Ugly Talk, Uglier Actions

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly:  Okay, forget about the good, yesterday was mostly about the ugly.  In response to Nancy and Chuck’s comments about his Oval Office outburst and Pelosi’s comments about him being a “stable genius” in need of a family intervention, Trump went into full attack mode, only this time his target wasn’t Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or any of the other too numerous to name Democratic presidential candidates, it was Speaker Pelosi.  First, he lined up a number of his staff members and had each one of them including such notables as Kellyanne Conway, Larry Kudlow and Press Secretary Sanders swear that he’d been calm as a cucumber during the aforementioned Oval Room hissy fit.  He even had Hogan Gidley attest to his sanity, notable because Gidley wasn’t even present at the meeting in question.  Niceties aside,  Trump then went on to  pounce on Pelosi’s stammer calling it out as evidence of her mental decline.  To be fair, Pelosi does stammer but let’s be real here, someone who has been called out by his own Secretary of State for being a moron, whose vocabulary includes mostly mispronounced single syllable words, whose handwritten notes included the word “achomlishments” and who himself appears to be mentally diminished really should stay away from commenting on others’ mental acuity, especially when that other person is, like her or not, the shrewdest and most powerful woman in the country.  Pelosi is a favorite Republican target so she’s used to being slammed but Trump’s use of a doctored video to make it appear that she was inebriated rather than just tongue tied represents a new low, even for him.  In any case, Pelosi appears to be handling the situation in stride, with or without a stammer, her criticisms of Trump and his behavior appear to be hitting home and as a number of people have pointed out, the mother of five and grandmother of eight knows how to deal with whiny, obnoxious babies, big and small.  On the good side, because there always has to be something good, the Senate finally passed disaster relief legislation.  The bill doesn’t include any of that extra border money that Trump wanted but does including the funding for Puerto Rico that he said he would oppose. Trump who earlier in the week said that he’s not going to agree to anymore legislation until Nancy stops the “witch hunt” says he’ll sign it when it gets to his desk.  He’s also in the process of signing away $16 billion in aid to farmers to compensate them for the losses they’re suffering from those tariffs on Chinese goods, the ones costing each and every American household about $831, not to mention the added impact they’re having on the stock markets.  

Coyote Ugly: With the exception of former Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson, most people really hate Julian Assange.  He’s scuzzy, being investigated for rape by Swedish authorities and his alliance with the Russians, the one that facilitated the publication of the Democratic National Committee emails on his WikiLeaks platform may well have led to Trump’s presidency.  So in April when it was revealed that he’d been indicted in absentia by US authorities for trying to help one time US soldier Chelsea Manning  crack a password for a computer storing sensitive government files most people yawned because helping crack passwords is not considered something that a journalist is supposed to  do.  However, people, or at least most of the free press aren’t yawning now.  Yesterday, US authorities amended the Assange indictment adding 17 counts of violating the rarely used Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010.  Mainstream journalists are concerned that going after Assange for publishing secret information is the opening salvo in a war against them because “the charges rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day,” and can be seen as a “frontal attack on press freedom” by an administration led by a president who attacks the press daily and has even gone so far as to suggest that his critics are treasonous purveyors of “fake news” who should all be jailed or worse.  Notably, the Obama administration debated going after Assange using the Espionage Act but ultimately did not because of the implications for press freedoms.  For now Assange remains in the UK, its not clear whether authorities there will extradite him to the US, they may find the new charges a step too far for them, and in any case Assange might end up first in Sweden facing those rape accusations.  Because targeting press freedom wasn’t enough for one day, last night Trump ramped up his battle against the investigators who initiated what he likes to call that “witch hunt.”  He signed an order giving Attorney General Barr “sweeping new authorities to conduct a review into how the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were investigated, significantly escalating the administration’s efforts to place those who investigated the campaign under scrutiny.” Trump order the CIA and all the country’s other intelligence agencies to cooperate with the review and granted Barr the authority to unilaterally declassify their documents.  In addition to giving Barr “immense leverage” over the entire intelligence community, Trump’s move also gives him “enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.” So Barr, who misrepresented the conclusions of the Mueller Report and who continues to sit on some of its content will now get to control everything the public sees.  The timing of the release of Trump’s pronouncement is not accidental.  The FBI Inspector General is due to release his report on the use of FISA warrants, a report that Trump’s spokes piece Sean Hannity has already “promised” will be “devastating” which could be typical Hannity hyperbole or could contain a kernel of truth, one that Barr will get to manipulate and exaggerate to his heart’s content.  Oh and yesterday, Trump called the actions of those two sexting FBI agents, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, treasonous, possibly even deserving of the death penalty.       

The Ugly Truth:  Yesterday Stephen Calk, the former CEO of Federal Savings Bank of Chicago was indicted for trying to leverage an inexplicably large loan to one time Trump campaign manager, current jailbird Paul Manafort into a very senior role in the Trump administration.  The indictment references a “Transition Official-1,” who appears to be none other than Jared Kushner, the chief Middle East peacemaker, who was the person who received and then forwarded on the recommendation from Paul Manafort that Calk be considered for one or more high positions.  In any case, the news about Calk isn’t all that surprising, we learned about the accusations against him and about Kushner’s small but probably not all that criminal role earlier as a result of Mueller’s investigation into all things Manafort.  As to Robert Mueller, last night House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler confirmed what has been earlier reported, that negotiations to get him to appear in front of the Judiciary committee are ongoing.  No date has been set largely because Mueller’s representatives say that though he’s willing to making an introductory statement in a public setting, he wants the rest of his testimony to be behind closed doors which kind of defeats the purpose of having him testify in the first place because the whole point is to get the widest audience possible hearing those damning things that he uncovered.  Former Trump Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is speaking and has been getting a few things off of his chest, he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Putin was more prepared for his meetings with Trump than Trump was because unlike Trump he actually prepared for those meetings. That “discrepancy” in preparation “created an unequal footing” for their talks.  Trump of course has a retort for that, he tweeted “Rex Tillerson, a man who is “dumb as a rock” and totally ill prepared and ill equipped to be Secretary of State, made up a story (he got fired) that I was out-prepared by Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Hamburg, Germany. I don’t think Putin would agree. Look how the U.S. is doing!”  It’s doubtful that Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon, is all that dumb and at least he, unlike Trump, can spell and has many “accomplishments.” Lastly, this morning UK Prime Minster Theresa May announced that she is stepping down.  Someone else is going to have to deal with that whole Brexit thing. Good luck with that.

Enjoy the Memorial Day holiday.