We start today with Heather Digby Parton of Salon writing that the United States must put the law before politics by prosecuting Number 45.
It may turn out that the documents are not as sensitive as they thought and all that will happen is that they are returned to the National Archives. But you have to look at this in the context of Trump's years-long crime spree to see that they had no choice but to take this extraordinary step. His contempt for the rule of law is so brazen that if they didn't, we might as well just officially declare that he has blanket immunity from criminal prosecution in perpetuity and call it a day.
Consider the long list of crimes that the Justice Department was precluded from prosecuting because of the policy against prosecuting a sitting president. The Mueller Report alone listed almost a dozen instances of obstruction of justice just in the first two years of Trump's presidency. He tried to bribe a foreign leader for personal political gain and was impeached for doing it. His abuse of presidential power to punish enemies and reward cronies is unprecedented. As we speak, he is under investigation for attempting a coup and disrupting the peaceful transfer of power.[...]
Trump has slithered out from under the law and managed to evade accountability for his misdeeds his entire life. He has been committing crimes and dealing in corrupt practices at an ever-increasing pace since he entered politics, believing that it shields him from legal liability. In fact, he believes that being president allows him to literally do anything he chooses.
Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post note that Number 45 continues to be about the grift and nothing but the grift.
Contributions to Trump’s political action committee topped $1 million on at least two days after the Aug. 8 search of his Palm Beach, Fla., estate, according to two people familiar with the figures. The daily hauls jumped from a level of $200,000 to $300,000 that had been typical in recent months, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic information.[...]
The influx comes at a crucial time for Trump as he
considers an early announcement for a 2024 presidential campaign and has seen
dwindling returns on his online fundraising solicitations earlier this year. The former president’s PAC brought in $36 million in the first half of the year, dropping below $50 million in a six-month period for the first time since he left office, according to Federal Election Commission data.
The cash bonanza also provides a concrete sign that Trump is reaping some political benefits from the revelation that he is under investigation by the Justice Department for potential violations of laws including the Espionage Act. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly boasted in emails, social media posts and right-wing media articles that the search warrant would backfire on President Biden and rally Republicans around Trump. The search prompted sympathetic statements from politicians such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and former vice president Mike Pence, who are not reflexively full-throated in defending Trump. And on Tuesday, Wyoming primary voters delivered a resounding defeat to Rep. Liz Cheney, whose leadership as a Republican on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol made her a top priority for Trump to unseat.
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Sarah Posner of Talking Points Memo writes about the plans of the Christian Right to avenge the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
Right-wing Christian media kicked into high gear in the days following the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, coalescing around a defense of former President Donald Trump based on a smorgasbord of persecution complexes, whataboutism, conspiracy theories, lies, and misinformation about law enforcement and the judicial process. The Christian right and its GOP allies are counting on their base consuming a steady diet of these radio shows, podcasts, social media posts, and email blasts, tuning out any coverage that conflicts with their image of Trump as both a virile hero and a victim besieged by radical leftists at the FBI. For them, God anointed Trump, choosing an “unlikely” leader to restore Christian America. It is precisely because Trump is singularly capable of resurrecting the Christian nation, this thinking goes, that the radical leftists of the deep state want to bring him down. [...]
Themes of war — actual and spiritual — abounded, a call to arms for Trump’s Christian followers who are being primed to believe that just as law enforcement came after Trump, it will come after them. Eric Metaxas, a popular evangelical author, Trump promoter, and radio host, called the FBI “thugs.” He interviewed Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing campus group Turning Point USA and also a rising star in the evangelical world, who declared the raid a “rubicon” moment for the left. “It wasn’t a raid, it was a military occupation,” Kirk told Metaxas, adding “I looked at it as a political invasion. I looked at it as they invaded us.” Stephen Strang, an influential evangelical publisher and author of four laudatory books about Trump, wrote, “I believe God raised up Donald Trump and there is warfare going on — satanic activity that is trying to tear down the fabric of this country.” He urged “Americans who are concerned about religious freedom and the threat of communist agendas to this country” to “stand up and voice their support for President Trump.”
Such Cold War relics as the “communist agenda,” mingled with comparisons to Nazism, are commonplace, and are used to sweep up other alleged government excesses, like COVID restrictions, under a rubric of government oppression. Metaxas hosted the once-liberal feminist author Naomi Wolf, who apologized to his listeners for having voted for President Joe Biden, whose administration, she said, is “tasking our law enforcement with terrorizing private citizens in a way that is really reminiscent of the Stasi and the Black Shirts.” Metaxas accused the FBI of “terrorizing” people, including the anti-vaccine doctor Simone Gold, who he said is “in jail because she is a doctor who had the temerity to talk about the vaccines as a bad thing.” (In reality, Gold pled guilty to trespassing at the Capitol on January 6.)
