Trump’s craziest claim about Russia

This is like someone on trial for bank robbery saying, “That bank wasn’t even robbed! Somebody else robbed it! And what we should really be asking is why the cops didn’t stop the bank from being robbed!”

..  This is worth discussing, however, because it’s part of a broader campaign on the part of the president and his allies to create a fog around the truth of what happened in 2016. It’s plain that he desperately wants us to forget those events, particularly his own actions and those of people around him.

We should say there’s a case to be made that President Barack Obama did not act aggressively enough to counter Russian meddling in our election. All the reports we have gotten suggest Obama was extremely reluctant to do anything that would suggest he was trying to use the resources of the federal government to help Hillary Clinton.

For instance, at one point, then-FBI Director James B. Comey suggested that he could write an op-ed explaining what Russia was doing, but Obama “replied that going public would play right into Russia’s hands by sowing doubts about the election’s legitimacy,” according to the New York Times.

.. But here’s what’s important now: Whatever you think of Obama’s decision-making, it changes nothing about what Trump and his campaign did.

And because the president is trying so hard to obscure the actual history of 2016, let’s review some facts about the Trump campaign and Russia that are not in dispute:

  • Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is under indictment for a series of crimes, some of which are connected to his relationships with a Kremlin-allied Ukrainian leader and a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. His deputy, Rick Gates, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI, and is cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
  • In June 2016, Donald Trump Jr. was approached by an acquaintance with an offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton from a group of Russians, which the acquaintance characterized as follows: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Don Jr. replied “I love it” and gathered Manafort and Jared Kushner to meet with the Russians.
  • When the story of that meeting broke about a year later, President Trump himself reportedly dictated a false story to be given to the press, claiming that the meeting took place to discuss adoption of Russian children.
  • In July 2016, Trump publicly encouraged Russia to hack into Clinton’s email.
  • In 2015, Michael Flynn, who would go on to become Trump’s national security adviser, was paid $45,000 plus travel expenses to deliver a speech in Moscow at an event honoring RT, a television network that acts as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin. He sat with Putin at the dinner.
  • Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.
  • George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, got the FBI counterintelligence investigation rolling when he told an Australian diplomat that the campaign had been offered dirt on Clinton from Russia in the form of hacked emails. (The diplomat passed the information along to the U.S. government.) Papadopoulos also pleaded guilty to lying to investigators and is cooperating with Mueller.
  • Carter Page, another Trump foreign policy adviser, had been on the FBI radar for years before the campaign because they suspected that Russian intelligence agents were attempting to recruit him. In 2016 the FBI became concerned enough about his contacts with people connected to the Russian government that it obtained a FISA warrant to monitor him.
  • Both in his confirmation hearing and on a security clearance questionnaire in preparation for becoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions claimed that he had no contact with Russian officials during the campaign. He later admitted that this was false and that he did have multiple meetings with the Russian ambassador.
  • During the presidential transition, the Russian ambassador was picked up on surveillance telling his superiors that Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, had suggested they set up a secret communications channel, perhaps within the Russian Embassy or consulate, so that Trump aides could speak to the Russians without U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring the communications. Even the Russians found this suggestion completely bonkers.

To repeat, none of that is in dispute.

Trump’s New Economic Adviser Lawrence Kudlow Has Been Wrong About Everything for Decades

Supply-side economics is not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes, but a commitment to the cause of low taxes, particularly for high earners, that borders on theological.

.. The Republican stance on taxes, like its position on climate change (fake) and national health insurance (against it), is unique among right-of-center parties in the industrialized world.

.. In 2012, every Republican presidential candidate, including moderate Jon Huntsman, indicated they would oppose accepting even a dollar of higher taxes in return for $10 dollars of spending cuts.

.. Kudlow attributes every positive economic indicator to lower taxes, and every piece of negative news to higher taxes.

.. In 1993, when Bill Clinton proposed an increase in the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, Kudlow wrote, “There is no question that President Clinton’s across-the-board tax increases … will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy’s long-run potential to grow.”

