for sharing the complaint with congressional oversight committees, which are qualified to receive classified information.

Goldsmith said criminality depended on what was in the complaint, calling the decision to disclose “political and personally risky.”

“If the IG or the [U.S. government] employee believes the president has engaged in an act of national treachery, they can leak the information, which is a crime, and suffer the consequences,” he wrote, adding that unless Trump’s conduct rose to the level of objective betrayal — where leaking information would be warranted, justifiable and forgivable — then it should remain within the executive branch.

Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution fellow in national security law and general counsel of the Lawfare Institute, wrote Thursday that it would “almost certainly not be a crime” if it was done in a secured space.

“They wouldn’t be prosecuted; they’d just be fired,” she added.

Marty Lederman, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, agreed, saying“it probably wouldn’t be criminal for the whistleblower or IG to leak.”

The real risk, he said, is being fired for breaching terms of employment.

The disagreement between respected members of the legal community highlights the unprecedented challenges posed by this complaint. What’s clear, though, is that the whistleblower would assume some risk. When facing possible retaliation or criminal prosecution, “almost certainly not” and “probably wouldn’t be” are less-than-adequate reassurances.

What happens now?

In his letter, Klitenic said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was willing to work with Congress in the accommodation process. Still, it’s unclear whether he and Schiff will be able to reach an acceptable resolution.

Many have surmised that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into the Bidens by threatening to withhold U.S. military and financial aid.

If the complaint contained that information, a former intelligence official told The Post, “it’s hard to imagine this White House agreeing to its release in any form.”

[queerculus]

It's not even a vendetta against Biden specifically, they're chasing the profits they made under the Trump administration that came in due to a severe cultural issue where a lot of people have no fucking clue how to discern propaganda from legitimate news

A lot of public schools, at least where I live, tried to teach media literacy but due to budget constraints, overtesting, and a lot of our curriculum being untouched since the cold war, what was actually taught to a lot of kids was something significantly more watered down: "good news is propaganda, bad news is the truth."

So now, after decades of "everything the government says ever is a lie and anyone saying the government is bad is automatically correct", there's a huge base of news media consumers who only want to hear bad stories because, as far as they're concerned, anything good is a government lie.

Then we got Trump. His entire administration was lie after lie, fuckup after fuckup, and people went absolutely bananas for it. People talk about waking up and checking the news to see what horrible bullshit happened overnight as if it's a funny quirky thing they did, but they wouldn't have done it if it didn't hit some receptor in their brain, some button that gave them a little rush because it validated years of conditioning.

The world was simpler and easier to conceptualize when the government was run entirely by evil con men who were committing crimes in broad daylight, and the news media made fucking BANK on it. Their profits were record high. Problem after that is that shareholders expect only growth. Anything other than growth is a failure, even if the growth is based on a short-lived phenomenon like an exceptionally unstable criminal running the government for four years.

So now we're here. The shareholders demand growth and the editors, desperate to keep their jobs by appeasing them, are now beholden to an audience chomping at the bit to read more stories that validate their worldview. Good news is communist big government propaganda, bad news is capitalist journalistic integrity. Everything published by the major distributors will go through this filter because it sells news subscriptions and ad space.

The reason it hits Biden and not Trump is because Trump is running on the platform that he's a racist, fascist, criminal conman who is going to rob the country blind while trying to eliminate any group of people his bigoted pea brain is even minorly set off by. He isn't pretending not to be, which makes writing hit pieces on him difficult. His constituency votes for him because of these things.

By contrast, for all of his failings (and there are many), Biden is actually trying to put out good domestic policy with long-term effects. He doesn't thrive on the same kind of press Trump does because his policy goals are opposed; the things hurting his chances of reelection are helping Trump. I mean fuck, look at 2020, Trump's pandemic policies got hundreds of thousands of people and he still almost won.

I'm not saying all of this to diminish the failures of the Biden campaign and administration, or the line-go-up chasing assclowns committing journalistic malpractice on a scale that should constitute some kind of crime. Biden should be at the Hauge and every US media conglomerate should be dissolved and their editorial boards barred from ever running a publication ever again.

However.

