Tag Archives: Mark Meadows

Now We Understand Why Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony was “Urgent”

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Watching tbe Cassidy Hutchinson testimony the other day I kept asking, “This is all pretty juicy, but what exactly about it did the committee see that made it ‘urgent’?”

Today’s subpoena for Trump’s top lawyer, Pat Cipollone, confirms what sharper legal minds than me understood. Namely that young miss Hutchinson was placing first-person eyewitness fingerprints on office elders who both knew what in hell was going down but were either unable or uninterested in doing anything about it. And that sliding her into the careful sequencing of testimonies was a vital strategic play.

More to the point, with D.C. basically taking a nap for another couple weeks, now was a good time to peel the scab off people like Cipollone and ex-restaurateur/voting fraudster/Trump wingman, Mark Meadows, and give them a few days to decide how far down the sewer of history they really want to get flushed for Donald Trump. The consensus suspicion being that while Meadows — the guy on his couch doom scrolling on his cellphone as the armed mob attacked the capitol — is so deep in the drain he’s beyond rescue, Cipollone, a guy with a real career and reputation might … might … finally see the wisdom in getting on the ethical side of The Big Lie.

As I read this morning, the betting line is that while Cipollone might … might … consent to a written deposition, it is unlikely he will step up to a John Dean moment and place his face on national TV for all of the world and MAGA Nation to see. Cipollone — introduced to Trump by FoxNews’ Laura Ingraham — has to be seeking advice on how to A: Maintain good standing with his ultra-Catholic/Federalist Society social and professional bases, while, B: Not getting rendered a historical stooge and sap for going down with the Trump ship of fools.

It may be a fascination unique to me, but much like John Roberts getting stampeded by a rampaging Supreme Court bearing his name, Cipollone is another old school, educated, well-mannered Republican watching his legacy getting tucked inside a flaming bag of manure and dumped on the streets of DC. Put another way, after enabling all sorts of fire-breathing, borderline unethical behavior in the name of “conservative values”, guys like Roberts and Cipollone are getting third-degree burns from vandals with neither manners or morals.

Cipollone is certainly also aware of what the House Committee has in its possession and is preparing to play next. And that would be, as ex-Republican Cong. Denver Riggleman and committee investigator told Nicole Wallace yesterday, a trove of text and e-mail messages from Meadows to … well, very likely to and from characters closely aligned with if not including the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and other members of a carefully oreganized, armed riot.

As White House counsel who had constant interaction with sewer rats like Meadows, Cipollone has to be thinking how he can create safe distance from that kind of reckless, indictable idiocy.

Russians Ordering Contract Killings of U.S. Troops? Hey, It’s No Benghazi.

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Let me get this straight. U.S. troops find a boatland of cash in a Taliban hideout. They investigate and learn from captured Taliban that Russia has been offering — and paying — a bounty on U.S. soldiers they kill. This gets reported up and up through the intelligence agencies and the whole megillah of the chain of command, with special inter-agency meetings, until it gets to the White House where in Version #1: Trump was never told about it. Or, in Version #2: his people (meaning who? Jared? Ivanka? Mark Meadows?) decided it wasn’t credible enough for him to do or say anything about it.

Is that the story? Am I missing anything?

With everything else going on, and by that I mean everything else that has turned into an All-Time, #1 on the charts [bleep]show of incompetence and corruption by Mr. MAGA, it may be hard to assign proportionate shock and disgust at this one. But someone’s got to try.

Obviously, no one — and I do mean no one — outside the wire of TrumpNation believes Trump wasn’t told. We can believe he didn’t read his Presidential Daily Briefing, (the one later marked “President Has Seen”), because these briefing things are often longer than a paragraph, don’t refer to him specifically in every other sentence and have too few pictures. But this is … big stuff.

This is Vladimir Putin himself putting out contract killings on American GIs.

Stuff like that, if you’re in the intelligence business, you make 100% certain POTUS is told, face to face, that this is what’s going down. It’s why you simultaneously offer him a menu of options of how to respond.

So yes, he and his “people” are lying and praying to hell that the “fake news” doesn’t come up with any more proof of what they … haven’t bothered to do anything about.

