#since unlike contra it was possible to give him arms

[bubblybloob]

Hero: Mate, you’re the tallest one here, what are you on about?

Broken comic! I originally wanted to make this a bit more grand but this was the best I could do.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

It’s a big day for Robert Mueller and his team: One year ago today, Mueller was appointed to lead the special counsel investigation into possible ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian officials. It’s a miracle, in some ways, that Mueller has lasted this long. President Trump’s relationship with the investigation has grown increasingly adversarial, and at many moments over the course of the past 12 months, it seemed like Mueller’s job was in jeopardy.

So this hasn’t been an easy year for Mueller, but it’s certainly been productive. Since the first indictments came down in the investigation last fall, the special counsel has racked up five guilty pleas and 14 indictments of individuals.1 He also reportedly gave a referral to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York that led to a raid on the office, home and hotel room of presidential lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, which has turned into its own separate investigation.

We’ve taken a look at how Mueller’s first year measures up against the initial 12 months of other special counsel and independent counsel investigations. In terms of the number of charges he’s been able to file, Mueller is moving quickly. At one year after the formal appointment of a special or independent counsel, only the Watergate special prosecution force had obtained more indictments and guilty pleas.

But the total number of charges doesn’t tell the whole story. To get a sense of where Mueller’s investigation might go in its second year, it’s worth looking at where the three other highest-profile investigations in modern history — Watergate, Iran-Contra and Whitewater — stood a year after a special or independent counsel came on board and how they evolved in the year or two afterward.

These investigations give us three separate models of what Mueller’s first year could mean for the rest of his investigation, and they show how foolish it can be to predict the end of a special counsel investigation based on its beginning. Watergate lived up to the dramatic promise of its first year: It ended Nixon’s presidency and sent dozens of people to jail. The revelations in the Iran-Contra scandal initially seemed like they might engulf Ronald Reagan, but the scandal began to fizzle when it became clear that Reagan wouldn’t be implicated. And Whitewater, which was sleepy at first, eventually resulted in the impeachment of Bill Clinton — but for reasons that could never have been foreseen after the first year of the investigation.

Watergate

The year after Archibald Cox was named special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation was, to put it mildly, a whirlwind. That’s partially because Cox was stepping into a scandal that had already been unfolding for months. The Watergate break-in occurred in June 1972, and by the time Cox was named special prosecutor in May 1973, the trials of the Watergate burglars were already complete. At this point, the stakes of the investigation were clear: According to a Gallup poll from the month Cox was appointed, 78 percent of Americans said that Watergate was of “great” or “some” importance for the nation. For comparison, in April 2017 — a month before Mueller came on board — Quinnipiac University found that 66 percent of registered voters believed that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election was either a very or somewhat important issue.

A year after Cox’s appointment, in May 1974, Cox had been fired by Nixon and replaced by another special prosecutor, and it was clear that a wide range of people connected to the Nixon administration had committed crimes far beyond the Watergate break-in, including illegal campaign donations, other burglaries, tax fraud and corruption. Nixon also fortified perceptions of his own guilt during this time by dismissing Cox for trying to obtain tapes from his secret White House recording system and continuing to fight Cox’s successor, Leon Jaworski, over the tapes.

The “smoking gun” tape, in which Nixon ordered his staff to stop the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, was released in August 1974, and Nixon resigned just days later. It seems unlikely that events of the same magnitude are in the cards for this summer, but it’s impossible to know what information Mueller’s team has already gathered. “By May 1974, Jaworski knew he had enough evidence against Nixon to indict him, if he had been a private citizen,” said Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and a history professor at New York University. “But he wasn’t sharing that with the American people.”

In other words: If the Russia investigation is truly like Watergate, Mueller’s team may already have the evidence it needs to topple the Trump presidency, and we just don’t know about it yet.

Iran-Contra

It’s also possible that the Mueller investigation will end up looking more like another high-profile investigation: the Iran-Contra affair.

