Note to Graham: Sexual Misconduct Knows No Party Lines and Neither Do Accusations

And I hope to move a little away from the toxic sludge sewer but not too far to take a minute to commend on Lindsey Graham's comment that Democrats are never accused of sexual misconduct.

And just to be clear, he is by no means the only one to say it.  I hear that alleged often enough on Twitter (admittedly an unrepresentative cross section) to conclude that it must be believed in wide stretches of the right wing.  It's something I truly can't wrap my head around.

What about Bill Clinton?  He was actually impeached for sexual misconduct.  In fact, Lindsey Graham himself served on the House Justice Committee at the time and Brett Kavanaugh was on Ken Starr's legal team.

I would also throw in John Edwards, Democratic Senator from North Carolina, some-time candidate in the Democratic primaries and John Kerry's running mate.  He saw his career end over an affair with a staffer and was indicted for using campaign funds to make payments to his mistress.

And Anthony Wiener, one-time rising liberal light in the House of Representatives who was hounded from office for sexting, hounded from an election for Mayor of New York for same, and eventually prosecuted for sending graphic pictures to a minor.  In fact, it was the discovery of Hillary Clinton's e-mails on his laptop (he was married to her chief of staff) that led to James Comey's fatal announcement that the Clinton investigation was being reopened.

Well, OK, Graham and company may say, but they beat the rap.  Republicans never beat the rap.  It is true that Clinton was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate, and that Edwards was indicted by also acquitted.  Anthony Weiner, on the other hand, is currently serving time.  And Republicans have been known to beat the rap as well.  Anita Hill's allegations didn't keep Clarence Thomas from being confirmed to the Supreme Court.  And numerous women coming forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault didn't keep him from being elected President.

Ancient history, they may say.  Even the 2016 election is ancient history.  They are referring to the Me Too movement, which they would presumably call a blatantly partisan movement in response to the election of Trump to bring down Republican politicians.

Aside from the awkward fact that it isn't.  I don't doubt that the election of Donald Trump played a major role in inspiring Me Too.  But what immediately sparked the movement -- it's Archduke Ferdinand moment, if you will -- was the expose on Hollywood director and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein.  Up till then, our side had been smugly complacent.  Donald Trump's "pussy" tape and the firing of Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly from Fox News had convinced our side that this was a conservative issue, born of retrograde ideas about women.  Revelations about Harvey Weinstein, soon followed by Kevin Spacey and Charlie Rose, showed how misplaced that complacency was.  And it proved that sexual misconduct cuts across partisan and ideological lines.  And the Me Too movement was out to show that it made no such distinctions.

It brought down John Conyers, described by Nancy Pelosi as an "icon."  It also forced the resignation of Al Franken, Lindsey Graham's own colleague on the Senate Justice Committee.  And Eric Schneiderman, the Democratic Attorney General of New York, who many were counting on to continue the investigations if Trump shuts down the Mueller probe.

To look for the balance, I did what people do these days and looked it up on Wikipedia.  Beginning with the Me Too Movement, it lists Al Franken as the only sitting U.S. Senator forced out by allegations of sexual misconduct, although Roy Moore lost an election based on similar allegations.  It lists allegations against seven members of the House, four Democrats (one of them gay) and three Republicans.  It also gives the following tallies for states:

Alabama -- One Republican (Roy Moore)
Alaska -- One Democrat
Arizona -- Two Republicans
California -- Six Democrats (including two women) and one Republican
Colorado -- Three Republicans, one Democrat (gay), and one party switcher
Florida -- Two Republicans, one Democrat
Hawaii -- One Democrat
Idaho -- One Republican (who committed suicide)
Illinois -- One Democrat, one Republican
Indiana -- One Republican (the Attorney General)
Iowa -- Two Republicans
Oklahoma -- One Republican
Kentucky -- Six Republicans
Louisiana -- One Republican
Massachusetts -- One Democrat (gay)
Minnesota -- Two Democrats, including Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and US Representative (I am not clear why he is not listed in the US House) and one Republican
Mississippi -- One Republican
Missouri -- One Republican (the Governor)
New York -- Three Democrats (including the Attorney General), one Republican
Ohio -- One Republican
Oregon -- One Republican
Pennsylvania -- One Democrat
Rhode Island -- One Republican
Texas -- Two Democrats
Utah -- One Republican
Wisconsin -- One Democrat
Wyoming -- One Republican (the Secretary of State)

Adding up, I get 40 Republicans and 30 Democrats at the state level, although human error is possible here.  This does suggest somewhat more state Republicans accused than Democrats, but then again, Republicans dominate more state governments than Democrats.  At the federal level, Democrats hold a slight edge.

It is true that the only federal judges named are Republicans Alex Kozinski and Brett Kavanaugh.  Add to that Clarence Thomas, even though that was in 1991, and I will concede that (so far) only Republican federal judges seem to be accused of sexual misconduct.  I will also point out that of the last four Democratic nominees to the Supreme Court, three have been women.

And one of the reasons Democrats are running so many women for office this year is to avoid any nasty surprises.

Another Norm Shredded, Supreme Court Edition

OK, so maybe I'll dip my toe in the toxic sludge just a little.  I just want to point out that Trump, indirectly in this case, has managed to shred yet another norm in our politics.

Let's face it.  Not to be cynical, but underneath all fancy theories of what the Supreme Court should do, everyone really wants it to do the same thing.  Rule in their favor.  It's just that up until now most of us have managed to rationalize it.  We claim that if the Supreme Court would just adopt the right theory of jurisprudence and be strictly impartial, we would always win, or at least almost always.

John Roberts claimed that he would be a neutral arbiter, just calling strikes and balls.  Gorsuch assured us that he would implement the vision of the Founding Fathers.  That the vision of the Founding Fathers looked a lot like the Republican Party platform simply meant that the Republican Party was in perfect alignment with what the Founding Fathers wanted.  The fact that a neutral arbiter calling strikes and balls always seemed to side with big money interests might be written off as coincidence.  Indeed, I have heard conservatives proposing views of the Supreme Court so mechanical that it sounded like a sort of supercomputer.  Program it with the law, key in the specific facts, and it would spit out the one right answer as reliably as a mathematical equation.  (Then why bother having judges at all, one wonders).

This is not to claim innocence for our side.  Conservatives at least claimed that the proper role of the Supreme Court was to pretend we still lived in 1787 and ignore all evidence to the contrary.  Liberal theories were often so incoherent as not to be theories at all so much as wish lists. 

But up until last week, Republicans could pretend, even to themselves, that they wanted a neutral arbiter and were convinced they would win any case before the Supreme Court based on the sheer merits of their case.  Then Kavenaugh came out swinging, making an intemperate partisan speech and promising (in effect) to be an openly partisan judge.  And Republicans suddenly realized that was what they had really wanted all along.

Without Trump in office, it would never have happened.

And so another norm is lost.

A Few Comments on the Kavenaugh Nomination

Up till now I have done my best to avoid the subject of the Kavenaugh nomination on the theory that if I don't absolutely have to wade through a sewer full of toxic sludge, why would I do it voluntarily?  But since the subject has taken up all the oxygen today, I might as well make a few comments.

I am reasonably confident that Brett Kavenaugh could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and the Republicans would still confirm.  This is the absolute most important thing to them.  I recall someone suggesting to Flake or Corker that they block Trump's judges as a way of pressuring him to cooperate and Flake or Corker dismissed that as cutting off their nose to spite their face.  This is quite right from a Republican perspective.  Ultimately Trump doesn't care about judges, except to the extent that he is praised for his choices.  Republicans, on the other hand, care about judges more than anything.  It logically follows that the proposal is absurd.

