Hearts and Guns

Smoke, Mirrors and Walls:  Late last night lawmakers put the final touches on the funding package, the one that provides only $1.375 billion for  a “border barrier,” less than Trump would have gotten had he signed last December’s funding bill and far less than the $20 billion that he would have gotten had he stood by last year’s very short promise to “Nancy and Chuck” that in exchange for lots of WALL he would protect the DACA recipients.  After a day of wrangling, two key provisions were left out of the funding bill, it doesn’t reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act nor does it include back pay for thousands of federal contractors who went unpaid during the shutdown.  Apparently, some Republican lawmakers had problems with the Violence Against Women Act because of changes that would have protected transgender people; of course they did.  And Trump has an issue with paying federal contractors; and why is that so surprising?  Absent a last minute change of mind or a really nasty phone call from one of his media “cabinet” members, Trump is expected to sign the bill before money runs out tonight, avoiding another government shutdown.  To get there, yesterday Trump spent part of his day calling around to some of those “cabinet” members including Fox’s Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs in an effort to get their sign off and to get them to stop trashing his deal making skills, or lack thereof.  He’s also doing his best to change the narrative, saying that the funding agreement is really a success because Nancy is giving him more than the $1 she said she’d never give him and because he’s getting so much for border security even if he can’t use those “additional” funds, funds that were never really in doubt, on WALL.  To help with his rebranding exercise, Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney is calling the barrier money just a down payment on the bigger WALL and is helping Trump identify other pools of money to be diverted from military related projects and hurricane relief towards additional WALL funding.  That strategy will end up in court, but in the meantime Trump, who probably cares less about actually building  WALL than convincing his base that he has built WALL, will tell his base it’s being built, and sadly they will probably believe him.  Problem solved, for now.   

Manafort’s Mess:  Earlier in the week Republican Senator Burr, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said that so far he’s seen no direct evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  Notice his emphasis on direct evidence, he pretty much avoided saying much about circumstantial evidence, and there appears to plenty of that out in the open especially when you consider that almost everyone in the Trump orbit has lied about their interactions with Russians and their discussions about sanctions relief.  Additionally it appears that neither Burr nor his committee have spent much time focusing on one time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s efforts to coordinate his and the campaign’s plans with his Russian associate/spy Konstantin Kilimnik.  Yesterday, Judy Amy Berman Jackson, the judge overseeing Manafort’s Washington DC case, agreed with Special Counsel Mueller’s assessment that Manafort had violated his cooperation agreement by lying about a few things including additional contacts that he had with Kilimnik, about a payment that was “routed through a pro-Trump political action committee to cover his legal bills, and about information relevant to another undisclosed investigation underway at the Justice Department.“  Last week it was reported that one of Manafort’s frequent Kilimnik interactions  involved an August 2, 2016 meeting that took place at Havana Room, a cigar bar located at 666 Fifth Avenue, coincidentally or not that the Kushner family’s highly leveraged building.   During that meeting, which also involved Manafort partner Rick Gates, who has been cooperating with Mueller, the three discussed a Russian friendly Ukraine peace plan, one that they hoped would lead to the lifting of sanctions against Russia.  Additionally, prosecutors believe that while they were puffing away Manafort gave Kilminik internal polling data from the Trump campaign.  When the meeting was over, the three men all slinked out separately, whether or not they were wearing trench coats has not been mentioned.   That meeting fits a little too nicely into the timeline of all those Trump friendly Russian actions and Russian friendly Trump statements that took place during the campaign, the actions that may well have led to Trump’s election victory which is probably why Mueller’s top prosecutor Andrew Weissman told the court that “the encounter goes very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.”  Whether or not direct evidence of Trump collusion exists, Manafort’s future is bleak, absent a pardon, he’ll be spending his remaining years in jail.  In other news, it’s likely that William Barr will be confirmed as Attorney General before the week is out despite concerns that he will limit the distribution of Mueller’s final report to the extent he ever delivers one.  Even though he’s on his way out, it appears that acting Attorney General, Matt Whitaker, is not off the hook yet.  Yesterday, Jerry Nadler the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee called him back to “clarify” the “unsatisfactory and incomplete” testimony that he provided last week.  Based on other information, Nadler believes that Whitaker was lying about conversations that he had with the White House about the Mueller investigation before he joined the Justice Department as well as whether or not Trump “expressed displeasure” with him about the Michael Cohen guilty plea.  Why does everyone associated with Trump lie so much about such stupid things?

One Year:  It’s been one year since the Valentine’s Day gun massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.  The surviving students and mourning parents have done a remarkable job rallying for gun control, a few gun restrictions have passed on the state level but nothing significant has been done on the federal level.  As evidenced by the tragedy at the Tree of Life Synagogue, the shooting sprees continue. Though their finances are somewhat diminished the NRA’s grip, mostly on Republican legislators, remains powerful.  Yesterday, after a considerable amount of “rancorous” partisan debate the House Judiciary Committee passed a measure that would require background checks for all gun sales and most gun transfers within the US, the most significant gun-control legislation to advance this far in years.  In a video that was quickly posted on the NRA’s twitter account, Republican Congressman Douglas Collins of George called the bill a “fraud” that “simply wants to get at your constitutional rights.” Assuming the bill gets enough votes to pass through the Democrat controlled House, it will probably die before making it through the Senate where Democratic Senators are currently pushing another bill focused on limiting high capacity magazines, a bill that has failed to pick up any Republican sponsors. Late last week the Supreme Court agreed to take up case involving a New York City gun law that bans carrying a licensed and unloaded handgun outside the city limits.  Given its increasingly conservative tilt, it’s quite possible that the Court will overturn the NY law because what we need is more people running around with guns.  Happy Valentine’s Day.