As these things always go, attention turns immediately to TrumpWorld’s royal guard, namely congressional Republicans, including notable hawks like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and hell, if they can track him down, ex-South Carolina congressman, Trey Gowdy, former chairman of the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi.

We all remember Gowdy. Not just for the worst case of flop sweat since Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News”, but for the way his committee (the sixth “investigation” Republicans whipped up around Benghazi) spent two and a half years (eight months longer than the Mueller investigation) and $8 million to find that, big surprise here, Hillary Clinton didn’t personally feed ammo clips to rebels attacking the U.S. compound.

Certainly now, congressional Republicans will be seen everywhere, scuttling like crabs to get in front of the nearest camera, puffing themselves up and inveighing against the hated Rooskies for such a low down dirty hit job on our universally beloved troops, right?

Right?

Right?

Just kidding. Maybe a couple here and there, in tepid terms. But because of Donald Trump’s (tiny) fingerprints on this atrocity, the hive mind of the Trump-era Republican borg will have nothing impactful to say … again. They’re the bored cops waving gawkers past the flaming 20-car pile-up. “Nothing to see, folks. Keep it moving. But hey, did hear the one about Antifa?”

Assuming that Mitch, Barr and the usual suspects will keep the lid on any serious investigation of why Trump hasn’t so much as publicly scolded Putin … for paying medieval religious fanatics to kill American soldiers, this scandal, BountyGate, will quickly get tossed on the heap of cadavers from his monumentally fcked up preparation and response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the way he’s incited bigots amid the George Floyd/BLM protests.

Which leads to something I think about a lot. Hell, too much.

“What do you with this guy once he’s out of office?” A few days ago the Strib ran a guest opinion piece from a local attorney arguing that Joe Biden, like Barack Obama in the wake of Dick Cheney, has to just let it go and “move on”, in the name, you know, of helping a divided nation heal.

Sorry, but I ain’t there. From the highly-suspect-to-rancid-smelling Russian “investments” in his real estate “developments”, to the racist appeals in his opening “birth certificate” pitch, to soliciting and getting Russian help to win the White House, to kow-towing to Putin at every imaginable turn and now to this, to tacitly acquiescing to the killing of American soldiers, it’s gone too far to simply “move on.”

Way too far.

Even Trump Has to Know Testing Will Help His Reelection

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It is truly a fool’s errand trying to make sense of anything Donald Trump does, beyond assuming he sees it as being in his very personal self-interest. But given that –and only that — that as an incontestabe reality, I still can not understand his refusal to ramp up and coordinate nation-wide testing for COVID-19.

If you accept that every move he makes is sociopathically-focused on getting himself reelected in November, and by that I mean shamelessly re-writing recently (recorded) history, scanning the radar for any and every possibility to lay blame for this catastrophic debacle on someone else and encouraging his troll-cult of “gun enthusiasts” to actively rebel against the states on whom he’s sloughed off the fundamental responsibilities of the federal government, the lack of “testing thing” still makes no sense.

I don’t know about you, but I long, long ago stopped thinking that Trump — a man who can’t read note-card memos much less books and thinks Captain Bligh was a role model for “very powerful” leadership — makes many or really any of the policy decisions in his White House. Clearly, he has no interest in doing anything other than the ceremonial, lights-and-cameras-on work of being President.

(The latest example were his “Liberate Minnesota!”, “Liberate Michigan!” and “Liberate Virginia, and save your great Second Amendment! It’s under siege!” tweets. These were tweets posted not as he was in his gold-trimmed jammies late at night, getting ready to go nighty-night after a snack of Kentucky Fried Chicken, nor were they even in the early AM, a bit groggy and entertaining impure thoughts about the blonde on “Fox and Friends”. No. They were just before noon, in the middle of a supposedly all-hands-on-deck, 24/7 fight against an international pandemic, and seconds after watching some nitwit on FoxNews. He was watching fcking TV! Point being … he never works at his job. Someone else is doing that.)