In pre-Trump days, a nominee could survive allegations like Kavenaugh is facing, but only by going the contrition route.  He would acknowledge that he did binge drink in his youth, that he did drink to the point of blacking out, that he could not say with certainty what happened during the blackouts.  He was out of control when it happened, but since he chose to drink so much he is responsible.  And then he could present himself as a reformed man and discuss how he put all that behind him.  No more.  In the Trump era, the way to survive such allegations is to lie through your teeth about everything and accuse your attackers of being a partisan conspiracy.  This is very much a Bad Thing, although I suppose we should be glad that at least he left out the Deep State and Soros money as being a little too paranoid.

It is also depressing that people on opposite sides of the partisan line watched the same testimony and saw completely different things.

Finally, does this show that Democrats made a mistake in eliminating the judicial filibuster?  I would still say no.  I also highly recommend this article on the subject.  The whole idea that requiring a super majority is the norm and passing anything with a simple majority is an extraordinary event is a recent development.  Traditionally, passing legislation by a simple majority was the norm and filibusters were an extraordinary event, reserved for the most controversial legislation.  Filibusters of nominees were unheard of.  Clarence Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52-48.  While many things about the nomination were controversial, no one questioned the use of a simple majority to confirm him.  The article blames Democrats for beginning the practice in 2003.  It was at that time that Mitch McConnell called eliminating the judicial filibuster the "nuclear option," suggesting that it was a very radical measure indeed.  Judicial filibusters were suspended for a while, but began to creep back in.  Under the Obama Administration, Republicans began to filibuster all nominees for the D.C. Circuit court, refusing to confirm any regardless of the merits. It was this that inspired Harry Reid to end the judicial filibuster.  To believe that Republican would have allowed Democrats the same privilege once a Republican was elected is extraordinarily naive.

Let's face it.  We, as a country have reached the point that Republicans will not confirm any judge who is not approved by the Federalist Society and Democrats will not confirm any judge who is approved by the Federalist Society.  In effect, we have reached the point that judges cannot be confirmed unless the President and the Senate are controlled by the same party.  The last thing we need is to be unable to confirm judges unless the President has a super-majority in the Senate.

Syria and Yemen; Cambodia and East Timor

When I first started to read Noam Chomsky, I noticed that he had a most disconcerting habit.  He responded to any mention of Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia by downplaying them and by changing the subject to East Timor. 

What is East Timor?  East Timor is an island belonging to the same archipelago as Indonesia, but a former Portuguese colony, whereas Indonesia was a former Dutch colony.  While Indonesia gained its independence following WWII, East Timor remained a Portuguese colony until 1975, at which point it attempted to establish itself as an independent republic.  Indonesia did not take kindly to the attempt and invaded.  Its bloody attempt to subjugate East Timor continued at least ten years, and the occupation did not end until 1999.

At the time, invariably changing the subject from Cambodia to East Timor seemed like a case of "whataboutism."  Chomsky was wrong to dismiss or minimize atrocities in Cambodia which were, in fact, on a greater scale than the ones in East Timor.  He did, nonetheless, have a point.  In the end, there was not much we could do about the Khmer Rouge.*  Indonesia's atrocities, by contrast, were being committed by an allied government that we were arming and therefore actively abetting.  Furthermore, no US interest was actually served by Indonesian's actions, so it would cost us nothing to restrain our ally.  We did not.

This comes to my mind whenever I read Daniel Larison.  Larison differs from Chomsky in accepting that it is reasonable and acceptable for the US to pursue its interests (Chomsky considers it evil an illegitimate).  Nonetheless, he responds to all talk about atrocities in Syria by changing the subject to Yemen.  Yemen is a country on the southern end of the Arabian peninsula that is experiencing a civil war between pro-Saudi and pro-Iranian factions.  The pro-Iranian faction seized power in 2014.  Saudi Arabia has been attempting to restore its faction since 2015.  Saudi Arabia has been blockading Yemen, leading to famine and disease, and at least sometimes bombing civilian targets.

The situation Syria/Yemen is not unlike Cambodia/East Timor.  Two bloodbaths are going on.  The more severe is being committed by a hostile power.  We are passively allowing it to take place.  On the other hand, stopping it would require military intervention with uncertain prospects of success and the real risk of a super power confrontation.  The lesser one is being committed by an ally, armed and equipped by us, but not serving our interests in any meaningful way.  We could, presumably, put an end to it by refusing to abet it any further.

Which should be our priority, the worse bloodbath, or the one that we can more easily stop?

________________________________________
*And, ironically enough, when the Khmer Rouge was finally swept from power by the pro-Soviet Vietnamese, our response was to support it as a resistance in the name of resisting Soviet power.

Trump, Syria, and the Blob

Back to accounts of Trump's staff thwarting him.  Among the plans they allegedly thwarted  were trade war with China (now underway), withdrawal from NAFTA, withdrawal from a free trade agreement with South Korea, withdrawal of our troops from South Korea, a preemptive military strike on North Korea, invading Venezuela, cutting off all aid to Pakistan, and a large scale intervention in Syria.

All but one of these are more or less unanimously seen as really bad ideas.  The exception is Syria.  The book reports that when Bashar Assad launched a chemical attack in Syria, President Trump said, “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.”  Secretary of Defense James Matthis agreed and then promptly did not even make contingency plans for such a possibility, but proceeded with a pinprick strike on the one runway that launched the attack.  The Blob applauded, saluted Trump for restoring the US credibility that Obama had squandered in not launching such an attack at the time of the first chemical attack, and pointed out that, since the attack did not lead to escalation, there was no reason for Obama not to have done so earlier.  Apparently unnoticed was that the pinprick strike had no effect whatever on the war, except to temporarily deter further use of chemical weapons.  When Assad used them again, the Trump Administration launched pinprick strikes on three sites, as strategically meaningless as the first attack, but just as pleasing to the Blob.

Before getting into the details of any proposed large-scale intervention, can we dispense once and for all with the most common justification given for such an intervention.  The argument is that since Obama made a threat to intervene, the threat must be followed through or US credibility is lost forever.  Implied here as that this was the first time in the entire history of the US that a President ever made a threat and failed to follow through.  But, in fact, Obama's threat was not as clear as many have read into it.  His actual words were:

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. . . . That would change my equation. . . . We’re monitoring that situation very carefully. We have put together a range of contingency plans.

That is a threat, of sorts, but one that leaves a lot of wiggle room for anyone who wants wiggle room.  The Blob obviously did not.  This thread, for instance, gives other threats made and not kept, many of the involving North Korea.  And, most famously of all, Donald Trump made his "fire and fury" threat, not not one member of the Blob seems to believe that had no choice but to actually start a war with North Korea, or we would lose all credibility.  In short, the Blob is so insistent that Obama should have intervened in Syria because it favored such intervention on the merits, not because it was convinced that all threats must be carried out.

So what are the merits here?  What it comes to, as far as I can tell, is a conviction that if only we had intervened earlier or more forcefully, we could have toppled Assad.  What would have happened next never gets addressed.  This article is a fine example:

Instead of implementing what had sounded like the commander-in-chief’s directive [to overthrow Assad], the State Department was saddled in August 2012 by the White House with a make-work, labor-intensive project cataloguing the countless things that would have to be in place for a post-Assad Syria to function. But how to get to post-Assad? The White House had shut down the sole interagency group examining options for achieving that end.

In other words, the author thinks we should have toppled Assad now and worried about what would follow later.  We tried that in Iraq and Libya.  It didn't go so well.  The usual response is that this time we didn't intervene and it went even worse.  Often also present is the insistence that the moderate opposition (as opposed to ISIS and other Islamist fanatics) would have prevailed if we had intervened sooner, and that the worst atrocities happened only after the Russians intervened, and that we could have prevented them by toppling Assad sooner.  Consider this article, which takes for granted that we could have safely intervened to topple Assad in 2011 (when the revolt first broke out), in 2013 (the whole chemical weapons "red line") or even as late as summer of 2015, when Assad's army was shattered, but that delay led to Russian intervention just a few weeks later. 

