For the Record: We Had All the Information We Needed

 

So Maggie Haberman's aptly titled biography of The Former Guy is about to drop, and they're teasing it, as is the custom, with a sample scabrous anecdote—how Trump clogged White House toilets with the bits of torn-up official documents, as if the cops were knocking and he was getting rid of his stash of coke. So what's got everybody riled up? This new evidence of Trump's knowing, continuous violation of the Presidential Records Act? Hell no, everybody's mad at Maggie for presumably waiting till now to publish the story so she could cash in on it.

Everybody, that is, except some old bloggers:

Maybe there would have been hearings - maybe even an impeachment. But he would have skated, with unanimous or near-unanimous Republican support. So withholding the story had no effective impact.

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) February 10, 2022

Now we know why he was so obsessed with water-saving toilets. It wasn't about flushing shit, it was about flushing criminal evidence pic.twitter.com/dt33u7kroU

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 10, 2022

Moar Impeachment!

The embarrassing projection doesn't fall far from the tax cheat. pic.twitter.com/RqTY585VEC

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 31, 2022

So I had to take a look at the Breitbart story, which reports:

A criminal IRS investigation into Hunter Biden — President Biden’s son — appears to have convened a grand jury as far back as May 2019, a confidential subpoena served to JPMorgan Chase bank reveals. The subpoena also seeks bank records of James Biden, the president’s brother, which appears to be the first time another Biden family member has surfaced in connection with the investigation.

Actually, this isn't exactly news; it seems to be an investigation we could have known about for quite a while, since December 2020, when Hunter Biden himself found out that his taxes were under investigation, and immediately issued a statement. According to CNN's reporting picked up by Wilmington TV,

Don the Con

  

President Two-Scoops. Photo by Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press.

Am I reading this right? Per Josh Dawsey and Michelle Ye Hee Lee in yesterday's WaPo, they're not even particularly hiding it; the report doesn't exactly say so, but the campaign against nonexistent election fraud looks like a simple con—a fund-raising effort using a cause they know to be hopeless to make money for other purposes:

President Trump’s political operation has raised more than $150 million since Election Day [$170 million per New York Times], using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the election to shatter fundraising records set during the campaign, according to people with knowledge of the contributions.

The influx of political donations is one reason Trump and some allies are inclined to continue a legal onslaught and public affairs blitz focused on baseless claims of election fraud, even as their attempts have repeatedly failed in court and as key states continue to certify wins for President-elect Joe Biden.

Much of the money raised since the election is likely to go into an account for the president to use on political activities after he leaves office, while some of the contributions will go toward what’s left of the legal fight.

Off the emotions of "small-dollar donors" who contribute when "the president is under siege" for the "Official Election Defense Fund"—

Counterintelligence News

Update 8/29/20: Since it turns out that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein shut down the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump's Russian ties around the same time as he appointed the spccial counsel, it looks like Toobin was right and I was totally wrong on a central point below.

Zandar flagged some important and at first sight kind of depressing reporting from Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker, showing how the fix was in on the Mueller investigation from the start, with some new details on two meetings from the beginning, one in which Andrew McCabe (in his brief time as acting director of the FBI) briefs Mueller on what the FBI knows about the stuff Mueller will be investigating, and one in which Mueller gets initial instructions from acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein. It's in the latter that the fix comes:

Rosenstein wasn’t as familiar with the evidence as McCabe and his team were, but he had a broader piece of advice for Mueller. Now that he was Mueller’s boss, it could be interpreted as a command. “I love Ken Starr,” Rosenstein said, according to people present. (Starr was the independent counsel who oversaw the Clinton Whitewater investigation; Rosenstein had been a prosecutor on the Arkansas portion of that inquiry.) “But his investigation was a fishing expedition. Don’t do that. This is a criminal investigation. Do your job, and then shut it down.”

In other words, far from authorizing a wide-ranging investigation of the President and his allies, the Justice Department directed Mueller to limit his probe to individuals who were reasonably suspected of committing crimes.