During the year after Lawrence Walsh was appointed independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation, he secured only two guilty pleas. But the scandal — which involved the Reagan administration’s illegal sales of arms to Iran and funneling of the profits to right-wing “Contras” battling the socialist government in Nicaragua — threatened Ronald Reagan at the height of his popularity.

As Reagan administration officials testified before Congress about their participation in the arms deal, it seemed possible that the scandal would engulf the president. Reagan’s approval ratings had plummeted in November 1986, when news about the Iran-Contra affair broke, and they remained low throughout 1987. Meanwhile, in February 1987, 81 percent of Americans agreed that the Iran-Contra scandal was of “great” or “some” importance for the country. By the end of 1987, it seemed clear that more indictments were coming, and Walsh charged six more people — including Reagan administration officials Oliver North and John Poindexter — in the first half of 1988.

But unlike in Watergate, the trajectory of the investigation was far less dramatic than the prevailing opinions of the first year would suggest. The convictions of North and Poindexter were overturned, and Walsh was ultimately foiled in his efforts to prosecute a second round of officials for their role in a cover-up of the deal after George H.W. Bush pardoned them a month before he left office.

And perhaps most importantly, Reagan himself was never implicated. “Reagan was able to recover and salvage his legacy,” said Richard Arenberg, who worked on the Senate committee investigating Iran-Contra and now teaches at Brown University. It’s possible that the Mueller investigation could turn out to be just as anticlimactic, and Trump — like Reagan — could emerge pretty much unscathed.

Whitewater

Then there’s the possibility that the events of Mueller’s first year might not matter much — but his investigation could still end up implicating the president. That’s what happened in the Whitewater independent counsel investigation, which began in 1994 and initially centered on a land deal made by Bill and Hillary Clinton in the late 1970s, when he was still the attorney general of Arkansas.

The independent counsel for that investigation, Kenneth Starr, obtained a handful of high-profile indictments in his first year, including of the former governor of Arkansas.2 But Americans were divided on the investigation’s importance at the time — an August 1994 poll showed that 52 percent of Americans thought the investigation was unimportant. It didn’t appear to threaten the president until several years later, when Starr expanded his investigation to include a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Clinton by a former Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones. It was in a deposition for the Jones suit that Clinton lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, setting up the perjury prosecution that led to his impeachment.

It remains possible that Trump or his close associates could be implicated in this investigation in ways that are unrelated to collusion with Russia, especially if Trump is forced to give a deposition in one of the civil lawsuits pending against him. But this scenario is probably the least likely of the three to transpire now, if only because Starr had much more flexibility and job security than Mueller does. He and Walsh were appointed under a law passed after Watergate that protected the independent counsel from being fired at the president’s behest, but that law expired in 1999. Under the terms of Mueller’s position as special counsel within the Department of Justice, straying from the issues he was charged with investigating could be grounds for dismissal. “Mueller has to be really careful and focused in a way that Ken Starr didn’t,” said Katy Harriger, a political science professor at Wake Forest University and an expert on independent counsel investigations. “So that reduces the likelihood of a Whitewater-style situation.”

As the Russia investigation enters its second year, the most important variable may be how long Mueller can keep his job. Watergate, Iran-Contra and Whitewater all had one thing in common: They lasted at least four years. Given the reports that Trump has already twice considered ordering Mueller’s removal, it’s not clear that the investigation can survive that long — at least, with Mueller at the helm.

Looking at past special counsel probes also highlights the limits of what Mueller can do on his own. Cox, for example, benefited enormously from the concurrent Watergate hearings held in Congress, which was where the White House deputy chief of staff revealed that Nixon had a secret White House taping system. Mueller hasn’t gotten similar assistance from this Congress.

And despite the drama of Mueller’s first year, we won’t know what his slew of indictments really means until it’s clear what additional evidence he’s been able to collect. “The big unanswered question is: Does Mueller have evidence that Trump is at the center of some kind of web of illegal activity?” Naftali said. “If he does, then we may be looking at something like Watergate. If not — then maybe this is as far as the Russia investigation gets.”