An alternate interpretation is obvious -- the Russians intervened to prevent the overthrow of their ally, Assad.  There was not some magical intervention date in 2015 that could have been avoided by toppling Assad earlier.  Rather, the Russians, after seeing their ally Qaddafi toppled, had no intention of allowing it to happen again.  They intervened when they saw Assad was in real danger of falling.  If Assad had been in danger of falling earlier, the Russians would simply have intervened earlier. 

But suppose we had intervened more aggressively, to the extent that the Russians would have risked a direct military confrontation with us if they had intervened.  Perhaps then we would have toppled Assad.  But then what?  No one in the Blob appears to have thought that far.  In all probability, the rival factions would have been at each other's throats and an imploding failed state with endless civil war would have ensued.  Certainly there were plenty of extremely nasty Islamist factions out there, including ISIS.  Well, what of the "moderate" opposition we backed in 2011?  The so-called "moderates" proved remarkably difficult to find and arm even at the beginning, and nice guys go down fast during civil wars. 

Well, some people have said, even that would be better than what we have now.  Libya is a mess, but the death toll has been a lot lower than in Syria.  But Libya at least is fairly peripheral to the Mideast's great power struggles.  Libya can burn to the ground for all US and Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia care.  Syria, on the other hand borders with Turkey and is only one country away from Iran and Saudi Arabia.  If Assad had fallen, all parties would be arming one faction or another, escalating the civil war.  Anyone who does not think Russia would have found someone to back, if only to stir up trouble, is being uncommonly naive.

Well, what of diplomacy backed by force?  There are some (including, as I understand it, John Kerry) who believe we might have successfully negotiated an end to the civil war if we had been willing to back our diplomacy with force.  I would be all in favor of that.  However, so long as we made Assad's removal a non-negotiable condition and Assad, with his Russian and Iranian backers, made Assad staying in power a non-negotiable condition, the chances of a negotiated solution seem fairly close to none.

And now Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers are gearing up for the final battle and a potentially massive humanitarian catastrophe.  And some are calling for a last US stand.


The Blob is not truly as uniform as sometimes implied.  The first time the Assad regime used chemical weapons during the Trump Administration, Mathis prevented a large-scale intervention.  Some members of the Blob disagreed.  Some are still calling for a last-ditch attempt.  But I agree with this critic of both Obama and Trump:

The “red line” retreat was a humiliating moment for U.S. power but I’ve never understood how an alternate course wouldn’t have ended in retreat anyway. If O had hit Assad, Assad almost certainly would have defied him afterward by using chemical weapons again. That’s what he did to Trump, after all, after the first U.S. strike on him in April 2017. What would Obama have done then? Another token bombing run, a la Trump? A small contingent of troops? The insuperable obstacle for every president on Syria is that Americans don’t understand what national interest is at stake and have had their fill of Middle East adventures over the past 20 years. There’s always support at the beginning of hostilities for punching a bully in the eye, but if the bully’s going to ignore you and keep doing what he does, you’re forced to either keep punching or to acquiesce and walk away. Trump was willing to throw a couple of jabs, Obama was willing to throw none, but neither one was going to commit to a sustained fight for purely humanitarian reasons. And so the question: If Obama had hit Assad in 2013 and then ended up retreating after Assad shook it off and kept gassing people, wouldn’t we have paid a price in lost credibility anyway? What price in terms of American lives lost might we have paid if Obama had committed to a McCain/Graham-style strategy of perpetual escalation to preserve American prestige?

I, for one, and glad that James Matthis avoided a large-scale intervention in Syria, and I suspect most Americans would agree with me.  But some members of the Blob may not.

The Steele Dossier and the Page Warrant

People arguing that the Steele Dossier was an elaborate Russia/Steele/Clinton campaign/Deep State plot to frame Trump run into the awkward question of why neither the Clinton campaign nor the Deep State ever published the information they allegedly went to such lengths to fabricate.  The usual counter is that even if none of these entities published the dossier before the election, but FBI did use it to obtain a warrant to spy on a member of the campaign.

Actually, Page had left the campaign at the time the FBI applied for the warrant.  This is significant because it means the FBI was not spying on an ongoing campaign.  Spying on a former campaign adviser could ultimately lead to incriminating information on the campaign, so the warrant was politically significant.  But it was not an attempt at real-time information on the political moves of an opposing campaign.

Still, regardless of whether he was part of an ongoing campaign, Carter Page should not have been wiretapped without probable cause, as properly established.  The Republican contention is that the warrant was improper because it was based on opposition research, and because the FISA court was not informed of the source's origins.

The Steele Dossier alleges three main incidents.

First and most notoriously, it alleges that during Donald Trump's November, 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, he hired some Russian prostitutes to urinate on the Obamas' bed in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, and that the Russian intelligence filmed the incident and used the film to blackmail Trump.  The only part of this that has been established is that Trump was in Moscow in November, 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant, and that he stayed at the Ritz Carlton.

Second, it alleges that during Carter Page's July, 2016 trip to Moscow to address the New Economic School he met with Igor Sechin, CEO of Rosneft oil company to discuss lifting sanctions on Russia.  In return, Sechin offered, "the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft."  Page showed interest but remained non-committal.  Page is also alleged to have met with Russian official Igor Divyenkin, who said that Russia had damaging information on Clinton, and broadly hinted that they had it on Trump as well.  This information allegedly came from "a trusted compatriot" of "a close associate" of Sechin.  In other words, it is a third-hand rumor.    (Memo 94, pp. 9-10 and Memo 134, pp. 30-31).  Nonetheless, there is at least some verification here.  Page's trip to Moscow at this time is a matter of public record.  Rosneft really did privatize a 19% interest.  And a close associate of Sechin turned up dead under suspicious circumstances.  (Nothing can be said of his "trusted compatriot.")

Finally, it alleges that Michael Cohen met with a Russian operative in Prague in August or September of 2016 to work on the coverup.  Cohen produced an apparent alibi to this meeting; Robert Mueller is working to break it.

The warrant against Page deals with this second alleged incident.

Republicans appear to be right about one thing at least.  The Steele Dossier really does appear to have been the primary source in applying for the warrant, as evidenced by the application (starting page 15) referring to Steele as "Source #1." 

Keep in mind this does not mean that the Steele Dossier was the primary source in the entire counterintelligence investigation, only that sub-portion of it that involved obtaining a FISA warrant against Page.  This is a distinction that Republicans like to blur, but it is real nonetheless.

Furthermore, the reference to Steele as "Source #1" implies that there are other sources as well, but does suggest that they are less important and are merely used as corroboration of the primary source.  Still, let's give at least part of a point to Republicans on that at least.

Republicans are outraged that the application does not say that the dossier was prepared as opposition research for the Democratic Party.  Democrats have essentially three responses.

First of all Steele was simply doing work for a dirt-digging firm.  He didn't know who the firm's client was.  Thus he didn't actually know that he was working for Trump's political opponents, although it seems most improbable that that Trump's allies would be funding the investigation.

Second, the application (page 16) makes clear that, although "Source #1" did not know who the client was, the FBI speculates that the research was probably being done to "discredit Candidate #1's campaign."  In other words, opposition research by Trump's political opponents.

Third (an rather caustically), although the FBI says that it believes Steele was doing opposition research for Trump's opponents, Republicans seem to be complaining that the application does not specifically name names.  This is remarkably hypocritical, given the uproar they made about inappropriate unmasking.  Apparently only Republicans should be shielded from unmasking.

Finally, although Republicans are outraged that the application relies on a hostile and biased sources, doing so is absolutely routine in warrant applications, and for obvious reasons.  Friends and allies of the target are usually not going to give the sort of information that can be used to establish probable cause.  Truly neutral and impartial parties generally just don't know that much.  Establishing probable cause generally means digging around in some sordid business because that is where the information is.  All of this really should draw a collective duh!