Brent Burgess of the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post reports that the entire elections staff of Gillespie County in Texas has resigned in the face of death threats to its election administrator and other staff.
“After the 2020 (election), I was threatened, I’ve been stalked, I’ve been called out on social media,” said Herrera. “And it’s just dangerous misinformation.”
Herrera is an inaugural member of the elections office for the county and has worked for Gillespie County for nine-and-a-half years. Prior to her role as elections administrator, she worked as the elections clerk under the county clerk’s office.
What had been an enjoyable job for Herrera took a different turn following the most recent presidential election.
“The year 2020 was when I got the death threats,” said Herrera. “It was enough that I reached out to our county attorney, and it was suggested that I forward it to FPD (Fredericksburg Police Department) and the sheriff’s office.” [...]
The wave of resignations in the Elections Department has left county officials wondering how to successfully conduct upcoming elections.
“We have some people who are pretty fanatical and radical about things,” said Gillespie County Judge Mark Stroeher. “Unfortunately, they have driven out our elections administrator, and not just her, but the staff. Everybody has resigned.”
Note: Donald Trump won Gillespie County, TX in 2020 by 59 percentage points.
The sentence of the day probably goes to book critic Dwight Garner of The New York Times contained in his review of Jared Kushner’s Breaking HIstory: A White House Memoir.
This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo. (bolding is mine)
That review (or at least the sentence I bolded) was almost as memorable the Guardian’s Jay Rayner’s review of Le Cinq.
Almost. I mean, you’d expect a 3-star Michelin restaurant like Le Cinq to be good (especially for those prices). There’s no such expectation of a book by Jared Kushner.
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post writes about “old-fashioned” Liz Cheney.
Cheney’s presence in American politics is both gratifying and jarring. Her conservative policy preferences are undeniable. Her voting record traumatizes liberals.
On recent bold face agenda items for the Biden administration, she has been a firm “nay.” To say that she’s been a splash of cold water would suggest that her votes have been out of character, a shock to the system. They were de rigueur. The congresswoman has voted no on the American Rescue Plan. She was not one of the handful of Republicans who crossed the aisle to support the infrastructure bill; she was a no on that. And most recently, she joined fellow Republicans in voting against the Inflation Reduction Act — a marvel of climate change and prescription drug legislation that has so pleased Democrats that they celebrated its likely passage, as well as its actual passage. They partied when the president signed it into law on Tuesday. And they plan to celebrate again in September with a splashy we-did-that extravaganza a few weeks before the midterm elections.
The country at large has heard Cheney speak more this year than it has during her entire career in Congress. On the Jan. 6 committee she is the counterbalance to Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.). He greets the in-person witnesses with a warm hospitality and spools out his opening statements like millions of television viewers have assembled on his front porch. Cheney has the calm detachment of a physician questioning a patient to confirm a diagnosis. There’s a flatness to her delivery, as if all the emotion has been carefully skimmed away so that all that remains are the devastating facts. And then, when a hearing finishes, she gives generous hugs to the witnesses.
She’s hailed the fearlessness of the women who have come forward to speak the truth about the circumstances surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. She reeled off the names of Cassidy Hutchinson, Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, Ruby Freeman and Sarah Matthews, and called them “an inspiration to American women and to American girls.” She could simply have said they were an inspiration to Americans. But she is a traditionalist. Or old-fashioned. Or not liberal.
Sarah Jones of New York magazine does not feel one bit sorry for Cheney’s loss in the Wyoming Republican primary and neither should you.
Cheney is a committed, even hard-line, conservative. She has been honest about her views with anyone who questions her. In a 2021 interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, she confirmed that she is anti-abortion, though she regrets her previous stance against same-sex marriage. (Her sister, Mary, is an out lesbian.) On foreign policy, she is a hawk. She opposes the Iran deal and can sound exactly like her father, the infamous Dick Cheney. “Waterboarding, a.k.a. torture,” Stahl says in the interview, and Cheney cuts in: “Well, it’s not torture,” she tells Stahl, adding that she “absolutely” supports the practice.
During Cheney’s long tenure in public life, she stoked the same nationalism that gave rise to Trump. As Spencer Ackerman notes in his book, Reign of Terror, she co-founded Keep America Safe with fellow neocon Bill Kristol and Debra Burlingame, the conservative sister of a pilot killed in the September 11 attacks. As the Guardian reported at the time, Cheney’s group “dubbed lawyers who acted on behalf of accused terrorists, and who now work for the Department of Justice, the ‘al-Qaida seven,’” and called the DOJ the “Department of Jihad.” The group participated in a right-wing furor over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, in reality a planned community center blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center.