[bountyofbeads]

THE NATIONAL INTEREST 

Impeachment Exposed Trump’s Authoritarian Ambitions

By Jonathan Chait | Published February 05, 2020 | New York Magazine | Posted February 06, 2020 |

One of the few live debates of the Trump era between intellectuals who remain on speaking terms is whether Donald Trump poses a real danger to the republic. His election spurred a burst of warnings from democracy scholars that Trump fits at least an early pattern of “democratic backsliding,” in which populist authoritarians would lead previously healthy democracies into dictatorship (or something closer to it). This warning — the most influential of which was How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — was met with skepticism from both the far left and the center-right. Even some conservative Trump critics, like Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens, insist the Republic remains safe from Trump’s predations, due to a combination of his own ineptitude or restraints imposed by his fellow partisans.

But his rapid defeat of impeachment charges is a flashing red light. It is not mainly the final verdict, which has seemed inevitable for weeks, that should concern supporters of democracy. It is the entire sham process, which seemed to ratify Trump’s command of his party and encourage his belief in untrammeled power. The Trump who emerges vindicated from his trial is a dangerous man. The behavior of the president and his party should make this more clear to those who have denied it.

When the Ukraine scandal was first exposed in September, it shared important traits with presidential scandals that have come before (Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Bill Clinton’s affair): Both parties agreed the alleged conduct was serious and wrong. While many Republicans denied that Trump had withheld aid and a meeting to pressure Ukraine to investigate his opponents, but at first, very few of them defended such behavior. Lindsey Graham said, “If you could show me that Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing”; Steve Doocy — Steve Doocy! — said, “If the president said, ‘I will give you the money, but you have got to investigate Joe Biden,’ that is really off-the-rails wrong.”

Nixon’s misconduct was revealed, and he resigned. Ronald Reagan was never shown to have ordered the covert arms sale and aid to the contras, but apologized for failing to stop his subordinates from doing it, cleaned house, and was not impeached. Clinton apologized, was impeached anyway, but stayed in office.

Trump’s scandal has followed a novel track. The quid pro quo scenario that most Republicans initially said would be totally unacceptable has been borne out. But unlike Clinton and Reagan, Trump offered no apology, and unlike Nixon, his party did not abandon him. Trump managed a feat his predecessors (who were far more popular) could not, and probably would not have dreamed possible: to redefine his misconduct as acceptable, even “perfect.”

A handful of Republican senators did concede Trump’s behavior was less than perfect. But the two decisive votes, Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander, also concluded that since they had decided not to convict, they would block any further evidence that would discomfit their Republican colleagues who refused to admit Trump had even committed the acts he was accused of. And so Trump can walk away insisting his actions were perfect, and the Senate has vindicated him, while dismissing as irrelevant testimony that proves he is lying. The handful who agree Trump is lying decided to cooperate in a cover-up that will enable him to sustain the lie.

The key development in Trump’s defense turned out to be his legal team’s introduction of the audacious argument that “abuse of power” is not an impeachable offense. The legal reasoning allowed Trump’s softest supporters among the Senate Republican caucus to find their way to the conclusion that more evidence would be unnecessary. After all, since abuse of power is not a crime, it simply doesn’t matter how thoroughly Democrats prove it.

Before the impeachment trial, hardly anybody endorsed this novel constitutional doctrine, which had the idiosyncratic support of Alan Dershowitz. (Dershowitz argued that even if Trump allowed Russia to occupy Alaska, he could not be impeached, an extreme scenario that ought to have illustrated the absurdity of his logic.) But as Republicans embraced it out of sheer necessity, the idea that a president can only be impeached over clear illegality, and not the abuse of legal powers, quickly gained wide acceptance. “It isn’t legitimate to toss a President from office because the House thinks otherwise legal acts were done with ‘corrupt motives,’”  editorialized the influential Wall Street Journal. The Journal and Dershowitz did not say a president can commit crimes, but they did say he can use any formal powers afforded the office in any way he sees fit.

