Good Morning Joe

Number Twenty:  Joe Biden is running, the twentieth Democratic candidate to announce but the one that everyone has been waiting for, the race is now officially on.  He announced this morning with a powerful video in which he slammed Trump for his “fine people on both sides” reaction to the Nazis and white supremacists who marched through Charlottesville while saying that “Trump’s first term will be regarded by history as an aberrant moment in time” warning that four more years (aargh) would “forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are.”  Though he didn’t endorse him,  Obama sent out a message of support, the first time that the former president has spoken out for any of this cycle’s Democratic aspirants.  Biden may have already lined up some union endorsements, expect to hear about that soon, and also expect to hear a number of his critics, a good portion of whom will be his competitor’s surrogates criticize his past not “progressive enough for these times” policies and question his fund raising abilities.  In other words, now that Biden’s in, the real fight for the hearts and minds of the Democratic base is on and Bernie most of all is not going to take his presence lying down.  As to Bernie, he and a number of other Democratic candidates including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke spoke to a largely minority women audience at the She the People Forum in Texas yesterday.  Reactions indicate that the crowd was most impressed by Warren, with Harris also winning a lot of accolades but that Bernie’s shtick didn’t go over all that well, notable because energizing Black women voters, who consistently have higher voter participation rates than any other group, will be essential for winning both the nomination and the general election.   

Stonewalling:  Trump is officially in stonewall mode.  Yesterday, he told reporters that “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” because “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.”  Following those remarks the Justice Department announced that John Gore, a civil rights division official would “defy” a subpoena to testify about the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census ostensibly, something currently being considered by the Supreme Court, because the House Oversight Committee told him that though he could bring a private attorney to the hearing he wouldn’t be allowed to bring along a Justice Department lawyer but really because the White House has decided that they don’t want him or anyone else testifying. Under the direction of the White House, Carl Kline, the former head of White House personnel security, has already ignored a subpoena ordering him to appear for a deposition about overriding recommendations to deny security clearances for people like Jared and Ivanka. It’s growing increasingly clear that the official White House strategy is to force House Democrats to fight tooth and nail in the courts, over each and every one of these subpoenas, in the hopes of pushing as much testimony as possible off to some far away future date.  In most cases the Democrats would eventually win in court but by the time they do, no one would care and/or Trump would have won reelection.  This White House strategy could push Democratic leadership to move forward with impeachment proceedings sooner rather than later even though they would prefer for the TV viewing public to see more Trump administration officials talk about all those “bat sh-t crazy” things that Trump pushed them to do before going the impeachment route.  For their part Trump and his advisors believe that pushing the Democrats to pull the impeachment trigger now will play into their hands by allowing them to argue that those Democrats are just a bunch of sore losers who don’t want to advance legislation they just want to tarnish and unseat Trump. To that end yesterday Trump tweeted  “I DID NOTHING WRONG. If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only are there no “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” there are no Crimes by me at all. All of the Crimes were committed by Crooked Hillary, the Dems, the DNC and Dirty Cops - and we caught them in the act! We waited for Mueller and WON, so now the Dems look to Congress as last hope!”  Not surprisingly, Trump’s tweet shows a misunderstanding of the Constitution, impeachment proceedings are the responsibility of Congress, not the courts. However, his base and core twitter followers knows or care little about that crucial detail. Anyway, in an effort to look like he has any legislative plans, Trump plans to meet with Nancy and Chuck to discuss, infrastructure funding because when all else fails it’s time for another Infrastructure Week.  Trump may also want another infrastructure discussion to distract from what’s going on elsewhere, particularly in NY State, where its reported that despite Trump Inc. pushback  Deutsche Bank has started releasing some of the Trump financial records to state regulators.   

Cybersecurity:  Homeland Security is responsible for much more than protecting the southern border from those waves of marauding migrants.  The department is also responsible for cybersecurity and maintaining the integrity of the election infrastructure but those are functions that Trump doesn’t like to hear about largely because he views any references to election interference as an attack on the legitimacy of his 2016 victory.  The New York Times reports that concerned about what she saw going into the 2018 midterms, former Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen tried to get the White House to focus on preparing for Russia's efforts to influence the 2020 election but was told by Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney not to bring her concerns up with Trump.  He told her it "wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.”  Mulvaney doesn’t deny the truth of the Times report, instead he says that he doesn’t “remember” saying that.  Notably though Trump was quick to trumpet that Special Counsel Mueller found “NO COLLUSION,” he still hasn’t had a word to say about all of the things that Mueller revealed about the Russian’s 2016 election interference activities. Yesterday, taking a page from Trump’s book, VP Pence refused to directly respond to a  question about whether he regretted the campaign’s use of hacked emails in 2016 and whether he would pledge not to do so again, instead he repeated that the Mueller report found NO COLLUSION between the campaign and Russia.  All the Democratic candidates have gone on record with a cybersecurity pledge, promising  not to use any hacked or stolen date in their campaigns but then again they aren’t being advised by Rudy Giuliani who is on record saying that taking information from a hostile foreign government is a totally okay thing to do.  No doubt the Russians are watching and know Trump and Rudy’s position.  Another uneven playing field?