“The president supports a mosque at ground zero led by a man who blamed America for 9/11, his top intelligence official preaches the true meaning of jihad, and his attorney general can’t even say the words ‘radical Islam,’” said Michael Goldfarb, then an adviser to Cheney’s group. “You start to worry they don’t understand who the enemy is, and so Republicans might understandably feel like they have to spell it out for them.” Goldfarb and the group had adopted a popular right-wing attack on Barack Obama: that he was soft on radical Islam. The line doubled as a useful dog whistle given birther claims that Obama was not American and was a secret Muslim. Though Cheney herself said she did not believe Obama was born in Kenya, as many right-wing activists once claimed, she did defend the racist birther movement in a 2009 interview with Larry King. “I’m saying that people are fundamentally uncomfortable, and I think increasingly uncomfortable, with an American president who seems to be afraid to defend America and stand up for what we believe in,” she said.
Rebecca Leber of Vox focuses on some little heralded and underrated parts of the Inflation Reduction Act.
One of the most damaging legacies of the intersection between racism and fossil fuels is how highways were built to cut through Latino and Black communities. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 alone displaced more than 1 million people, according to the Department of Transportation. People who remained near these roads, overwhelmingly communities of color, were exposed to more fine particulate matter from the tailpipes of cars and trucks.
That legacy lingers today. A mountain of research has shown how Black people nationwide are exposed to more damaging pollution from construction, power plants, roads, and industry than white people.
The Inflation Reduction Act includes a federal infusion of cash for community projects aimed at addressing some of the harmful effects of these projects. There is $3 billion marked for Neighborhood Access and Equity Grants, in addition to $1 billion already approved under the bipartisan infrastructure law last fall.
The money can be used for many things, including improving walkability, capping wells, installing noise barriers, and reducing the urban heat island effect. But one way communities could use the funding is to just remove a road, highway, or other types of damaging infrastructure. They can also reconnect communities divided by highways in other ways: “multi-use trails, regional greenways, or active transportation networks and spines.”
Up to two years after Covid-19 infection, the risk of developing conditions such as psychosis, dementia, “brain fog,” and seizures is still higher than after other respiratory infections, the researchers report in their study published Wednesday in the Lancet Psychiatry. But while anxiety and depression are more common soon after a Covid-19 diagnosis, the mood disorders are transient, becoming no more likely after the two months than following similar infections such as flu.
Children were not more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression, right away or up to two years after Covid, and their risk of brain fog subsided over two years. But they were still more likely than children recovering from other respiratory infections to have seizures and psychotic disorders. Overall, the likelihood of all these diagnoses was lower in children than in adults.
On variants, the risk of neuropsychiatric diagnoses rose, from 10% higher for anxiety to 38% for brain fog — after the Delta variant emerged than after the alpha version. Similar risks continued with Omicron, even though that variant has milder effects during the acute phase of infection.
In advance of a meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy today in Lviv, Barbara Moens, Sarah Anne Aarup, and Paola Tamma of POLITICO Europe wonders how long Erdoğan can continue to play both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
On the one hand, Zelenskyy has grounds to thank the Turkish leader. Erdoğan is trying to present himself as a neutral power broker on the Black Sea, mediating between Russia and Ukraine to allow grain exports to resume out of blockaded ports. A Turkish company — one of whose executives is Erdoğan's son-in-law — is the supplier of the Bayraktar drones that have given Ukrainian forces a decisive boost on the battlefield, to the fury of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Erdoğan has also closed the Black Sea to Russian naval reinforcements through the Bosphorus.
On the other hand, Turkey is facing accusations of being a war profiteer, or rather what sanctions experts call a "black knight" — a nation that helps in the evasion of international embargoes for its own benefit. A surge in Turkey-Russia trade and the adoption of a Russian payment system by Turkish banks since the outbreak of the war has triggered speculation that Ankara has spotted the advantages of giving Moscow a helping hand as its own mismanaged and inflation-crippled economy lurches out of control.
Turkey is “being pro-Ukraine without being anti-Russia,” said former Turkish diplomat Sinan Ülgen, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank.
Many Western diplomats, however, are less forgiving about Turkey's double game. "You cannot be with both sides in a war like this. It’s a member of NATO!” complained an envoy from one EU country.
Christian Esch of Der Spiegel writes about the changes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has wrought in Moscow, Esch’s home of 14 years.