This is an argument that would enable almost limitless abuse. Presidents could not only dangle aid to foreign countries in return for investigations of their opponents, they could do the same with domestic aid. (Want that disaster aid, governor? Let’s talk about an endorsement, or maybe an investigation into my opponent’s “corruption.”) They could offer pardons in advance to allies who commit crimes on their behalf — voter fraud, murdering reporters or opposition-party leaders, you name it.

During the impeachment trial, Maine senator Angus King posed a clever thought experiment. What if the president privately warned Israel he would hold up military aid unless its prime minister denounced the president’s rival as an anti-Semite? Under the Republican legal reasoning, wouldn’t such an action be completely legitimate? (The president could simply claim to be concerned about anti-Semitism, just as Trump purports to be concerned about corruption.) Trump’s lawyers dismissed it as a hypothetical case, not even attempting to show how their constitutional principles would exclude it.

How Democracies Die actually devotes significant attention to this very possibility. A — perhaps the — main threat it identifies is that a president will abuse his powers through legal means, not by violating the law. For that very reason, it identifies democratic norms, not laws, as the defensive wall against autocracy. The powers of government simply offer too many possibilities for abuse to foreclose all of them through explicit laws. Norms are necessary to prevent a president from entrenching himself in power, by using it to reward allies or smearing or intimidating critics.

It is therefore especially chilling that Trump’s impeachment not only centers on exactly such an action (Trump using his authority to steer foreign policy to discredit domestic rivals), but that his fellow partisans got around to defending the violation of norms as a general practice. By insisting that only an explicit crime is impeachable, they are defending not only Trump’s actual misconduct but the entire category of norm violation. The Republican impeachment defense is an almost-literal reprise of the arguments in How Democracies Die, but in reverse.

Nearly as discouraging as their license for presidential abuses of power is their unanimous support for Trump’s refusal to acknowledge congressional oversight, the second count of impeachment. Trump’s lawyers have claimed that he is merely defending presidential turf, in the same manner all modern presidents have. “It was not simply absolute defiance and not simply a blanket assertion that we won’t do anything,” protested Pat Philbin during the Senate trial.

Trump himself has not even bothered with this pretense. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” he has boasted. His reasoning for his absolutist position is telling. “These aren’t, like, impartial people,” the president declared of Congress. “The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” The whole structure of the Constitution assumes Congress will maintain political rivalry against the president, so that the ambitions of one branch counteract those of the other. Trump has dismissed the entire logic of the constitutional system. His logic is that of the populist authoritarian. Congress’s political interests make it inherently illegitimate. Through his misleading red maps, constant invocations of his “landslide” victory, reminders of his 63 million votes, Trump is reinforcing his belief that he alone represents the will of the people incarnate.

Yet even the handful of Republicans who expressed a modicum of concern over Trump’s extortion of Ukraine have contemptuously waved away the second article of impeachment, which Lamar Alexander called “frivolous.” Combined with their dismissal of abuse of power, they are arguing not only that the president cannot be impeached over any behavior that isn’t criminal, he can withhold all documents and testimony into any investigation that might establish behavior that is criminal. Between the two, what enforcement mechanism is there against misconduct — other than the president blurting out his crimes in public? (And perhaps, given Trump’s propensity to do exactly that, not even then?)

In the wake of the Mueller investigation, Trump has pushed for, and received, investigations into the investigators. He will almost assuredly do so again. His allies are already working to expose the whistle-blower — a vindictive move that serves the sole objective of intimidating anybody else in government who might report Trump’s wrongdoing. Lindsey Graham is vowing to open the investigation of Joe Biden that Trump tried to get Ukraine to do for him. Trump is trying to block the publication of John Bolton’s book, and Gabriel Sherman reports Trump is trying to gin up a criminal investigation.