I always forget how good Toobin is (as a TV pundit I find him annoying, but on the page he's still a real New Yorker writer), but in this case I think he's mistaken; Rosenstein was right about the danger of emulating Starr, and Mueller was right to take heed. But I also think Toobin is missing something important that we here in Left Blogistan just happen to know about, and it's causing him to misread his evidence.

For the Record: Now With More Pompeo

Photo by Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images via Intercept (I think originally used in The New Yorker).

Trump has only two ideas about China, both of which are not actually about China but about his election campaign—wanting to get his name on a "deal" to the content of which he is basically indifferent, which will enhance his view of himself as a master negotiator, and wanting to blame China for all the problems of the universe, which the rally crowds adore—and doesn't understand that they contradict each other and that the more abuse he heaps on the country the more difficult it will be for the dictator Xi Jinping to have another playdate with him. But the way he's working the coronavirus into the latter goal, pushing his people to fabricate the case that Chinese scientists created the virus in a Wuhan laboratory, is getting dangerously reminiscent of the kind of fabrication used to set up the Iraq War in 2002-03, and there's something scary about the role Secretary of State Pompeo is playing in the business:

Seems like privatizing intelligence is the way to make sure you get the intelligence the boss wants. https://t.co/86W8YQRKFN

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2020

So somebody asked a contractor called "MACE" to come up with it-- pic.twitter.com/n0xWg7vqj1

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2020

For the Record: I was into impeachment before it went mainstream

Photo via Pasta Factory, Cape Town.

A constant theme on the Republican side of the impeachment debate was the idea that "Democrats have been wanting to impeach this president since the day he took office," as if to say the particular matter of the Ukraine case was just an excuse—the spaghetti strand that clung to the wall.

Of course it's projection, as my old friend Mikey says, because it's exactly what they'd been planning themselves  (see Steve M for lots of detail):

What I know is, weeks BEFORE the election, when it seemed a lock for HRC, I’d heard of R’s saying they’d be drafting Articles on her literally before she was even sworn in.

For what??
Doesn’t matter. Because HER.

So, any Rs b¡tching now, can Shut right TFU & sit TF down. 😡

— Not My Secret Twîtter Account (@mikeybee33) December 19, 2019

Nevertheless there's some truth to the suggestion that we'd have taken anything that worked, some of us: the Zelenskyy bribery case being the one that somehow grabbed the attention of those 30 "moderate" congressional Democrats and the big newspapers—though not to the corollary implication that Trump's not guilty in the others, from the corrupt use of the inauguration fund and the campaign finance violations for which Michael Cohen is in jail through all the bank fraud and tax fraud that may apply and the many sexual assault charges and the foreign and domestic emoluments to the big cases of the president bending foreign and national security policy for the personal benefits he may have received or be receiving from the leaderships of countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and above all Russia.

I was worried about this problem in the "marketing" of the narrow impeachment case from the start, that it would give Republicans a chance to insinuate that the Ukraine shakedown must be the only bad thing Trump had ever done as president, since it was the only bad thing Democrats had been able to find, and cast doubt on whether it was really so bad, because they'd be portraying it in isolation, rather than the context of Trump's all-round thug style of foreign policy. Indeed that's how the Republicans have been arguing, and yesterday they did it all day long, until I was moved to emit the following thread:

High Crimes

Andrew Johnson's Senate trial, 13 March 1868, Library of Congress/Getty Images, via Vox.

Next time somebody tells you that the Articles of Impeachment fail to accuse our president of any crimes, refer them to the newly issued Report of the House Committee on the Judiciary (there's a notice in Politico), which argues on Article I that he's guilty of Criminal Bribery, 18 U.S.C. § 201 and Honest Services Fraud, 18 U.S.C § 1346.

The first count is laid out in terms of the federal anti-bribery statute, according to which

criminal bribery occurs when a public official (1) “demands [or] seeks” (2) “anything of value personally,” (3) “in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act.”684 Additionally, the public official must carry out these actions (4) “corruptly.”685 We address the four statutory elements in turn.

