Merry, Marry and Maria

Hopeless:  Former Communications Director/Gal Friday Hope Hicks testified in front of a closed door session of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. She strutted into the hearing room accessorized with dark sunglasses, lots of make-up and her very own White House lawyer who was there to make sure that she didn’t violate Trump’s overly broad assertion of executive privilege by responding to questions about anything she’d heard, seen or participated in during the transition period after the 2016 election and during her days in the White House.  Though she was grilled for seven hours, reports are that she refused to answer far too many questions, wouldn’t say anything about the Comey firing, calls/meetings with Russians  and wouldn’t even reveal the location of her office, which everyone knows was within whispering distance of the Oval Office.  Democrats assert that Trump’s broad immunity assertion was made up, accusing the White House of trying to stonewall their investigations and are now expected to go to court to force Hicks to be more forthcoming and to force former White House Counsel Don McGahn, who has so far refused to even honor his subpoena, to show up to testify.  Although there’s a good chance that they will win in court, the process is likely to be time consuming which is of course what Trump wants, to stall as much as possible until after the 2020 election.  When asked about Hicks’s performance, or lack thereof, Speaker Pelosi said only “Obstruction of Justice” as she hurried off to her next meeting.  Last night Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a member of  Pelosi’s leadership team, announced that she has now joined the impeachment bandwagon.  Though she said that it was a personal decision, it’s hard to believe that she would cross Pelosi. The House pro-impeachment count is now up to around 70.      

Enough Said:  Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been getting skewered by a number of Republicans, most notably Wyoming’s Liz Cheney for using the term concentration camp to describe the migrant detainment centers.  While her reference is a stretch, the term concentration camp predates the Nazi horror and not all concentration camps were death camps.  In any case, if the best thing you can say about detention centers for thousands of young children, men, and women is that calling them concentration camps is another example of Godwin’s law*, you probably aren’t doing the right thing.  Democratic candidates are rushing to support the concept of slavery reparations as a “path to restorative justice,” an idea that’s been discussed for a while.  It’s not clear what that would involve and how anything substantive could actually be implemented still Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s statement that reparations aren’t necessary because “we’ve passed civil rights legislation” and “we’ve elected an African American president” seems just a bit tone deaf, especially given the “fine people on both sides” guy in the White House who still insists that the Central Park Five are guilty and whose campaign launch rally was just attended by a contingent of white supremacist Proud Boys, the modern day equivalent of the KKK.  Lastly, former VP Joe Biden is getting slammed for some remarks he made at a recent fund raiser. Meaning to make the point that to get legislation passed you have to reach across the aisle, he used the example of having worked in the past with some segregationist Senators. To be clear, he didn’t say that he ever condoned their views but judging by the reaction from the his Democratic presidential opponents, you’d think he had.  One of the downfalls of leading the pack is that your opponents, especially those polling around 1% are eager to pull out the knives to take you down.  That may also explain why Bernie Sanders is now calling Elizabeth Warren, who appears to be gaining traction at his expense, horror of horrors, a centrist.   

WTF: Last night the Washington Post reported that Andrea Thompson, now the State Department official in charge of arms negotiation with Moscow, and her husband had a long term relationship with Russian agent of influence Maria Butina’s boyfriend/ Republican operative Paul Erikson.  They were so close that Erikson officiated at their wedding bringing along Butina as his plus one.  The wedding took place when Thompson was “just” a national security advisor to VP Pence.  Thompson failed to disclose her husband’s ties to Erikson, ties that also involved him “investing” $100,000 in Erikson’s dubious business,  during her security reviews. As one senior administration told WaPo  “When the person who marries you gets into trouble with the Russians and your job is to negotiate with the Russians, you have to disclose that, everybody with an intelligence clearance knows that.”  It’s fair to assume that we will soon learn that Thompson is leaving the administration to spend more time with her family.  As to family ties, it looks like Deutsche Bank, the Trump and Kushner family lending institution of choice is facing some problems of their own.  The NY Times reports that the bank is under investigation for potential criminal money laundering lapses.  In turns out the bank’s problems may extend far beyond mishandling a few Kushner “suspicious activity reports.” In addition to the FBI, the Justice Department’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section in Washington and the US attorney’s offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn are involved in the investigations.         

Winds of War:  Members of the Trump team are promoting the narrative that Iran is involved with Al Qaeda terrorists, an echo of the Bush administration’s pretext for the invasion of Iraq.  They are trying to make a convincing case, not because there are substantive ties, but because saying so would allow them to use the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed in the aftermath of 9.11 to justify going to war against Iran without seeking new congressional sign off.  For their part the Iranians continue to act out, this morning they shot down one of our drones, one that they claim, and we deny, was over their territorial waters.

*Godwin’s Law – as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.