Impeaching Trump for his high crimes did not cause or even exacerbate the threat. It exposed a threat that was already there — the president’s authoritarian ambitions, and the complicity of his party. With the honorable exception of Mitt Romney, the Republican Party has engaged in what Levitsky and Ziblatt call “ideological collusion,” the partnering with autocratic politics in order to advance their policy goals, rather than break ranks and join the opposition. Trump has taken note. His next high crime is probably already underway.

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IMPEACHMENT SEASON

Mitt Stands Alone: Romney Sole GOP Defector as Senate Exonerates Trump

By Ben Jacobs | Published February 05, 2020 | New York Magazine | Posted February 06, 2020 |

The impeachment of President Donald Trump has ended with Mitt Romney becoming a liberal hero.

It is both an anodyne description of Wednesday’s events and testimony to how jarring the presidency of Donald Trump has been. Less than eight years after Mitt Romney awkwardly accepted the endorsement of the-then reality television show host in attempt to ensure victory in Nevada’s Republican caucuses, he voted for Trump to be removed from the presidency.

The apotheosis of Romney’s journey from severely conservative venture capitalist to leader of the resistance was reached just after 2 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. Speaking from a binder full of rebukes of President Trump, the Utah senator announced that he would vote to convict the President for abusing his power — the first Senator to vote for conviction of their own party’s president in American history.

Occasionally choking up, Romney posed the rhetorical question whether Trump had committed a high crime and misdemeanor. Then, he answered it with unadorned understatement: “Yes, he did.”

With an eye to his legacy, Romney insisted, “I will only be one name among many, no more or less, to future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial … We’re all footnotes at best in the annals of history.” However, as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, Romney already achieved a status somewhat more exalted than a footnote; in rolling out his decision with embargoed interviews with Fox News and the Atlantic, he seemed aware of the scrutiny that his decision would receive.

Romney spoke to a near empty Senate chamber, although to a much bigger audience live on cable news. Three Democrats were in the chamber with him: Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi walked in part-way through, then left quickly. After the speech ended, Romney quickly walked towards an exit while Schatz approached him, saying “Mitt.”

Afterwards, Leahy said that he had just come into the chamber to prepare for his own remarks when he noticed Romney was due to speak. “I was just about to leave. I thought I’ll listen to him speak.” He added, “Almost from the first sentence I could tell by the sound of his voice what he was probably going to say.”

The Vermont senator, who was first elected in 1974, toted a copy of Profiles in Courage around Capitol Hill in recent days in hopes of somehow inspiring Republicans to break ranks. He said he felt redeemed having the book with him, despite some of its historical inaccuracies in describing one Republican who broke ranks to acquit Andrew Johnson. As Leahy noted with a smile, “The man who voted to exonerate Johnson was bribed.”

Although some on Twitter, like Donald Trump Jr., raged against Romney’s decision, Senate Republicans shrugged it off. “It is what it is,” said Josh Hawley of Missouri. John Thune of South Dakota noted that Romney had “made it clear from the beginning … that he was going to go his own way.”

It represented another chapter in the unusual relationship between Trump and Romney. As Thune charitably described it, “I think he and POTUS had a little bit of a complicated relationship to start with.” Since that awkward endorsement at the peak of Trump’s birtherism, Romney cut Trump from speaking at the 2012 convention, denounced him as unfit for office during the 2016 Republican primary, then interviewed with him for a cabinet position after the general election. Until impeachment, they had since reached an uneasy truce with Romney’s election to be the junior senator from Utah.

The final vote was as perfunctory as Romney’s statement was dramatic. But it was certainly solemn. Few senators were chatting on the floor; the gallery was as crowded as it had been during any point in the trial. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, perched with hands folded in front of his face, watched the proceedings. A number of Republican congressmen packed onto a bench on the Republican side of the floor. It was so crowded that hard-right firebrand Steve King of Iowa, arriving late, had to sit on the Democratic side of the chamber.

The clerk then held a roll call on each article of impeachment and all 100 senators stood up in turn to pronounce their verdict of guilty or not guilty.