Venediktov views Simonyan's lack of empathy for Ukraine's children as reflective of Russian society writ large. "Eleven million Russian families have close relatives in Ukraine. That means there are 40 million people who have mother, father, brother, sister or grandchildren there. And then such support for the war. How can that be?" He says the propaganda alone isn't enough to explain it. "There's something bad that runs deep in people. It's about the younger brother Ukraine, who is viewed as a traitor because he wants to live better than you do."
It is also difficult for me to describe the relationship of Russians to Ukrainians because it is changing. Each generation of Russians has its own Ukraine. To the elderly, Ukraine is just a region where people speak a funny peasant dialect and like to eat bacon. Over time, they came to accept that there is a separate state for bacon eaters. But they could not see it as a foreign country.
For younger Russians, Ukraine is a foreign country. It doesn't bother them if the country strives to move closer to the West. And the eight years of estrangement since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 have left a stronger mark on them.
To me, young and old alike seem to have a poor understanding of Ukraine. The younger people have the advantage of at least being aware of this. Putin is 69 years old. He has no idea how little he knows about Ukraine.
Shannon Tiezzi of The Diplomat interviews Ali Wyne, a senior analyst for the Eurasia Group, about competition in “great power” politics and diplomacy.
[Tiezzi]: President Biden’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia sparked much debate over the role of human rights advocacy in U.S. foreign policy. How should human rights and democracy factor into the United States’ “great power opportunity”?
[Wyne]: As is often observed, the power of America’s example is at least as important to its external competitiveness as the example of its power; witness the global reverberations of its #MeToo movement and its ongoing reckoning with racial injustice. While China and Russia often elicit condemnation when they commit human rights abuses, they rarely elicit disappointment, for few, if any, observers expect either of them to serve as moral exemplars. When the United States takes steps at home and abroad that violate its stated ideals, observers criticize it because they believe that it should behave differently and that its actions continue to carry moral weight; those expectations are as much a blessing as they are a burden.
When Beijing and Moscow accuse Washington of violating human rights, Washington should not betray defensiveness. Instead, it should note that, unlike in China and Russia, where those who criticize government actions are swiftly censored, if not severely punished, activists and nongovernmental organizations in the United States regularly and vigorously air such criticism. More importantly, it should continue demonstrating its capacity to address its moral shortcomings, however haltingly. During the Cold War, Washington’s most potent response to Moscow’s accusations of hypocrisy was not to document the Soviet Union’s human rights abuses, but instead to pass Supreme Court cases (such as Brown v. Board of Education) and bills (such as the Civil Rights Act) that affirmed a commitment to redressing its imperfections.
Is it fair to characterize the American advancement of Black civil rights, in whole or in part, as a reaction to the Soviet Union’s human rights abuses?
Before you answer that question. compare Wyne’s statement to what Alexander Khara, writing for the Atlantic Council, writes about the American reaction to “Holodomor,” the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine that killed 4 million people in the early 1930’s.
When seeking to define genocide, Lemkin highlighted the crimes committed by the Soviet regime in Ukraine. He saw the Kremlin’s systematic efforts to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a “classic example of Soviet genocide.” The central event of the Soviet Union’s genocidal campaign in Ukraine was the murder of over four million Ukrainians through artificial famine in the early 1930s.
The Soviet authorities experienced almost no negative consequences as a result of this unparalleled slaughter. Indeed, just months after the peak of the famine, the United States granted the USSR official recognition. The outside world simply refused to listen to the handful of courageous voices such as British journalist Gareth Jones who attempted to shed light on the apocalyptic reality of the famine.
Instead of being celebrated for his revelations, Jones was shamefully attacked by his fellow international correspondents. The loudest voice was that of Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. It says much about how little has been learned that this disgraced genocide accomplice still holds a Pulitzer Prize despite calls for him to be posthumously stripped of the award.
Khara goes on to connect the failure to punish the Soviet Union for the Ukrainian famine of the 1930’s with Putin’s “impunity” in Ukraine today.
Also, if one assumes that domestic policy also functions, in part, as foreign policy, than prosecuting Trump takes on even more urgency, as Heather Digby Parton suggests.
Finally today,The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer about the surge in lookups of the word “espionage.”
After the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, lookups for espionage surged. But when dictionary fans got there, they were doubtlessly disappointed by Merriam-Webster’s definition: “the practice of spying or using spies to obtain information about the plans and activities especially of a foreign government or a competing company.” [...]
The lookup surge is logical: The unsealed search warrant for Mar-a-Lago revealed that the FBI’s investigation was into Trump’s possible violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and espionage is — in 2022, anyway — an uncommon enough word that the OED characterizes its usage as tending “to be restricted to literate vocabulary associated with educated discourse,” its frequency being on par with words like surveillance, assimilation, and tumult.
Have a good day, everyone.