Help Me, I Need Wall!

Dialing 911:  The shutdown has been averted.  Both the House and Senate have passed the funding bill, the bill that provides only $1.375 billion for border slats or some other such structure, but specifically prohibits Trump from building  WALL.  Trump will sign the bill today but, before heading to Mar a Lago, he plans to transfer $600 million from the Treasury’s drug forfeiture fund and $2.5 billion from the Defense Department’s drug interdiction fund to his WALL funding pot by executive action and then to declare a national emergency so that he can justify transferring an additional $3.5 billion from the Defense Department’s construction fund giving him a total of $8 billion for his WALL folly. To be clear there is no emergency, the actual number of border crossings is down from previous year’s levels, and anyway an emergency is defined as a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action, not an orchestrated happening that a petulant man child rants about for months before actually taking action.  Nevertheless since Trump believes that declaring an emergency will stop shadow cabinet members Hannity, Dobbs, Coulter and Ingraham from squawking about his cowardly ineptitude and convince his base that he’s won the battle for WALL funding, he’s going the emergency declaration route.  The White House Counsel’s office has told him that it’s a high litigation risk strategy and they are right.  A number of states are expected to sue and Speaker Pelosi is expected to introduce and the House is expected to pass a resolution challenging the emergency declaration forcing the Senate to also vote on the issue.  A number of Republican senators, including the usual naysayers Senators Paul, Collins and Murkowski but also including a number of conservatives who are generally unhappy with executive overreach as well as those facing hotly contested elections in 2020 will probably join Democrats in voting in support of the resolution. In any case, if the resolution fails to obtain enough votes to withstand a Trump veto, Pelosi will sue in the courts. The bottom line is that there will be no WALL construction anytime soon, if ever. 

Another Tell All Book:  Embattled former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s book “The Threat. How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump” is due out momentarily and he has begun his obligatory book promotion tour. To no one’s surprise McCabe doesn’t have anything nice to say about Trump but what he has to say about former Attorney General Sessions is even worse.  McCabe says that Sessions did not read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in the newspaper.  “He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects.  He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness.” No wonder Trump picked Sessions and liked him so much before he hated him for recusing from the Russia investigation.  McCabe paints a picture of the Trump administration that makes prior claims of dysfunction look understated.  He also provides confirmation of earlier assertions that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein considered wearing a “wire” and that discussions of invoking the 25^th Amendment to get rid of Trump really did take place although no one actually canvassed any members of the cabinet or took any further action on that front.  Rosenstein’s office continues to deny that any of those conversations were serious although their denials ring hollow.   McCabe also confirms that he did open up an investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice as a way to preserve ongoing inquiries into Russia election interference in case there was an effort to terminate them, something he was concerned would happen if efforts were made to fire him and the other FBI officials who were all ultimately fired.  Immediately after teaser tapes of the McCabe interview that is scheduled to air Sunday night on 60 Minutes hit the airwaves yesterday, Trump emerged from his newly “refurbished” virtual White House golf range where he was working off some of the excess poundage that has thrown him into the obese category to tweet out a few of his usual anti-McCabe favorites, attacking the former FBI leader as a disgraced Clinton hack and a confirmed liar.  It looks like McCabe, who with Trump’s help already has a best seller on his hands, is hitting a little too close to home. Just one comment on Trump’s extra poundage, it is most certainly real but once again Trump has found a doctor willing to shave pounds, this year he is reported to weigh in at 243, clearly another Trumpian fabrication.  As to Attorneys General, Trump’s new one, Thomas Barr, was confirmed yesterday by a vote of 55 to 45.  Three Democrats, Senators Manchin of West Virginia, Jones of Alabama and Sinema of Arizona joined with all of the Republicans except Kentucky’s Senator Paul by voting yes for his confirmation.  Later in the day Barr was sworn in.  Although Barr implied that he might hide any final Special Prosecutor report, he promised to leave the Mueller investigation alone during his fairly contentious confirmation hearing.  However Matt Schlapp, the conservative activist and commentator whose wife Mercedes works in the White House Press Office, may have reason to believe otherwise.  Yesterday he tweeted “Tomorrow will be the first day that…Trump will have a fully operational confirmed Attorney General. Let that sink in. Mueller will be gone soon.”  Yikes.