Zombie Purge

The Morning Joe Feud:  Friday morning Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough revealed that their feud with Trump has been going on for a while ever since they began making negative comments about his presidency.  Joe disclosed that after the National Enquirer started stalking Mika and her children, threatening to publish a negative story about Mika and Joe’s relationship, a senior White House aide, later identified as son-in-law Jared, called him and said that if he apologized to Trump for their ongoing criticism he would get his buddies at the National Enquirer to spike the story.  Joe didn’t apologize and the not very nice story ran in early June.  Immediately after Joe made this accusation, Trump, who was watching Morning Joe despite his claim that he never watches the “low rated” show, responded by tweeting his version of the National Enquirer story, the one where Joe initiated several calls requesting his help.  Joe, a graduate of the Jim Comey school of memo writing, has records of his White House calls and had kept MSNBC management in the loop throughout the process.  Threatening and intimidating correspondents to get better coverage is a definite no-no. This round goes to Mika and Joe.     

Election Integrity Commission:  Trump continues to refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election popular vote and is still trying to locate those three to five million fraudulent voters who all voted for Hillary Clinton. On Wednesday, his voter fraud commission, headed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Vice President Pence, sent a notice to every state requesting voter roll data, including full names of all registered votes, addresses, dates of birth, the last four digits of their social security numbers, voting history, party registration, record of felony convictions, driver’s license records, military records, and other personal information.  Like Trump and Attorney General Sessions, Kobach, an advocate of strict voter ID laws who the ACLU calls the king of voter suppression, believes that there are millions of non-citizens, dead people and zombies illegally voting across the country and that that they only vote for Democrats.  He wants to create a national database so that he can scrub the voter rolls, purging as many minorities and other likely Democratic voters, as possible.  So far a bipartisan group of governors and voting officials from twenty-five states is refusing to provide the requested information with the list of refusers expected to grow once the other twenty-five states read their letters. Mississippi’s Republican Secretary of State said that “they can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a place to launch from.”  California’s Democratic Secretary of State said he ”can’t even begin to entertain responding” to the request. The Secretary of State from Indiana, Pence’s home state, who is on the commission said that she will only provide some of the requested information. Governor Cuomo said that New York will not be complying since he refuses to “perpetuate the myth voter fraud played a role in our election,” and Kobach’s own state said that Kansas law prevents turning over even partial social security numbers.  Ironically, one of the things that protects the US electoral system from hacking is that it is decentralized and that no one has a single definitive list of voters.  In addition to advancing voter suppression and intimidation, creating a national database would benefit Putin and his ambitions to disrupt the democratic process.  Then again, Trump still hasn’t acknowledged Putin’s actions and still hasn’t developed a plan to protect future US elections, unless purging Democrats from the voter rolls is his idea of a plan.  Trump gets another opportunity to bring up election interference when he meets with Putin at next week’s G-20 meeting, but as of now he hasn’t decided what he will discuss at the crucial meeting.  According to security adviser McMaster, Trump plans to just “wing it.” McMaster is usually cool as a cucumber but even he is sweating.

Health Care is Complicated:  Friday morning, after Republican Senator Ben Sasse told Fox and Friends that he thought that the Senate should dump the Trumpcare plan and just repeal Obamacare, Trump jumped on the bandwagon by tweeting “If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL and then REPLACE at a later date!”  Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare countless times while Obama was president but now that they are in power, most of them recognize that it would be political suicide to kill Obamacare without providing an immediate replacement and only fifteen or so Senators would vote to repeal without an alternative in place.  Moreover, due to Senate parliamentary rules it would be technically difficult, if not impossible, to repeal the entire Obamacare program through reconciliation and it would be virtually impossible to find the sixty votes required to pass an entirely new plan through ordinary procedures.  McConnell, who is still working on gaining the votes for his Trumpcare plan, knows this and refrained from publicly commenting on Trump’s tweet.  Privately he is probably seething.  Just one day after his Mika attack diminished his clout over wayward Senators, Trump has thrown another wrench into McConnell’s process.   

More on Peter Smith’s Email Search:  The Wall Street Journal is trying hard to catch up to the Washington Post and New York Times. Thursday the Journal reported that Peter Smith, a former banker and opposition researcher, sought Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, implying that he was working with Mike Flynn who was then Trump’s close adviser.  Last night the Journal added a few more details to the story.  In addition to Flynn, Smith identified Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Sam Clovis, an advisor to Trump’s campaign and now a senior advisor in the Agriculture Department, in a recruitment document he prepared as part of his efforts to track down the emails. The Trump team names were prominently listed on the cover of what he shared with a British cyber security expert who considered but ultimately decided not to join Smith’s email search team. Smith wrote his document six weeks after Trump called for the Russians to find the Clinton emails at one of his campaign rallys. Bannon denies knowing Smith, Conway says that she knew him but hadn’t seen him for years.  Flynn, Clovis and the White House did not respond to the Journal’s request for comments. At this point the connection to the Trump team is tenuous, but the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal is hardly an advocate of anti-Trump conspiracy theories so Smith’s story cannot be ignored.