The assumption, already well-documented through contemporary reporting and almost certain to be verified in the “after action” investigations into what — to repeat myself — is the worst dereliction of duty and failure of executive function by a president in U.S. history, is that Trump “policy” such as it is is a product of the imaginations of others. Like, for example, 34 year-old former high school malcontent/Joe Goebbels-like senior advisor Stephen Miller. And the chronically-bungling senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner. And likely the various old tycoon cronies like Tom Barrack — (one of) the guys who did what he could to profiteer off the 2008 collapse, the inauguration and every Trump move since, along with whoever followed him into the men’s room, and of course the deep thinkers on talk radio and FoxNews.

But even then, with Trump as this vain empty vessel playing useful idiot for America’s worst characters and impulses, it makes no sense not to use the Defense Production Act and divert a fraction of the fire hose of deficit-exploding money for a Manhattan Project-style nationwide testing program. Testing, ordered by him (or whoever) and directed by him (or one of his many “task forces”) would without question have the effect of restoring a semblance of order and a functioning economy … before the election.

As we know from those pesky things called numbers, testing in the USA is slowing down rather than speeding up.

As dismaying as it it to imagine, Trump would be rewarded for at least doing that, never mind so completely screwing up the response to a forseeable and well-predicted international disaster.

So why isn’t Team Trump, Miller, (or the latest chief of staff and ex-North Carolina hill country real estate broker Mark Meadows), Jared, Ivanka, Sean Hannity, etc., pushing him on this? It’s not like he’d have to, you know, do anything. He wouldn’t have to show up in a WalMart parking lot and stick swabs up voters’ noses. He wouldn’t have to even break into any of his free-styling gibberish-and-invective spewing afternoon press rallies to express a moment’s worth of empathy for the 35,000 – 40,000 already dead. Hell, he could even go out and play golf! (They might even let him use the ball-washers.)

The only explanation that makes any sense is that someone, somehow has already made it clear that his failure to date is so far beyond the range of Herbert Hoover, (as in Hoover times-100), that the only election strategy now worth pursuing is to pour everything into the blame game. Blame everything on the states, states with Democratic governors in particular. THEY refused to do their job! THEY refused to test! THEIR incompetence is what has held down the economy. And THEIR whining about needing Trump’s help only shows THEIR ineptitude and weakness.

Without testing there’s no imaginable way the economic tragedy of Trump’s incompetence will have dissipated by November. With testing — at the level of hundreds of thousands per day — there is at least a real-world chance that recovery would be sufficient enough to allow millions to return to work.

And at that point thousands would forget/ignore how all this got so off-the-charts bad and vote to give Dear Leader another chance.

Go ahead explain it to me. I don’t get it.

Michael Cohen: “I fear … there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

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You couldn’t help but make a direct, almost umbilical connection, between Michael Cohen’s parting words yesterday … “Given my experience working for Mr Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power” and the performance of 99% of the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.

As was plain to everyone watching, the Republicans, led by the loudest and most cynical of the (so-called) Freedom Caucus, had zero interest in refuting anything …  anything, mind you … Cohen accused Trump of being. Not of being a “racist”, or a “con man” or a “cheat”. Hell, if Cohen produced a HiDef video of Trump kidnapping schoolgirls (or boys) off the streets of Mole Hill, West Virginia and shooting them up with opioids the Republican response would still be, “Oh, yeah! But you want a book deal, you lying bastard!”

Trump’s flagrant incompetence and corruption has never bothered the likes of Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and … it’s very important to emphasize … it never will.

Those two, the leaders of The Wrongest of The Right Wing, get elected and stay in office because they bring full-on toxic cultural warfare, not in spite of it. They are the equivalent of Subutai the Mongol for America’s fear-driven racist under-class. For that sad over-stressed crowd, ethics, legality, logic and human decency are incidental to defeating … liberals. “Liberals” of course being code for uppity women, blacks, Hispanics, climate change, electric cars, mass transportation, cheaper prescription drugs and everything else that comes with common sense in 2019.