.. This was wrong. Instead, a boom ensued. Rather than question his analysis, Kudlow switched to crediting the results to the great tax-cutter, Ronald Reagan. “The politician most responsible for laying the groundwork for this prosperous era is not Bill Clinton, but Ronald Reagan,” he argued in February, 2000.

.. By the time George W. Bush took office, Kudlow was plumping for his tax-cut plan. Kudlow not only endorsed Bush’s argument that the budget surplus he inherited from Clinton — the one Kudlow and his allies had insisted in 1993 could never happen, because the tax hikes would strangle the economy — would turn out to be even larger than forecast.

.. Kudlow then began to relentlessly tout Bush’s economic program. “The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points,” he predicted in 2002. That was wrong. He began to insist that the housing bubble that was forming was a hallucination imagined by Bush’s liberal critics who refused to appreciate the magic of the Bush boom. He made this case over and over (“There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum).

.. When Obama took office, Kudlow was detecting an “inflationary bubble.” That was wrong. He warned in 2009 that the administration “is waging war on investors. He’s waging war against businesses. He’s waging war against bondholders. These are very bad things.” That was also wrong, and when the recovery proceeded, by 2011, he credited the Bush tax cuts for the recovery.

.. Kansas, where he advised Republican governor Sam Brownback to implement a sweeping tax-cut plan that would produce faster growth. This was wrong. Alas, Brownback’s program has proven a comprehensive failure, falling short of all its promises and leaving the state in fiscal turmoil.

.. The onset of deficits exceeding a trillion dollars a year in the midst of low unemployment has not prompted any regret, or even a hint of willingness to compromise on the party’s rigid opposition to higher taxes.

This was the Trump agenda even with the relatively moderate Gary Cohn running the National Economic Council. Now that true believer Lawrence Kudlow is taking the helm, the dawn of fiscal sanity in the GOP is receding ever farther into the distant future.

 

Storm Watch: the latest developments in the Stormy Daniels case

She faces formidable opposition from Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who has claimed he personally paid the $130,000 for Daniels’s silence. He obtained a restraining order at the end of February, shortly before Daniels filed her lawsuit in court, and has now filed papers in federal court accusing Daniels of violating the terms of the nondisclosure agreement. The Washington Post reports that Cohen is seeking a total of $20 million in damages — $1 million per alleged violation.

But another one of Cohen’s legal disputes might undercut his efforts. He is pursuing a libel suit against BuzzFeed, and the website is attempting a legal maneuver that might allow Daniels’s records of any relationship with Trump to be made public.

.. Cohen, through Essential Consultants, LLC, the company he set up to pay Daniels last October, will request to move Daniels’s dispute out of the open courts back to private arbitration, reports Bloomberg.

And Cohen’s efforts probably have the support of President Donald Trump. In a separate filing on the president’s behalf, another Trump attorney said he agreed with Cohen’s decision to move the case back to private arbitration.

Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s attorney, responded to Cohen’s suit in a series of tweets, calling it “yet another bullying tactic from the president and Mr. Cohen.”

“They are not attempting to remove this case to federal court in order to increase their changes that the matter will be decided in private arbitration,” he wrote.

.. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed is using a legal maneuver that might give Daniels the chance to tell her story.

The news outlet is embroiled in its own litigation with Cohen, who is suing BuzzFeed for libel over its publication of the Steele dossier, a collection of allegations about Trump’s dealings with Russia, last year. As part of that lawsuit, BuzzFeed has asked Daniels to preserve all documents and records relating to her dealings with Cohen and her 2016 nondisclosure agreement.

.. If BuzzFeed’s gambit is successful, lawyers may have to depose Daniels in that case. And unless a judge intervenes, according to Politico, it’s possible all those details might be made public.
.. Trump’s lawyers are reportedly weighing legal action against CBS, though it’s unclear that would actually stop the network from airing the interview.

.. Daniels’s mother is a Trump supporter

Daniels’s estranged mother, Sheila Gregory, said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News that she doesn’t want the scandal to hurt the president.

“If Mr. Trump runs four more times, I would vote for him every time,” Gregory said. “I like him. I like the way he handles things. It’s time this country is put back where it belongs — taking care of the people here instead of the people who don’t belong here.”