Pardon Politics

Pardon Me Too:  Trump isn’t even trying to be subtle.  Yesterday, he pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a right wing troll  best known for posting racist tweets about Barack Obama, for spreading the lie that financier George Soros was a Nazi collaborator, the same lie that Roseanne Barr tweeted this week, and for defending slavery by writing that “the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”  D’Souza had previously pleaded guilty to making a series of illegal campaign contributions.  Trump also indicated that he is seriously considering pardoning Martha Stewart, who was imprisoned for lying about insider trading, and Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois Governor who is currently in prison for bribery. Trump has already pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio who had been found guilty of contempt and Scooter Libby, the Bush era aide who had obstructed justice.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what Trump is up to, he’s clearly sending not so subtle messages to his embattled aides and cronies, most obviously Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, telling them to hold firm and not to worry, good ole Donald J Trump has your back.  Its fair to assume that he is also winking at Mike Flynn, asking him to stop cooperating and alerting others like Roger Stone, Hope Hicks and the myriad of other aides who are facing pressure to cooperate in the Russia probe to clam up too.  As if that’s not enough, Trump is also using his pardon power to thumb his nose at his foes.  Former FBI Director Comey prosecuted Martha Stewart when he was a US Attorney and was responsible for appointing Patrick Fitzgerald as the special counsel who prosecuted Scooter Libby.  Fitzgerald, who is currently representing Comey, was also the US Attorney responsible for prosecuting Blagojevich.  And to further complicate things, Preet Bharara the outspoken former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York who Trump fired after assuring him his job was safe, was responsible for prosecuting D’Souza.  Proving that he fits right in with the Trump way of thinking D’Souza responded to his pardon by tweet trolling Bharara saying “KARMA IS A BITCH DEPT: @PreetBharara wanted to destroy a fellow Indian American to advance his career. Then he got fired & I got pardoned.”   As to karma, Roseanne Barr might be feeling just a little bit better today too.  Though she is still out of a job and the White House hasn’t come to her defense, Sarah Huckabee Sanders did go after liberal comedienne Samantha Bee for her tasteless and, given the timing, tone deaf, use of the C-word in her otherwise spot on critique of Ivanka Trump who posted a picture of herself hugging one of her children on the same day that the news broke about all of the immigrant children being torn from their mothers’ arms.  As to that Russia investigation, the thing that inspires Trump’s targeted pardoning, it turns out that a series of those talkative White House sources report that he’s tried to convince Attorney General Sessions to “unrecuse” himself at least four times, just another one of those things that supports the obstruction of justice case.  Joseph DiGenova the Fox TV lawyer that Trump previously hired for a minute before determining that he would be more valuable representing him from a Fox TV perch, justified Trump’s pressuring of Sessions by arguing that Sessions’ decision to recuse was “an unforced betrayal of the president of the United States who had appointed him….Sessions did not have to recuse himself. He could have supervised that investigation, stayed in touch with it, been aware of it.” Suffice it to say, few legal experts and no one in the Department of Justice ethics department agree with DiGenova on that.

Trading Tariffs:  It looks like Larry Kudlow, Trump’s newest economic advisor, is having as difficult a time as his predecessor Gary Cohn did in trying to tame Trump’s trade instincts.  Yesterday, Trump’s  Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that Trump's much desired tariffs, 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum, will go into effect on the European Union, Canada and Mexico.  The stock markets immediately dropped and the EU, Canada and Mexico responded by announcing plans to retaliate in kind.  Ross tried to downplay the ramping up of the trade war by saying that the tariffs were "blips on the radar screen" in the relationship between the US and EU,  the EU "will get over this in due course." Since the tariff announcements could be just another one of those Trumpian trade strategies, one that might end in some form of quotas or something else a bit less noxious, Ross could be right.  However the blips continue to pile up and added to Trump’s other actions, including his hostile talk and the dropping out of the Paris Climate accords and the Iran nuclear agreement, they count, bigly and are likely to come back to haunt when we need Europe’s support with a crisis or with another international agreement that suits US interests, like the one with North Korea.  On that front, Pompeo emerged early from his meetings with Kim Jong Un’s envoy to report that he “is confident that things are moving in the right direction,” whatever that means, but that the summit plans are not yet set.  Kim Jong Un’s envoy will be presenting Trump with a letter from the North Korean leader later today.  For his part Trump, who is finally recognizing that the North Korean situation won’t be resolved overnight, is now talking about a series of meetings played out over a longer period of time.  While Trump’s been publicly pontificating and pardoning and Pompeo has been engaged in meetings, Kim Jong Un has been keeping busy.  Yesterday he met with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov who made it clear that Russia has no plans to sit on the sideline, to that end he muddied the waters by going on record saying "As we start discussions on how to resolve the nuclear problem on the Korean Peninsula, it is understood that the solution cannot be comprehensive without the lifting of sanctions."  Further adding to world and trade challenges, Italy finally has a government, one that is made up of anti-Euro parties,  and Spain’s government is in the process of failing, their prime minister just lost a no confidence vote, an outcome that furthers destabilizes Southern Europe.  International relations and denuclearization are complicated.  Really complicated.  Whack a Mole anyone?