Dark Kool-Aid

Another Pleasant Day: Democratic leadership announced two articles of impeachment against Trump yesterday morning.  Keeping it simple they stuck with his Ukraine related crimes, arguing that Trump abused the power of the presidency by pressuring Ukraine to announce political investigations to benefit his reelection and that he obstructed congressional authority by ordering witnesses to defy subpoenas. They argue that he has to be impeached to prevent him from continuing to manipulate the electoral process. Though Democrats kept former special counsel Mueller’s conclusion regarding all of Trump’s other obstructions of justice out of it, Russia, a beneficiary of Trump’s Ukraine shenanigans, remains a lurking presence in the background of everything Trump does in the international arena, so the coincident visit of Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to the White House also garnered a lot of attention yesterday.  What president wouldn’t meet with a high Russian official on the day that his impeachment charges are being revealed?  It’s unusual for a foreign minister to get even one White House visit during the term of a presidency; this was Lavrov’s second visit, giving him two more Oval Office tete-a-tetes than the embattled Ukraine President Zelensky has gotten.  For the record, there is no major treaty or anything similar on the horizon that would justify the visit and anyway US presidents don’t generally make it a habit to grant foreign minister’s such meetings.  Apparently Lavrov just wanted to stop by, could be he had a message to deliver from Putin and knowing the porous state of White House security and not wanting to risk being overheard by another whistleblower, he decided that delivering it in person was best.  The White House asserted that Trump told Lavrov that Russia shouldn’t engage in any more election interference, as if he would ever do that. The wily Lavrov, who continues to deny that the Russians ever engaged in any such interference said that the subject never came up.  Given the choice, it’s difficult to know who to believe. 

On the believability front, Trump slammed his chosen FBI Director Christopher Wray for refusing to go along with the Trump/Attorney General Barr interpretation and scathing critique of the Michael Horowitz Inspector General Report of the Russia investigation, by tweeting “I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me. With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!” Notice that Trump used the term “current” to describe Wray’s directorship, could his head be the next to roll? Later in the day during a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump went further calling those great FBI men and women “scum” for spying on his team and for ruining the lives of good people.  Presumably by good people he means such notables as convicted criminals Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and maybe even coffee boy George Papadopoulos but clearly doesn’t mean Manafort associate Rick Gates who, at the request of his lawyers and upon the concurrent recommendation of prosecutors, is likely to be spared any prison time because of his cooperation with prosecutors, cooperation that apparently is still ongoing, though none of us know what case he is still helping with. For his part AG Barr was out granting interviews.  At the same time that he slammed the main stream media for hyping the Russia investigation and making Trump’s life miserable, Barr whose former colleagues fear that he’s drunk some “dark Kool-Aid,” some of that Rudy Giuliani stuff, repeated his assertion that the Inspector General Report was seriously flawed because as far as he’s concerned the opening of the investigation into Trump’s campaign interactions with Russian characters wasn’t justified and was conducted in bad faith, something he asserts will be proven when his chosen investigator, federal attorney John Durham, delivers his report.  Trump continued on that theme during his Pennsylvania campaign rant, telling the crowd to wait for Durham’s as yet unwritten report because it will be much better as it will “prove” that he was the target of deep state Obama and Clinton loving FBI and CIA agents or else.  To round out the day, one of those deep staters, FBI sexter Lisa Page who, despite Trump’s undue attention and sexually rude mocking, was barely mentioned in the Inspector General report announced that she is suing the FBI and the Justice Department, alleging officials unlawfully released the text messages she exchanged with agent Peter Strozk. She asserts that the agencies violated the Privacy Act and ruined her life by sharing those texts with reporters.  So basically it was just another pleasant day in Trump land.

Other News:  On the legislative front, Speaker Pelosi signed off on Trump’s revised NAFTA treaty, the trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada now called the not so catchy USMCA.  Pushing back against criticism that helping Trump score a major trade success would give him a valuable bragging point, Pelosi, who had spent months successfully pushing for labor and environment protections to be included into the agreement and who was largely responsible for getting the leadership of the AFL-CIO on board, refused to let the impeachment stuff get in the way of doing the right thing.  She is well aware that her caucus, especially her purple district representatives, need to be able to show their voters that Democrats can walk and chew gum and passing NAFTA makes the point that the Democrats are hardly the “do nothing” crowd that Trump likes to say they are.  A plus on trade but Trump’s wall problems continued to mount, a Texas judge put the brakes, at least for now, on his efforts to fund new wall construction with military funds.  On the election front, entrepreneur Andrew Yang has qualified for next week’s December debate, he’ll be joining former VP Joe Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, billionaire businessman Tom Steyer, and Senators Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  Barring any unlikely last minute qualification, Senator Cory Booker and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro will not make it to the stage, leaving Yang as the only minority representative. Neither will the disruptive Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.  She’s only one poll away from qualifying and though there’s a small chance she will get the poll she needs before the Thursday night deadline, she says that she won’t attend even if she makes the cut, tweeting “I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina.”  She either means that or is planning her third party run, or both. Stacey Abrams, the popular Georgia politician who, having lost the Georgia governorship election, is spending all her time fighting for voter rights, confirmed her interest in being vice president by telling Washington Post journalist Jonathan Capehart that “I’m a black woman who’s in a conversation about possibly being second in command to the leader of the free world and I will not diminish my ambition or the ambition of any other women of color by saying that’s not something I’d be willing to do.” Good for her but nothing’s a given, there’s probably some competition from some other people of color for that spot.