Reverse Agnew

Bagman:  Spiro Agnew got into bigly trouble and was ultimately forced out of office for accepting payoffs from favor seekers while serving as Richard Nixon’s Vice President, a practice he brought with him from his days as the Governor of Maryland.  (If you haven’t already, check out Rachel Maddow’s brilliant, funny and very topical pod cast series on his downfall.)  Agnew actually received bags of cash while he was physically in the White House.  As far as we know no one has delivered any bags of cash to Trump’s Oval Office, however we now know for certain that he’s been pulling a reverse Agnew.  While conducting his daily duties, the things he does when he isn’t busy watching Fox News and tweeting, he also wrote numerous checks to lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen, reimbursing him for the hush payment that he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. During last week’s testimony to the Oversight Committee Cohen stated that Trump promised at least one of those checks would be forthcoming when the two met in the Oval Office shortly after the inauguration. Last week  Cohen brought one of the checks with him to corroborate his testimony. Although he’s still missing a few hard copies, he’s now dug up seven more of them.  All together seven of the checks were for $35,000, one was for $70,000.  Six were signed by Trump after he took office, the other two were signed by son Don Jr and Trump organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. Yesterday during his return trip to the House Intelligence Committee Cohen brought evidence corroborating another one of his claims.  That evidence came in the form of marked-up drafts of the testimony that he delivered last year when he claimed that the negotiations for Trump Tower Moscow had ended well before they really ended, the statement that resulted in his perjury conviction.  Those drafts appear to substantiate Cohen’s claims that the Trump legal team was aware of what he planned to say and in fact had edited his statement. Notably at least one of those changes benefited Trump’s “honey” Ivanka, making it appear that she was less involved in the Moscow project than she really was, an indication that her lawyer Abbe Lowell saw and commented on the testimony.  Trump attorney Jay Sekulow’s previous statement that Cohen was lying when he testified that “attorneys for the president edited or changed his statement to Congress to alter the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations is completely false" doesn’t hold up well. He may have been technically right in that the Trump lawyers left the glaringly false Moscow negotiations part intact, but the drafts show that they clearly were involved in the drafting process and signed off on the final text. The party line now is that they were relying on information provided by their clients, more or less an admission that they were lied to. Cohen may have made at least one misleading comment during last week’s testimony when he said that he had no interest in getting a Trump pardon.  Apparently early on, when his joint defense agreement with Trump was still in place, he did direct his then lawyer to let the Trump team know that he was interested in talking about a pardon but those days are long behind him, once he “turned” and started cooperating with federal prosecutors he says he “changed his mind,” his current representative/lawyer Lanny Davis’ explanation for last week’s statement.  As to that whole pardon thing, all the facts behind it are still somewhat murky.  Yesterday ABC News reported that two lawyers who represented themselves as having ties to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s current lawyer/fixer, approached Cohen after his office was raided but before he decided to plead guilty, it appears that they were dangling a delayed pardon, one that they said they could help him with through their relationship with Giuliani. That appears to be one of the things that is still being investigated by the Southern District of New York prosecutors.  Giuliani’s comments on the subject are, as expected, somewhat vague to say the least. With regard to liars and lying, when asked by Quinnipiac University pollsters whom they believe more, 50 percent of the voters surveyed picked Cohen while 35 percent chose Trump.  As to Trump, Bloomberg News has caught him, or at least Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in another bigly lie. Despite her assertion that he wasn’t involved in the planning of the inauguration, Bloomberg reports that Trump micromanaged the process, focusing on things like whether or not the Rockettes would show up as planned (they did), the selection of table cloths to cover what he viewed as tacky leather table tops and the costs of all inaugural services.  In an effort to extricate himself from any of the controversies and possible illegalities surounding the inauguration, Tom Barrack, the billionaire Trump supporter who served as Chair of the Inauguration festivities and financing, is now being very forthcoming with investigators.

Dog Cages:  Yesterday Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security.  Suffice it to say, it wasn’t one of her better moments.  Among other things she insisted that the cages used to house migrant and asylum seeking children weren’t cages, instead she engaged in doublespeak calling them areas “carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed.” When asked how the cages differ from the cages you put your dogs in, Nielsen responded that they were “larger, it has facilities, it provides room to sit, to stand, to lay down.”  The querying Congresswoman glared back, responding that her dog’s crate did too.  Nielsen who repeatedly refused to answer any yes or no question with a simple yes or no, also claimed that “there was no parent who has been deported to my knowledge without multiple opportunities to take their children with them.” Following the hearing, the administration admitted to the ACLU that it had identified 471 parents who were removed from the US without their children and “without being given the opportunity to elect or waive reunification.” It’s fair to say that Nielsen is either a liar, woefully incompetent or both.

Other News:  Yesterday the Senate confirmed Chad Readler to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the 6^th District by a vote of 52 to 47, Arizona’s Democratic Senator Sinema did not vote since she’s currently on her New Zealand Triathlon vacation.  While serving in the Justice Department’s Civil Division,  instead of defending the Affordable Care Act, Readler filed a brief in support of a lawsuit filed by several  Republican Attorneys General aimed at gutting it and the pre-existing coverage requirement.  Only Senator Susan Collins crossed the aisle to join all the Democratic Senators in voting against Readler’s nomination; so much for consistency from Senator Lisa Murkowski.  The Democrats are still tied up in knots over Congresswoman Ilhan and her anti-Semitic comments.   Apparently we’ve gotten to a place where hate speech is tolerable as long as it hides behind disapproval of Israeli politics and targets Jews.