Republicans tended to wait to do so, standing only as their name was called. Democrats were more likely to stand earlier, often as the name of the senator alphabetically before them was called. The most eager senator was Michael Bennet. He stood up when the roll call on the second article began as Lamar Alexander was asked to render his verdict. Bennet remained on his feet while both Tammy Baldwin and John Barasso gave judgment before the dark horse presidential candidate could solemnly say “guilty.”

Once it all ended, the formalities required a certified copy of the verdict sent to both the House of Representatives and to Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State who played a key — and still mysterious — role during the Ukraine saga. Then Chief Justice John Roberts departed the chamber and the Senate returned to its normal course of business under Mitch McConnell — an assembly line of judicial confirmations.

The drama of the impeachment process was finally over. After three weeks of legal arguments and procedural maneuvering almost nothing had really changed. Save, of course, for the first line of Mitt Romney’s obituary.

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Trump World’s Backlash Toward Mitt Romney Has Begun, and It Will Never End

By Matt Stieb | Published February 06, 2020 12:35 AM ET | New York Magazine| Posted February 06, 2020 |

Prior to the impeachment vote on Wednesday, Utah Senator Mitt Romney was a reliable, if cordial, intra-party heel for President Trump and his most fervent supporters. After becoming the only senator to ever vote to convict a president of their own party in an impeachment trial, Romney may have lost the support of a broad swath of the Republican base for the remainder of his time in politics.

Though the president did not make any public statements chastising Romney or boasting of vindication — saving those sentiments for his press conference tomorrow in which he will discuss “our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax!” — he did post a video accidentally making Romney appear much cooler than he is. (See: sunglasses.)

Donald Trump Jr., an emissary of the family popular among the president’s base, was a little more explicit in a post on Instagram, calling Romney “a pussy.” Trump’s eldest son also expressed a sentiment common among Republican critics of the Utah senator, claiming that the vote was one of jealousy stemming from his 2012 presidential loss to Obama:

Jim Jordan had a simpler analysis of Romney’s decision, calling it a “wrong, wrong, wrong move.” Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel also diverged from Romney, who is her uncle: “This is not the first time I’ve disagreed with Mitt, and I imagine it will not be the last. The bottom line is President Trump did nothing wrong, and the Republican Party is more united than ever behind him. I, along with the GOP, stand with President Trump.” Perhaps the most interesting reaction came from Newt Gingrich, considering that he is comparing Romney’s ideological inconsistency to a president who has changed his party affiliation five times:

The past two GOP presidential candidates have had a tumultuous relationship over the past decade. In 2012, as Trump pushed the racist birther conspiracy, he endorsed  Romney in the 2012 primary: “He’s not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love.” Romney did not extend that kindness to Trump four years later: “If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished,” he said in May 2016. That didn’t stop him from pursuing a cabinet position in the “diminished” Trump presidency, which led to an embarrassing and enduring picture at Jean-Georges in midtown. By 2018, the feud had cooled, and Trump endorsed Romney during his easy-street bid for Utah’s open Senate seat. But by October 2019, as Romney condemned Trump’s open-air call for more high crimes, the conflict was hot again. In response to Romney’s critique of his request that China and Ukraine investigate the Bidens, Trump tweeted:

It appears that the 72-year-old senator will now face the ire of the president and his allies for the remainder of his political career. But that is just fine with Romney, who seems to be more concerned with his legacy than the average GOP leader. In an interview with The Atlantic published on Wednesday, he responded to a report speculating that he may be up for another presidential run in 2024, which caused him to “erupt in laughter.” In response to the question, Romney said, “Yes! That’s it! They caught me! “Look at the base I have! It’s going to be at least 2 or 3 percent of the Republican Party. As goes Utah, so goes the nation!” Though, according to one recent poll, Trump is now more popular than Romney for the first time in the Beehive state, the senator has almost five years to prove his mettle before reelection. It may take longer for the whole of the Republican Party to determine if Romney’s decision proves him to be a man of “moral courage” as Adam Schiff suggested, or something closer to Donald Trump Jr.’s astute observation.

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