Impeachment Misdirection

Clean Up:  Even Donald Trump can’t fool some of his people all of the time.  Responding to desperate pleas from Republican leaders concerned that his tariff policy and Putin bromance are putting House and Senate majorities as well as their leadership positions in jeopardy, Trump spent part of yesterday trying to clean up his mess.  First,  he sent National Security Advisor Bolton out to announce that his second date with Putin, the date that Putin hadn’t yet agreed to, will be delayed.  Specifically Bolton said Trump “believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year."  It’s not entirely clear that Mueller’s “witch hunt” will be finished by next year, however postponing the Putin meeting removes the specter of another dreadful Helsinki like performance in the run up to the mid-term elections.   Later in the day Trump attempted to dispel fears about the escalating trade war by announcing that he and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had agreed to turn down the heat on their trade dispute, suggesting that they would push off further tariffs while they “talk through” their differences. Though he may have temporarily  calmed the waters with regard to his planned Putin meeting and European tariffs, Trump did nothing to ratchet down his war with the “fake media.”  Furious about the release of one of Michael Cohen’s tapes, the one where he was overheard conversing with his former lawyer/fixer about the payment made to squelch one time girlfriend Karen McDougal’s tell-all story, Trump ignored a CNN reporter’s questions about his reaction to the tape release and then arranged for her to be punished for having the nerve to do her job.  The reporter,  Kaitlan Collins, who had asked the questions while acting as the designated pool reporter during a photo op before the Juncker-Trump meeting was banned from attending a follow-up press availability in the Rose Garden.   A videotape of Collins’ “offensive” questioning showed that she hadn’t done or said anything inappropriate unless of course you consider the fact that she was asking questions about Cohen and was employed by CNN “inappropriate.”  As to CNN, apparently Trump hates them so much that he grew irate when he realized that Melania had her TV turned to CNN rather than Fox on their most recent flight home from Europe.  When asked about that, Melania’s spokesperson reported that she gets to watch whatever she wants.  Makes you wonder if that is another one of those things included in the post-nup agreement that she is rumored to have signed after the Access Hollywood tape fiasco.    

Pompeo Pomposity:  While Trump was trying to sweep up his mess ,  Secretary of State Pompeo was being grilled by  members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  For the most part the smirking Pompeo was evasive and combative.  When asked if he knew what had been discussed during the Trump’s private meeting with Putin, Pompeo said that he knew all he needed to know, leaving the impression that he, like the rest of us, had learned most of what he knows about the meeting from the Russian press.  He asserted that US policy remains the same as it was before the meeting and that’s all that matters.  Curiously while he said that no sanctions against Russia would be lifted, he mentioned that Putin and Trump had discussed the possibility of a business to business exchange between the two countries, something that would be difficult to implement given that many of Putin’s oligarchs are sanctioned.  With regard to Ukraine, he said that nothing had changed, that the two leaders had agreed to disagree.  Curiously, he also said that Trump had pushed Putin on election interference something that no one really believes given Trump’s controversial statement during the Helsinki press conference, the one where he said that he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies.   Pompeo also said that the government never had any plans to turnover any diplomats to the Kremlin for Russian grilling or at least no plans that he was aware of.  Finally, when asked if Trump had read anyone in the Defense Department into what he had agreed to during his Putin meeting, Pompeo pretty much admitted that he had no idea, saying that was a question that should be posed to one of the Generals.  Its worth noting that on Monday, after US General Joseph Votel, America’s top military commander in the Middle East, said that he had reservations about working with the Russians in Syria and had received no specific direction to cooperate with them,  Igor Konashenkov, a Russian spokesman rebuked him by saying that General Votel had “discredited” his “supreme commander-in-chief” Trump by failing to abide by Trump’s official position, a position that may or may not be known by the Russians but most certainly was never communicated to General Votel.  Democratic Senator Kaine did some trolling of his own, he read a  Buzzfeed article, one that detailed the chaos created at the Pentagon when it is kept out of the loop by the White House. Kaine read a list of headlines included within the article from news stories about the Pentagon being caught off guard by White House defense announcements on subjects from the cancelled Korean exercises to the changes in policies with regard to DACA recipients in the military and transgender soldiers. Kaine called the headlines “instructive.” Pompeo did not respond.  It wasn’t just Democrats giving Pompeo a hard time, several Republicans including Committee Chair Senator Corker called out Pompeo, and by extension Trump, saying to Pompeo “You come before a group of senators today who are filled with serious doubts about this White House and its conduct of American foreign policy,” Adding “It appears that in a ‘ready, fire, aim’ fashion, the White House is waking up every morning and making it up as they go.”  As to one of those made up strategies, Pompeo also refused to reveal much about his North Korea negotiations, the ones that aren’t proceeding as planned.  As to those DACA recipients serving in the military, in a positive move the House Appropriations Committee voted to bar funds from being used to deport any of them.    

Deadline Hijinks:  It’s deadline day, the day by which all of the remaining separated children are supposed to be reunited with their parents. The government represents that by the end of the day they will have met the court mandated reunification order.  However, to achieve that mandated requirement, officials are playing with numbers.  By the end of today they expect to reunite 1,637 parents with their children but have determined that another 914 of the parents are ineligible for reasons that aren’t always clear even to the government, officials admit that they are still evaluating those parents.  Of those parents, 463 have been deemed ineligible because they were deported before the Judge presiding over the reunifications put a halt to the deportation of anyone from the separated families.  At this point the government has no immediate plans to reunify those families. At first officials insisted that all of those parents had left willingly without their children, claiming that they had signed waivers agreeing to leave their children behind.  However, under pressure, officials now acknowledge that they have no evidence that  350 of the parents ever signed such a waiver and the ACLU says that it’s likely that many of the 103 parents who did sign waivers didn’t understand what they were signing or thought that signing the document was the only way that they would get their children back.  So much for meeting the Judge’s orders.  

Other News of Note:  Republican Congressmen Mark Meadows and the disgraced former wrestling coach Jim Jordan filed articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, Special Counsel Mueller’s boss.  They allege that he hasn’t responded to all of their document requests even though he has released far more highly sensitive documents than have ever been released in the past.  Meadows and Jordan, two of Trump’s most dedicated flunkies, do not have the full support of all of their Republican brethren, notably at least so far neither Speaker Ryan or even Trey Gowdy are on board, so its likely that at least for now the impeachment proceedings won’t go anywhere.  In any case, nothing will happen for a few more weeks since Congress is set to depart for a five week recess.  Still Meadows’ and Jordan’s action represents a significant escalation in the war to discredit Mueller and the whole Russian investigation, which they like Trump like to call the witch hunt. On another topic near and dear to Trump’s pocketbook, a Federal Judge in Maryland ruled that the emoluments lawsuit filed against him by the Attorneys General of Maryland and the District of Columbia can proceed.  The lawsuit alleges Trump is violating the Constitution by continuing to do business with foreign governments.  If the ruling stands, we should be able to get a look at some of those highly secret Trump business documents, and maybe, just maybe some of those tax returns, the ones that we haven’t been able to see because they are under continuous audit. Or so Trump says.