But so far as I understand it, Republicans' response is that if Steele didn't know who is ultimate employer was, then it was the FBI's responsibility to investigate and find out.  While acknowledging that the ultimate employer was most unlikely to be friendly to Trump, they maintain that it might have been a business rival, or a jilted ex-mistress (presumably with a new sugar daddy to pay for the research).  If the animosity had been purely personal or commercial, Steele's memos would have been fine, but knowing that the ultimate employer was a political rival hopelessly taints them.

I really don't see it.  The application goes on to say that Page and Sechin discussed "future bilateral energy cooperation" and lifting sanctions.  It also says that Divyekin discussed the possibility of releasing damaging information on "Candidate #2."  That does not sound like the sort of thing a business or romantic rival would be looking for.  It sounds very much like research for a political rival.  Just how much digging is the FBI expected to do into which political rival, and why does it matter?

What obviously is important is whether any of Steele's allegations have been verified. Milking the rumor mill is fine as the opening of an investigation.  It is not sufficient for a political ad -- or for a news article, or for a wiretap.  For any of these things there must be corroboration.  It was because of the lack of corroboration that the Clinton campaign did not use any of Steele's research during her campaign (must I reiterate again why it makes no sense at all to make such an elaborate fabrication and then not use it?), and why the press did not publish it until after the election and then with great controversy.  But the intelligence community has access to sources not available to the Clinton campaign or the news media.  Were these sources able to give sufficient verification to justify a warrant?

And the only reasonable answer, based on what has been made public so far, is that we simply do not know.  The application begins (pp. 1-2) with a pro forma explanation of who Carter Page and Russia (!) are.  Page 3 is a large, blacked out section of Russian's clandestine intelligence activities.  Page 4 says that Carter Page is foreign policy adviser to "Candidate #1" and is believed to be a target for recruitment by the Russian government to undermine and influence the US election.  This is, once again, a strong hit that it was probably not a commercial or romantic rival who underwrote the research.  And, really, it is appropriate to investigate attempts by a foreign power to undermine and influence an election, even if it is on behalf of the party out of power.

Pages 5-8 address Russian attempts to sway elections, in the US and other countries, in general, and in the 2016 election in particular.  Some chunks are blacked out that presumably deal with how they know Russia is meddling.  Pages 8 (toward the bottom) through 10 (near the top) say that George Papadopoulos and Carter Page are foreign policy advisers for "Candidate #1" and that the FBI believes the Russian government's efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with "Candidate #1's campaign."  Further information (a little more than a page) are blacked out.  Two things here are significant.  First, the application believes that Page, though no longer a member of the campaign, was still coordinating with the Russians, suggesting his association with the campaign had not entirely ended.  Second, the others doing the coordination were "associated with" rather than members of the campaign.  That probably refers to Roger Stone.

Pages 10 through halfway down 13 are about Page's business ties with Russia and are almost entirely blacked out.  Pages 13 through 15 is about Russian spying in 2015.  It is not quite clear why this is significant.  Page was a target for recruitment as a Russian spy in 2013, but the 2015 operation was separate.  What it may have to do with Page is blacked out.

Pages 15 through 18 are the sections dealing with the Steele Dossier and Christopher Steele as "Source #1."  It reports Page's trip to Moscow and address at the New Economic School as matters of open record and discusses Page's alleged meetings with Sechin and Divyekin according to Steele.  It also says that Steele has been a reliable source, that he was and doing dirt digging, and that he did not know who the client was but suspected "Candidate #1's" political rivals.  It also identifies who Sechin and Divyekin are and what "kompromat" is.  It also contains some blacked out information about Steele's ties to the FBI (presumably the work he and Bruce Ohr were doing seeking to flip Russian oligarchs), and on why Steele is considered reliable.  Pages 19 and 20 are blacked out and my contain corroboration.

Page 21 quotes July and August news articles about the Trump campaign's seeming openness to recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea and lifting sanctions.  Pages 22-24 quote the September 23 Yahoo News article which made most the same allegations as Steele about Carter Page's trip to Moscow.  (Conspicuously absent:  Any talk about a 19% share of privatized Rosneft).  Republicans strongly condemn the FBI for using this article as corroboration of Steele's report, since Steele himself was the source.  Democrats defend it as not being offered as corroboration, but to show that Page denied the meetings.  Actually, the article is offered more as a setup for Page's denials.  There is also a footnote that acknowledges the remarkable similarities between the article and Steele's findings, but says the FBI does not believe Steele was the source of the article.  This mistake was never acknowledged, though later versions of the application mention that the FBI terminated relations with Steele after the October 31, 2016 Mother Jones article sourced to Steele came out.  (The first application dates to before the Mother Jones) article.  Pages 24 through 26 cite various new and other open source denials of the meeting by Carter Page and attempts by the Trump campaign to repudiate Page.

Pages 27 through 31 are blacked out but may contain corroboration of Steele.  Page 32 is boilerplate language saying there is probable cause to believe Page is the agent of a foreign power in violation of criminal statutes.  The rest of the application (total pages 67) is either boilerplate or blacked out.

Conclusion:  The Steele Dossier alleges real and serious crimes. Its origins as opposition research do not taint it and were revealed or at least strongly suggested in the application.  It is the product of milking the rumor mill.  Milking the rumor mill is fine as the starting point of an investigation, but not sufficient to justify a wiretap without further corroboration.  The publicly released portions of the dossier are not enough for a conclusion one way or the other whether there is enough corroboration.

And now Donald Trump has authorized further releases.  His authorized releases are specific -- pages 10 through 12 and 17 through 34.  Pages 10 through 12 appear to address Carter Page's business ties to Russia.  Pages 17 through 20 probably address corroboration or lack thereof of Steele's material.  Pages 26 through 31 follow Trump's and Page's denials of allegations.  I have no idea what they contain.  Pages 33 through 34 probably contain information about why the FBI suspects Page is the agent of a foreign power.

I will make two more comments.  First, I don't trust Trump as far as I can spit.  Presumably the releases he has authorized are selected to make him look good.  Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that he is not disclosing the most dangerous parts of the warrant -- the early parts showing how the intelligence community knows that Russia is trying to sway the election and the later parts that presumably discuss how the surveillance would take place.

Republican Views of the Steele Dossier

So, let me return to the subject of the Trump investigation.  Republican consensus is unanimous that, seeing Russian attempts to rig the election in favor of Trump and strange ties to Russia by numerous members of the Trump campaign, any investigation of whether these things were related should have been absolutely off the table. 

But above all else, Republicans unanimously condemn the Steele Dossier.  They disagree on whether it is acceptable to accept dirt from foreign operatives, but all agree that one way or the other, the Steele Dossier is definitely worse than the Trump Tower meeting, and that while the Trump Tower meeting may have been attempted collision with the Russians, the Steele Dossier was actual collusion.

This is a remarkable conclusion to reach.  The position here appears to be that if the Clinton campaign had wanted to investigate whether Donald Trump had suspicious business dealing with Russia, any talking to real live Russians should have been out of the question.  How you are supposed to learn about Trump's dealings in Russia while scrupulously avoiding talking to Russians is rather less than clear.  At another link I cannot find someone compared this to a candidate suspected of ties to organized crime.  The Republican viewpoint, if taken seriously, would say that a political opponent must not hire a retired cop to talk to his tipsters and inside sources, and that to do so is exactly equivalent to accepting help from organized crime directly.

Well, what about the ban on accepting assistance in campaigns from foreigners, Trump supporters ask.  If assistance includes opposition research, doesn't the ban apply to allies as well as adversaries? Here I must confess to ignorance.  I know that Christopher Steele was not working for the Democratic Party directly.  Rather, the Democratic Party hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research and Fusion GPS hired Steele, not telling him who their client was.  Whether the Democratic Party was aware who Fusion GPS hired is not clear, though as I understand it, the usual practice is not to ask opposition researchers too many questions where they are getting their information.  Is this a sufficient laundering of the information to make it legal?  I don't know, but presumably the parties involved knew enough about the letter of the law to stay within it.  Is accepting such information as legal so long as it is laundered through an opposition research firm that doesn't reveal its sources and methods hypocritical?  Yes, obviously, but them's the breaks. 