None of that will resolve the underlying cultural issue that the US public school system has managed to create through its disastrously bad attempts at teaching media literacy. I don't know how to fix this, I am not qualified to offer a suggestion other than trying to point this out to family and friends so maybe they'll evaluate their own biases more. But it is increasingly apparent that if we don't figure out how to do something about it, the fascists are going to eventually gain power. They have no problem being the villain of the newspaper headlines because they have figured out how to turn that into an advantage.

[kyriarchy]

been a while since i've seen such a concentrated distillation of liberal gullibility and delusion, and their utter capitulation to fascism in the barest hint of a crisis.

Of course the protests ae unpopular; protests always are. The Civil Rights Movement was unpopular. The Vietnam protests were unpopular. 50 years from now we'll all agree that ethnic cleansing of Gaza was a sad, regrettable chapter of American History that we've learned from and moved past, except we actually won't, and the next time it's convenient for western imperialism to kill off a few tens of thousands of people we're going to go through this all over again.

But this post isn't about mass murder or history or our moral obligations as a society, it's about short-sighted electoral politics. So let's talk about that. Joe Biden's worst issue is the rise in inflation which, according this post, is entirely Joe Biden's fault for spending money and not the global pandemic that cost America $13 trillion dollars precipitating it. We are urged to consider these expenditures to be things "leftists would theoretically like"; apparently actually asking leftists in practice what they want is too difficult or inconvenient for OP. It is correct to say that without agitation from the left, it's unlikely we would have gotten any debt relief or stimulus payments at all. Nevertheless, the stimulus checks, the debt forgiveness, the renewable energy spending, all of these are meager compromises, far less than what those on the left have argued is necessary. Hillary Clinton herself recently tweeted the following chart, arguing the necessity and importance of Biden's reelection while also clearly demonstrating his failure to reach the emission targets he himself set.

still, we are expected to accept that any policy must be sacrificed on the alter of "practicality", that it's simply not reasonable to directly address the catastrophes looming on the horizon (or here already), lest we lose the next election and the Republicans make the disasters we've allowed to happen, happen even worse somehow.

This is all standard American liberal ideology, nothing new or groundbreaking here. The funny part though, is that after positing that 1. Leftists occupy a extremely marginalized position in American politics and 2. Nominally "leftist" policies are the direct cause of Biden's unpopularity, the blame is then placed on those same leftists for...not being supportive enough? As if internet communists could have convinced Joe Manchin to keep the child tax credit. As if pausing arms shipments for a week had any impact on Israel's assault on Rafah (in lieu of a ground invasion, air strikes have continued on the city without pause). It is correct that Biden's perfunctory gestures in the direction of Palestine will not win him votes from the far left. Whether his support of Israel will cost him support amongst voters who don't view Israel as "a sort of Middle Eastern America under attack by strange foreigners" (a deeply racist view, btw) remains to be scene.

In any case, we're left with the same ultimatum: The left must kowtow and do everything in their power to get centrist Democrats elected in perpetuity, lest the Republicans win and the Democratic is forced to move ever more rightward in order to compete. (Movement to the left is unthinkable, of course, as we are to believe leftist policies are unpopular and unworkable.) The liberal mind is shocked and scandalized that we are not inspired by this vision: a political ratchet whose inevitable conclusion is a steady and inexorable descent into fascism.

We are left with a question: If the Democratic Party's brand of neoliberalism is so popular and pragmatic, why are they in danger of losing? Here is where the furtive leftist is thrust onto the stage. A benighted, curmudgeonly creature, with no love in its heart for the benevolent liberal who deigns to let it scrounge among the crumbs and detritus of neoliberal exploitation. And yet despite our intransigence, and our small numbers, we are somehow held responsible for Democratic policy, and indeed, the success of the party as whole. To paraphrase Umberto Eco:

"Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the Left is at the same time too strong and too weak. Democrats are condemned to lose elections because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."

I see a bunch of posts like this and they all seem to assume there's a huge undercurrent of anti-Israeli sentiment in the general populace such that Biden would easily cruise to victory if he did the right thing, as opposed to the truth which is that the average voter sees Israel as a sort of Middle Eastern America under attack by strange foreigners and would take all but the most couched and careful opposition to Israel's actions as a betrayal.