First, the solicitation, which may be indirect,

for example, where a public official with authority to award construction contracts requested that a contractor “take a look at the roof” of the official’s home.

was directly made in Trump's 25 July call to President Zelenskyy, when he asked for the "favor" of a couple of investigations, one of the theory that Ukrainians were somehow involved in the theft and publication of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, one of the theory that Vice President Biden saved his son Hunter from Ukrainian criminal prosecution for some unnamed offense by forcing the firing of the prosecutor, both pretty clearly untrue and indeed nonsensical; and also made on several occasions by Trump's "irregulars", Volker and Sondland, under the guidance of Giuliani.

The "thing of value" was the desired announcement of investigations, which was clearly valuable at least in Trump's mind:

Method to Madness

Illustration via La Cuadra Magazine, October 2013.

Marc Thiessen:

Incompetence is not an impeachable offense

Oh right. Hard to argue with that. If the Founding Fathers, in their practically infinite wisdom, had thought the nation should be enabled to do something when a president turns out to be an imbecile who believes in invisible airplanes, can't read, and changes his mind 120 times a day, surely they would have said something!

What we saw on display Wednesday were two dedicated, experienced career foreign policy officials who had been desperately trying to figure out what the president wanted — and inferring his intentions based on snippets of information from others. But their efforts to divine Trump’s desires presume that the president knew what he wanted. It’s not clear he did. His handling of Ukraine seemed less the execution of an intelligible plan than a chaotic mishmash of constantly changing urges and demands. According to Sondland, “President Trump changes his mind on what he wants on a daily basis.”

.... it looks as though the entire Ukraine debacle may be the result less of intent than incompetence. And unfortunately for Democrats, incompetence is not an impeachable offense.

Unfortunately for Democrats! Having a stupid, certifiable, uncontrollable maniac in the White House isn't a problem for the nation as a whole—in fact it's good for Republicans! Suck on it, libtards!

I can't help feeling there's something imprudent about choosing this hill to die on, as Republicans from Lindsey Graham

Standing Orders

Photo via Reuters Money Control.

....serving and doing a great job as your President (including accepting Zero salary!).

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2019

Typical Donald. His "donation" of his salary, $400,000 annually while his sole proprietorship businesses make $434 million (according to the 2018 report), amounts to less than one thousandth of his income (0.09%). It's a casual tip to the nation, like John D. Rockefeller's dimes. The America First Action PAC alone spent more than that, $427,000, holding campaign events at Trump properties, which he wouldn't have earned if he weren't president. We went through some of that, and the money taxpayers provide for government officials and White House aides to spend in his properties, last month. To say nothing of the money taxpayers spend on his air travel to visit his properties with his entourage every weekend or golf carts for him and the secret service to toddle across the greens in.

Trump's own argument seems to be that it would be "ridiculous" for him to obey the Constitutional strictures on foreign and domestic emoluments because that would be bad business practice: "I'm taking a loss as it is!"

For the Record: Bribery

Me, yesterday:

Donald's making something out of this. Maybe just increased business at the DC hotel with guests looking for administration favors, but something for sure https://t.co/lsHwu0qWxg

— Impeachment Agnostic (@Yastreblyansky) July 3, 2019

Steve, this morning:

The Constitution doesn't limit the reasons for impeachment to "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" - the full phrase is "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

This is bribery.https://t.co/uWa3OI8G0C

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) July 4, 2019

I knew there'd be something sleazy. And then, via Crooks & Liars (my bold):

As HuffPost noted, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, found that Trump’s nearby Washington, D.C. hotel, which he still owns and profits from, is sold out for the 3rd and 4th despite charging double what the other luxury hotels are charging around the holiday.

How neatly that works with the fact that, as even Fox correspondent Ellison Barber reported, “The White House is reportedly giving some VIP tickets to Republican donors.”

Gee, where might those donors dine or stay if they’re from out of town?