It also appears that Fusion GPS is considered "reputable" within the sleazy bounds of opposition research, meaning, at a minimum, that they do not resort to Watergate-style illegality such as break-ins or wire tapping.  They do milk the rumor mill, a perfectly legitimate beginning for gathering information.  What Steele was doing was milking a particular rumor mill -- the Russian rumor mill.  This opens him up to two absolutely reasonable forms of criticism.  One is that milking the rumor mill is not a reliable source of information, and that all sorts of unverified gossip could have found its way into his report.  The other is that the Russians may have figured out what he was up to and seeded the report with deliberate misinformation.  This probability seems a lot stronger since the revelation that Steele and Bruce Ohr, his contact in the FBI has been cultivating Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska as an informant.  Deripaska is widely believed to be Paul Manafort's handler and assumed to have passed everything he heard up the chain.  So there is, indeed, a strong probability that the Steele Dossier was deliberately seeded with false information.

But this does not appear to be what Republicans are alleging.  Republicans are alleging, not merely that Steele may have been played for a fool, or that as an seasoned intelligence agent, he may be unable to admit that to himself.  What Republicans are alleging appears to be that Steele, the Clinton campaign, the Deep State, and the Russians deliberately worked together to concoct the dossier in order to slander Trump.  There is no evidence for this belief whatever. 

Furthermore, it makes no sense.  Why would the Russians go to such lengths to slander Trump even as they were attempting to rig the election in his favor?  The usual answer is so the could then use the information to undermine if in case he won the election.

Why would Steele, hitherto a reliable and reputable source of intelligence, suddenly start fabricating?  The usual answer given is out of hostility to Trump.  But this is to reverse any common sense line of causation.  It assumes that Steele, as a Briton, had such a strong dislike for a US candidate that he would go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate a dossier against him.  Surely a more plausible explanation is that Steele, investigating Trump's ties to Russia, came across evidence (real or fabricated) of conspiracy and as a result became strongly hostile to him.  Republicans seem to believe that researchers (and FBI agents) should be will-less automatons, unaffected by anything they may discover.

Finally, why would Clinton and the Deep State go to such lengths to concoct a slander and then keep it secret?  The usual answer given is that they expected Clinton to win anyhow and were simply keeping the dossier in reserve as an "insurance policy" against Trump winning.  This seems wildly improbable.  People don't go to such lengths to fabricate materials they don't expect to use.  Even if the Clinton campaign and the Deep State expected her to win, why not use of the information they supposedly went to such lengths to fabricate to make that probability a certainty?  Leaking even a small portion of the dossier (and any veteran campaign knows how to make such leaks while maintaining plausible deniability) could have gone a long way towards countering the horror over the security threat posed by Clinton's e-mails.  The FBI was already indirectly aiding the Trump campaign by revealing that it was investigating Clinton while keeping its investigation of Trump a secret.*  Above all else, when Comey's announcement that the FBI was reopening its investigation into the Clinton e-mails caused her numbers to tank, why didn't attempt to offset by announcing that Trump was also under investigation.  Note here that I am not seeing he should have done so.  But if there was truly a Deep State plot against Trump, then to all appearances the announcement was seriously undermining it.  Wouldn't one expect the Deep State to bring out its heavy artillery when faced with the real chance of failure?

What actually happened was much simpler.  The Clinton campaign, and many media outlets received the Steele Dossier.  However, what that had was pure rumor.  Neither the campaign nor the media, with two notable exceptions,** published the report because there was not enough evidence to support it.  The FBI did not reveal that it was investigating Trump because its normal practice is not to reveal counterintelligence investigations lest it jeopardize them.  So the public went to the polls believing one candidate was under FBI investigation, and that the investigation had recently been reopened, while unaware that the other was under investigation at all.  And ever since then Trump and his supporters have been claiming the Deep State was out to get him because it investigated at all.

I have quoted this article before and I will quote it again:

Trump’s position, and the consensus position of the conservative movement, is that, having become aware of a foreign intelligence service’s successful efforts to infiltrate a major party presidential campaign, the FBI should have done nothing about it, because the campaign in question happened to be a Republican one.

. . . . . . .

Where Trump’s campaign was open for business with high-bidding autocrats, the people who saw what was happening, and understood it was wrong, didn’t think to rush to the Clinton campaign, or leak their intelligence in a manner designed to maximize harm to Trump. As representatives of a rules-based order, they understood that it was a matter for the FBI, which in turn understood that it had to hold its investigation very tightly, in order to protect the innocent and avoid tampering with the election. (This was a norm and a courtesy that the FBI famously did not offer Hillary Clinton.)

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*And yes, I know they had legitimate reasons for doing so.  The Clinton investigation was of past and well-publicized actions.  The Trump investigation was of ongoing and highly secret actions and might have been jeopardized if it had become public.  But the result, though perhaps inevitable, was no less real for that.
**One report was a Yahoo News Article by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff dated September 23, 2016.  It reported that Carter Page was a businessman with extensive ties to Russia (true) a longstanding Russian apologist (true), and that he had traveled to Moscow in July, 2016 and made a speech at the New Economic School in which he denounces US criticisms of Russia (true).  It also reported that he was believed to have discussed lifting sanctions with Igor Sechin, chairman of Rosneft oil company and Russian official Igor Divekin.  The source of this report was Michael Steele, although the author appears to have spoken with officials in Congress and implied that those officials were his source.  The article did not attract significant attention at the time.  The other, better known report David Corn, writing for Mother Jones.  reported that an unnamed "former Western intelligence officer" deemed a credible source had found evidence that Trump was directly conspiring with the Russians.  The report was extremely vague about details, saying only that “[T]here was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance,” that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals,” that Trump had been "compromised" and could be blackmailed.  Emphasis was more on the existence of the dossier than its contents.  Coming as it did right after Comey's announcement that he had reopened the Clinton investigation, it looked like the flailing of a desperate campaign in trouble.  But Corn's source does not appear to have been either the Clinton campaign or the FBI, but Steele.

Where is the Heartland of Real America?

I don't know why and am writing on this but the map below is taken from this article arguing that the real divide in whether people support or oppose Trump is not rural-urban, but based on the "eleven nations" named in the map below, and explained in greater detail in the article.

The article called most maps breaking down the vote by counties, or by precincts, etc. as misleading, which they certainly are.  Such maps are misleading because they create the impression of a vast Republic sea with only a few tiny democratic islands, ignoring the difference in population density.  It claims that the map below, which breaks down the vote by regions, conveys a more accurate picture.

The map below has obvious problems like, for instance, showing Clinton winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania when she quite notoriously didn't.  It ignores the rural-urban divide, which is very real.  But I do think the map is revealing for another reason.

The map is revealing, I think, because it reveals a certain dispute between Trump supporters and media elites about where the mythical "Real America" is located, and also why the geography of Trump's win was such a shock.

There is plenty that both groups agree on.  Both agree that the New York to Washington corridor is definitely not part of Real America.  Though less clear, they would probably agree that New England and the West Coast are also not part of Real America, while everything else is at least somewhat real, but not equally real.  Both seem to agree that white voters are more authentic that black or Hispanic voters, that blue collar voters are more authentic than white collar voters, and that small town voters are more authentic than voters in the big cities.  Both also agree that some geographic part of the United States is called the Heartland and is the most authentically Real American part of the country and therefore has the greatest moral weight.