Meadows and Jordan may not be quite the abject fools and buffoons that some of their colleagues are. Here’s looking at you ex-Loooosiana Sheriff and wearer of weird, ill-fitting vests, Clay Higgins

(may you personally re-confiscate Cohen’s “boxes”), or Carol Miller of West Virginia,

or Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin,

or … well, it got to the point, before the lunch break, where the Republicans looked to be in a competition to see who among them could sound most most like they were having an ischemic stroke; bug-eyed and struggling to put two coherent sentences together. With the exception of Justin Amash from Michigan, you’re excused if you thought the brain-eating zombie apocalypse had already attacked and fed off the GOP caucus.

Lord, what a collection of goobers.

But my point here, and it too is somewhat apocalyptic, is that this crowd; bred, raised and sustained on the raging gibberish of talk radio (several of them are ex-talk radio hosts), don’t have the genetic composition to concede defeat. Because of that, it is worth considering that they will see Trump being driven from office by the legal weight of Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York and/or defeated at the ballot box in 2020 as the catalyst for all-out civil insurrection.

As Cohen suggested and others who have known Trump for years have concurred, Trump will resort to anything to avoid (or reject) defeat. This is acutely true in the context of this moment, where the Presidency may be the only thing that temporarily protects him from total financial destruction. Should the SDNY indict him for bank fraud, tax fraud, insurance fraud and on and on, the penalties for could easily leave him penniless, a blubbery shamble in a Trump Gardens efficiency, rocking a soiled wife-beater and eating cold, day-old KFC out of a bucket.

Facing that prospect Trump will have no choice but to rally the goober masses, the cesspool swamp of deplorables that re-elect the Jim Jordans, Mark Meadows, Glenn Grothmans and Carol Millers of the planet … because of their indifference to decency and common sense and revulsion of “liberals.”

Now, we always want to avoid hysteria and hyperbole. But you know that line you keep hearing about how, “this isn’t normal”?

Well, it could very easily, and likely, get even less normal.

Paul Ryan Cashes In

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Raise your hand if you’re surprised Paul Ryan wants to spend more time with his family.

As a “small government conservative” Ryan has spent essentially all of his adult life cashing government checks, (with those sweet, sweet government health care benefits). His ascension to national influence is due primarily to his deft cooperation with and service to Wisconsin’s and then the country’s wealthiest citizen benefactors. His promise to them has forever been two-fold. A: Repeated rounds of tax relief followed by, B: a dramatic gutting of social services, otherwise known as social spending “reform”.

Having delivered the former, in a package that guarantees a return to trillion-dollar deficits, he has in effect accomplished both, and can now dump the daily aggravation of his political gig in favor of a Tim Pawlenty/Norm Coleman style pay-off in the private sector, or put another way, by going to work directly for the .1%-ers who have kept him in DC for 20-plus years.

(Ryan achieves a fresh gutting of social services to poorer Americans by driving deficits up so high conservatives have fresh horrifying numbers to rage and rail that “spending is out of control” … once Democrats are back in power and red ink matters again.)

As loathsome as Freedom Caucus torch-carriers like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are, they are at least naked about their subservience to Robert Mercer-scale political “investors”. What’s always disgusted me about Ryan is his snake oil image of a serious, concerned public servant all the while he consents to the same noxious policies promoted by the truly shameless wing nuts of the modern conservative movement.

Very much like Newt Gingrich before him, Ryan is “what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.”

Besides seizing the cash-out phase of his career, Ryan, being another character who is all about self-serving political calculus, knows that campaigning as a Republican this year is not going to be any fun. Not with Donald Trump looking ever more like a delusional third-tier mob boss and anger at DC descending from swamp to sewer more intense than it has been in a century. Even as Speaker of the House, Ryan was not going to have a pleasant time out in public in his own district. Like Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis here in Minnesota, he knew public appearances with an actual cross-section of voters was going to be an extraordinarily perilous experience.

I’m still not convinced that a giant “blue wave” is going to sweep across the land this November. There are hundreds of millions in dark money available to spread any hysteria imaginable to prevent that from happening.

But clearly Ryan, the calculator, (aka “the zombie-eyed granny starver”  TM Charlie Pierce), has read smoke signals on the horizon and decided that moving now to profiteer off his “public service” is a far better option than being screamed at and vilified across southern Wisconsin.