The difference, I believe, is on where this "Heartland" of "authentic Real America" is located.  Looking at the "Eleven Nations" map and its margin of victory, it should surprise exactly no one that Trump's greatest margin of victory was in the area designated as Greater Appalachia.  I would say that Republicans  would identify the Heartland, the most authentically "real American" part of the country entitled to the greatest moral weight with Greater Appalachia.  Other people's authenticity and real American-ness can be measured by the extent to which they adopt the Greater Appalachian culture.

Our media elite, by contrast, have probably written off Greater Appalachia as a hopeless cause and instead locate the Heartland of Real America in the midlands.  If asked which state is most authentically Real American, I am guessing most of our media elite would say Iowa, with strong points for Wisconsin (which they would probably place in the Midlands) and Illinois (the prairie parts of Illinois, that is, not Chicago, although Chicago prides itself in being the biggest city still to be part of Real America).   So it must have come as a shock to see not only Greater Appalachia (clearly a hopeless cause), but much of the Midlands and even parts of Yankeedom (i.e., Michigan and Wisconsin) go over to anyone as obviously unfit to be President as Trump.

The author of the article argues that the rural-urban divide is strongest in the Midlands.  If that is where you locate the Heartland of Real America, it makes sense that you would give that division special emphasis.

And finally, it explains all the articles about journeys to Trump Country to see if people have changed their minds.  Particularly if you associate the Midlands with Real America, it makes sense to scour it to see if the Heartland has come to its senses.  Because only if it does will opposition to Trump carry the real moral conviction that it speaks for Real Americans.

Other Things That Will Not Turn Economic Royalists Against Trump

So, granting all that, what about the other problems with Trump?  My guess is, economic royalists will acknowledge some, not acknowledge others and not see any but one as a deal breaker.

What about the extraordinary levels of dysfunction in the White House?  Ordinary Trump supporters have generally either dismissed that as something that elites get upset about but doesn't affect ordinary Americans, or else applaud it as evidence that Trump is draining the swamp and the swamp is fighting back.  My guess is that economic royalists will incline toward the latter explanation.  Remember, economic royalists oppose any concept of workers' rights beyond the right to quit if the job is unbearable.  To acknowledge any other rights in employees is to restrict the employer's right to deploy resources as the employer sees best.  Thus economic royalists are apt to have a certain perverse approval of an abusive workplace -- it shows power lies where it should and besides, if it was really so bad, why is anyone still there? 

What about pointing out that Trump is not merely an abusive employer, but everyone is at cross-purposes and the White House really is badly managed?  Presumably economic royalists do not approve of workplaces that are so dysfunctional that it interferes with their ability to get the product out.  But government is a different case since the "product" it gets out consists of laws, regulations, and services, all of which royalists disapprove of, so the more inept and dysfunctional the government the better.

What about the threat Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law?  It should be obvious by now that none of that is a deal-breaker so far as economic royalists are concerned.  And, if truth be known, libertarians have always been skeptical of democracy.  After all, if you believe that all government is bad, and democracy is a form of government, then the conclusion about democracy is obvious.  Libertarians are apt to see democracy simply as tyranny of the majority over the minority.  Everyone agrees that there are some minority rights that should be beyond the power of a democratic majority.  Our Bill of Rights protects unpopular religious and political views and guarantees certain criminal procedural rights.*  Economic royalists would simply broaden the areas beyond the authority of a democratic majority to ban all redistributionist taxation and all constraints on profit making.  Within those restrictions, they are presumably all in favor of democracy.  But so long as the people are not willing to accept those restrictions, democracy is not a libertarian priority.

What about the rule of law?  Business needs regular and consistent laws to flourish.  Why aren't economic royalists concerned that Trump seems to see the law as an instrument to shield his friends and harass his opponents, including hostile business interests?  My guess is that to an economic royalist the real problem is that there are too many laws and that if you repealed 90 plus percent of all laws on the books today, the ability to use law to harass opponents would disappear.  Declining to enforce economic regulations, wrecking regulatory agencies by corruption and incompetence, and appointing economic royalist judges to strike down what is left must seem like a good enough start.

Well, what about Trump's deviation from economic royalism?  His immigration crackdown is (at least in theory) a violation of free market principles of labor mobility, and some of it, like his child separation policy, look a whole lot more like despotism in the making than, say, Social Security or Medicare.  I certainly don't think that economic royalists are at all happy about Trump's immigration crackdown.  They just don't see it as a really serious violation of economic liberty, not on a par with, say, requiring employers to use e-verify.  So they are willing to put up with it in return for cutting taxes, gutting regulations, and appointing economic royalists as judges.

What about Trump's protectionist policies?  Why aren't libertarians up in arms about them?  Look, there is ample evidence that economic royalists are not happy with this aspect of the Trump administration.  But compared to a tax cut, regulatory rollback and judicial appointments, they will grit their teeth and bear it.

Well, what about Mike Pence?  He'd make exactly the same judicial appointments (literally, the Federalist Society is the one making the choices; any Republican President would simply rubber stamp them) and support the same tax cuts and regulatory rollback, but without the erratic behavior, with respect for basic rule of law, and maybe even relaxing the protectionism?  I suppose Pence might be less effective at wrecking through corruption and incompetence than Trump and therefore less desirable from an economic royalist perspective.  But presumably the main reason economic royalists show no interest in removing Trump is that the recognize it would involve the Republican Party in an internal war and therefore harm its electoral prospects.

Well, what about the scary revelations in Woodward's new book?  Including the ones that Trump considered preemptive war with North Korea and had to be talked out of a tweet that the North Koreans could have mistaken for an act of war?  My guess is that nuclear war, or even a large-scale conventional war with a significant risk of going nuclear is a deal-breaker for economic royalists.  After all, if you fail to roll back the New Deal this election cycle, you can always live to fight another day.  Nuclear war, on the other hand . . . .  But the good news is that we seem to have moved past the risk of war with North Korea and that, although there is still room for a foreign policy disaster, at least the disaster is not going to go nuclear.

The bad news is that means that nothing is going to be a deal breaker for economic royalists.  Why, they would probably support Trump even if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

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*And, I realize, other things that judges have written into it, but more on that later.

Why The Republican Elite Thinks the Judges Make it All Worthwhile

Some people ask if there is any sort of dubious behavior that will lead Republicans to vote against confirming Brett Kavenaugh.  Others complain about how warped Republicans are to put up with Trump and his corruption, dangerously erratic behavior and attempts to subvert the rule of law, all for the sake of tax cuts, regulatory rollback, and federal judges.

To which I can only answer, you don't understand economic royalists.  While the number of true economic royalists in the US is small, they make up basically the entire Republican elite.  From an economic royalist perspective, the US has not been free since 1933.  Ever since the New Deal was implemented, we have existed under the jackboot of despotism.*  Their top priority is therefore rolling back the New Deal.

This has proven problematic.  They had high hopes when Ronald Reagan became President in 1980, but he was thwarted by a Democratic Congress.  They had high hopes when Newt Gingrich took over Congress in 1994, but he was thwarted by a Democratic President.  When Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency in 2000, they didn't make any effort whatever and even expanded the abomination by introducing Medicare-D.  The last hope for economic royalists was the Tea Party, which denounced Obama deficits, fought Obamacare, and demanded massive spending cuts, even to the point of threatening a debt ceiling breach.  But the American people reelected Obama and sided with him over the government shutdown and debt ceiling.  And economic royalists were forced to the conclusion that the American people had become hopelessly corrupted, that they would never roll back the New Deal with the elective branches of government, and that their only hope was through the federal courts.  The Federalist Society has assembled an essentially unlimited supply of economic royalist judges and the Republican elite has made no secret that they were holding their noses and voting Trump for one reason only -- federal judges in general and the Supreme Court in particular.**

Trump has not disappointed, and the reason is obvious.  He neither knows nor cares anything whatever about federal judges.  To Donald Trump, judges matter only insofar as they earn him plaudits.  The Federalist Society has a ready-made supply of judges for Trump to appoint, and he earns regular plaudits for doing so.  He can therefore be counted on to appoint economic royalist judges.

There is also the matter of tax cuts and regulatory rollback.  Yes, I know it is ridiculous to applaud tax cuts and be outraged by the deficits that result, but Republicans have been playing this game since Ronald Reagan's day.  To an economic royalist, taxes and deficits are unrelated.  Cutting taxes doesn't increase deficits, it merely returns money to the people who earned it.  The fact that deficits go up just shows that the tax cuts should have been accompanied by spending cuts, but can never call tax cuts into question.  Besides, eventually one of two things will happen.  Either the tax cuts will precipitate a fiscal crisis and force some future government to cut spending, or else there will finally be enough economic royalist judges to to declare all that spending unconstitutional.  Of course, no current office holder wants to still be in office when that happens.

And then, of course, there is regulatory rollback.  The Trump administration is declining to enforce regulations, which is good as far as it goes, but has the disadvantage that some Democratic administration might start enforcing them again.  Better, from an economic royalist perspective, is wrecking the administrative agencies by corruption and incompetence because that will prevent some future Democratic administration from being able to repair those agencies.  But one loophole remains.  Private citizens feeling aggrieved under some regulation may sue for enforcement.  But that just emphasizes the importance of appointing economic royalist judges who will always rule against the regulation and perhaps someday hold regulatory agencies unconstitutional.

So, yes, to an economic royalist these are the truly important things. That is not to say that they like everything about the Trump Administration.  But things that bother journalists may not seem so important to an economic royalist.


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*Some economic royalists may trace our loss of liberty back to the Progressive Era and the first Roosevelt's measures such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.  A few may even see the rot as setting in with the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887.  But most, I think can live with these and see the New Deal and when we lost our freedom.

**Social conservatives also voted Trump in hopes that they would like his Supreme Court appointments, but I am more sympathetic  In allowing the New Deal to stand, the Supreme Court is, after all, deferring to the elective branches and the will of the people.  In upholding the rights of unpopular religious and political views, they are following a clear constitutional mandate. But in declaring abortion or gay marriage constitutional rights, the Supreme Court is imposing a political program nowhere mentioned in the Constitution that could not be passed by the ordinary political process.  I intend to write more on this subject in the future.

The Awkward Question of What Trump's Staff Should Be Doing

The shocking-but-not-surprising revelations that people around Trump are thwarting some of his worst impulses raises two serious problems.

One is problem of unelected staffers and bureaucrats thwarting a duly elected President.  To the extent that the bureaucracy upholds the rule of law against Trump's worst impulses, we should certainly applaud it.  But most of the thwarting appears to be taking place either within the realm of foreign policy, where the President's discretionary authority is extremely broad, or in foreign trade, where the law has foolishly delegated way more power to the President than it ought.  This also means, by the way, that electing a Democratic Congress will not make that much difference.  Congress has quite limited power to restrain the President in matters of foreign policy.  And although Congress could hypothetically pass legislation to take back its power on trade, any such law would require enough Republican votes to pass over Trump's veto.

The other problem it raises is the whole the anti-Trump paradox.  Staffers, bureaucrats, and members of Congress of both parties, as well as political activists, very properly want to avoid the sort of catastrophes portrayed in "But her emails."  The best way to keep Trump from breaking free from his minders and causing -- well, maybe we shouldn't think too much about it -- is to remove him in one of the two ways allowed by law -- either by impeachment or by finding him unfit to hold office under the 25th Amendment.

Impeachment requires a majority vote in the House of Representatives and a 2/3 vote in the Senate.  The 25th Amendment requires a majority of the Cabinet and 2/3 of both houses of Congress to vote that the President is incapable of carrying out his duties.  These are high hurdles to meet, incapacity even higher than impeachment, and rightly so.  The will of the people should not be lightly overturned

The will of the people is precisely what is at stake.  The President is impeachable for "Bribery, Treason and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."  "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" is a vague formulation.  For all intents and purposes, an impeachable offense is whatever public opinion says it is.  And "public opinion" does not mean 50% plus one.  It means a very strong consensus in favor of impeachment.  The Zero Percent Approval Rating is not a thing in real life, but by the time Nixon was impeached, his approval rating was at 24%.  It will not be possible to remove Trump from office without significant Republican cooperation.  That is not going to happen until a significant portion of the Republican public turns against him.  In these highly polarized times, Donald Trump could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and most Republicans would not consider it an impeachable offense.

The only thing that could bring Trump's approval rating into impeachment-grade territory is if he actually harms his loyal followers.  Unfortunately, there is no way for him to do that without harming a great many innocent bystanders in the process.  This commentator makes something like that point:

[A]re senior officials who steal memos and thwart orders from the president actually doing more harm than good by screening the ‘real’ Trump from the democracy that has to live with its choices, and choose again in two years?

Two responses illustrated the dilemma well.  One answered:  "Yes. Same as enablers of alcoholics who keep them from facing natural consequences until a catastrophe happens."  To which another replied, "There's a difference between someone who shields an alcoholic from embarrassment or ridicule, Verses someone with the good sense to hide the keys to the car."

I would agree.  You hope that alcoholics facing the consequences of their drinking will finally decide to quit.  If the alcoholic causes an accident and is killed, all such hope vanishes.  And, worse, yet, the alcoholic is risking not only his or her own life by driving drunk, but the lives of innocent bystanders.

So, what price respecting the will of the people in choosing their duly elected leader?  And what price in allowing the leader to show himself for what he is and prove the need to get rid of him? I am not talking now about Congress declining to pass his agenda, bureaucracies in following the law instead of his whims, or courts striking down illegal actions.  I am talking about top-ranking staffers illegally thwarting the lawful actions of a duly elected President.

Well, looking at the actions that we now know about:

• Withdrawing from NAFTA, which could spark a diplomatic and economic crisis.  I would say let him proceed.  An economic crisis, quite unnecessarily created, is just what is needed to get the attention of Trump's followers.  I am confident that any economic and diplomatic crisis created would be recoverable.  Granted, a lot of innocent Canadians and Mexicans would suffer, but this is the sort of lesser crisis I would be willing to tolerate now to avoid a worse crisis in the future.
• Trade war with China.  Let him proceed.  We are there already.  It is not creating a crisis, but is causing problems.  Let them get worse.
• Invading Venezuela.  I do not have a clear sense of how this would end up.  Would there be Iraqi-style resistance, or merely a godawful mess that was now our responsibility, and with the least competent administration ever in charge?  On the one hand, my guess is the damage would be limited by Trump getting bored and soon leaving.  On the other hand, I suspect this would be the sort of thing that causes serious damage to the invaded country but not much at home.  Is that a good reason to approve or disapprove?
• Cutting off aid to Pakistan.  I don't know enough to have an opinion here.
• Withdrawing from the free trade pact with South Korea and/or withdrawing our troops.  There was an excellent explanation of why this is a serious threat to national security, and why preventing it was such a high priority.
• Large-scale intervention in Syria.  I plan to do a whole post on this.
• Preventive war against North Korea.  Yikes! Absolutely, I am in favor of staff intervening with our President to stop this.  I don't care about legal nicities here; I just want to avoid nuclear war.

And one final thought.  Some might ask, is it worth removing Trump from office if Mike Pence will take his place.  I would say, see all the things staffers have kept Trump from doing you will see the answer is hell, yes!  I don't like Mike Pence's politics and would expect to oppose almost anything he would want to do as President.  But at least there would be no need to handcuff him, stuff something in his mouth and lock him up in the closet.

How is Trump's Staff Thwarting Him?

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I was going to make further posts on Trump and Russia, but the first leaks from Woodward's book have lead me to a detour

When Donald Trump made his first run for President in 2012, I had no idea he had anything to do with Russia.  I did not know his entire business career was based on fraud, although I may have suspected it at some level. I had no idea what his position on any issue was (other than birtherism) and took for granted that he had none.  I regarded him a sort of a male Paris Hilton -- a playboy, mostly harmless, but absolutely useless, and an obvious disaster as President.

My reasons for being horrified at the thought of Trump as President had nothing to do with ideology or any particular issue.  They were simple.  The man was nothing but so much hot air.  He knew nothing whatever about any issue and showed no sign of being willing or able to learn.  He wouldn't know political or moral principle if it punched him in the nose.  He had the attention span and impulse control of a small child.  He had no concept of the public good as apart for his own private interests and, if elected, could be expected to regard the federal government as his own private property.   He as an obvious authoritarian with no regard for the rule of law.   Ross Perot inspired jokes about how shocked he would be when if found out the President could not fire Congress.  Trump was so ignorant and so authoritarian that such things would not be jokes.  But above all else, he was the sort of person who in case of crisis you would want his staff to handcuff him, stuff something in his mouth, and lock him in a closet until it blew over.

And yet here he is as President and nothing catastrophic has happened yet, except in Puerto Rico.  The upshot of Woodward's shocking but not surprising book is that the reason is that his staff has restrained him.  They have not gone so far as to physically restrain him (yet), but they have regularly stolen papers or engaged in delays or distractions in hopes that he would forget about the original insane project, and flat-out disobedience.  Examples included:

• Withdrawing from the US-South Korea free trade pact (stolen paper)
• Withdrawing troops from South Korea (discussions)
• Invading Venezuela (numerous cases of talking him down)
• Starting a trade war with China (delays by Gary Cohn, begun now, after Cohn left)
• Cutting off all aid to Pakistan (discrete undermining)
• Large-scale intervention in Syria (a cross between disobedience and talking him down)
• Withdrawal from NAFTA (another stolen paper)
• Preemptive war against North Korea (at least discussed)

Giving credit where it is due, Trump's stopped clock has occasionally been right.  Trump is impatient with the never-ending war in Afghanistan.  And he recognized that his war of words with North Korea's Kim Jong-un was a man-to-man showdown and would not escalate.  But the general impression is that we have avoided disaster because Trump's advisers have overruled their boss.

The New York Times anonymous editorial by an unnamed official described the general atmosphere, but is short on specifics.  It says both that "We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous," and also that "[T]he president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic."  So the author wants Trump to succeed and thinks that his policies have made America "safer and more prosperous," but that he is nonetheless "detrimental to the health of the republic"?  The answer appears to be that the Administration has brought about "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more," but that Trump's style makes it really difficult to get any of this done.  As for specific actions in which the White House staff has thwarted their boss, the author mentions sanctions on Russia and expelling Russian diplomats.

This confirms the general impression in the other articles -- that Trump's staff have been thwarting him primarily in foreign policy and secondarily in foreign trade.  If he has been thwarted in domestic policy, it has been by the failure to pass legislation in Congress (such as the repeal of Obamacare).  But on the whole staffers are not interfering with Trump's domestic policy -- probably because they agree with it.

Seriously, What Do Republicans Think We Should Have Done?

Republicans seem unanimously of the view that the Deep State definitely should not have opened a counter-intelligence investigation of Trump and Russia during the election.  They point out (correctly) that investigating a candidate for office, especially for Presidency, is an extremely sensitive topic, and that there have been serious abuses in that regard, culminating with the Watergate break-in.

But pointing out that investigation of a political opponent is a sensitive topic is one thing.  Concluding that it should therefore never be done no matter what the evidence is quite another.

And consider the evidence the Intelligence Community was looking at.  (Here let us grant (1) a lot of things are public knowledge now that the Intelligence Community did not know at the time and (2) the Intelligence Community knew (and knows) a lot that is still not public knowledge.  But let's go by what we know they knew).

They knew the Russians had hacked the DNC server and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.  At a minimum, they knew this because the FBI and two cyber security firms examined the hack and traced it back to Russian intelligence.  And to judge from the degree of detail in the Mueller indictment, there may have been other sources as well.

They knew that Wikileaks, an organization at least suspected of ties to Russia, was releasing the hacked material in a manner calculated to cause maximum damage.  The Mueller indictment  (paragraph 47) identifies the precise e-mail in which the Russians conveyed this information to Wikileaks. 

They apparently had a source inside the Kremlin that confirmed that Vladimir Putin was directly behind the hack.  (And, I recall but have not found a link, that the purpose was to sway the election for Trump).

They knew Trump was a Putin cheerleader.  Trump ran an openly pro-Russia campaign and, despite seemingly having no concept of a mutually beneficial relationship, somehow managed to make an exception for Russia.  He regularly quoted talking points from Russian propaganda sources.

They knew the Trump campaign had members with suspicious Russia ties.  Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser, had extensive business ties to Russia, strongly pro-Russian views, and had once been targeted for recruitment as a Russian spy.  During the campaign he traveled to Moscow and made a pro-Russia public speech.  Paul Manafort, who served several months as campaign director, was an adviser and propagandist for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine.  Michael Flynn, a major foreign policy adviser who Trump even considered for Vice President, was a semi-regular commentator for Russia Today  who did a photo op with Putin.

They knew that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted about being approached by Russian assets who offered him "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of e-mails.

Finally, and most controversially, there are unconfirmed reports that allied intelligence agencies, in the course of routine surveillance of Russian communications, kept picking up suspicious contacts with the Trump team:

It is understood that GCHQ [Government Central Headquarters, the British intelligence] was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.

To the best of my knowledge, mainstream Republicans do not dispute most of these points.  The Russian hack and release to Wikileaks are disputed by some in the crazy conspiracy fringe, but not the mainstream.  Trump's pro-Russian stance and advisers with Russian ties are matters of public record beyond dispute.  And Papadopoulos appears to have admitted to his drunken boast.

That leaves the purported spy in the Kremlin and the reports from allied intelligence of contacts between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.  These are more nebulous matters, highly secret information that necessarily cannot be disclosed and therefore is easy to dispute and hard to confirm. 

Even so, we have the Russian government hacking into the e-mails of one party and campaign chair and arranging the release of the materials in a manner calculated to do maximum harm.  And we have the other candidate showing a general hostility to all other countries except Russia and running a team with at least three members who had extraordinary Russia ties.  And a member (admittedly not high level) who was contacted by Russian agents and offered "dirt" on the other candidate.

Granted, all of these things could have been unrelated.  On the other hand, there is that alarming but real possibility that they might be related.  And wouldn't one want the Intelligence Community to find out whether these things were related or not?  To which Republicans answer no, Trump was running for President, so any investigation was simply too politically sensitive to be done.

So, if their view is to be taken seriously, running for President should be taken as an immunity, not only from prosecution, but even from investigation.  Except for the obvious.  Republicans did not extend any such immunity to Hillary Clinton.  Quite the contrary, the Republican (or at least Trumpite) consensus on Hillary was that she should not only be investigated, but that any investigation that did not terminate in prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment was obviously rigged in her favor.

Admittedly, once can reconcile these two views.  Incumbent Presidents can hardly be suspected of abusing their power investigating their preferred successor, so investigation of a candidate of the President's party is fine.*  But an opposing candidate is above the law, and the Deep State must turn a blind eye to any developments, no matter how alarming.  Or, as this article comments:

Trump’s position, and the consensus position of the conservative movement, is that, having become aware of a foreign intelligence service’s successful efforts to infiltrate a major party presidential campaign, the FBI should have done nothing about it, because the campaign in question happened to be a Republican one.

And if that is your view, it raises serious questions about how far this principle should go.  If candidate Trump shot someone in front of Washington Monument** should that, too, go uninvestigated? 

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*Presumably this would not apply to a primary opponent.

**If he had committed murder in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it would have been a matter under New York law, so the feds would not have been involved.