December 16, 2019

Dec 17, 2019

There are four big stories for today. Three add up to a single narrative of Trump and his Republican Party in trouble and desperate to stay in power. The fourth—the Washington Post’s crucially important story about the 18-year war in Afghanistan—is just tragic.

Trump’s lawyer, and apparently fixer, Rudy Giuliani has been in the news again, first because his “documentary” on the pro-Trump One America News Network accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 elections and attacking the Bidens has played on state television in Russia; and second because investigations into his business dealings show how Trump has been remaking our government along the lines of an oligarchy in which powerful men work to please him in exchange for government favors.

On December 9, Josh Kovensky at TalkingPointsMemo revealed how Giuliani was working with Ukrainian oligarchs for access to the president. In the Washington Post today, David Ignatius detailed how Giuliani became the man to see for access to Trump. Foreigners in trouble with the law in America hired Giuliani for huge sums of money to pilot their cases into safer waters; businessmen in Ukraine eager to make corrupt deals in the natural gas industry hired Giuliani to get rid of anti-corruption figures like U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Casey Michel at the New Republic has a similar story today, in which a Ukrainian oligarch offered dirt on Biden in exchange for getting US charges of money laundering against him dropped. (He allegedly used shell companies and real estate purchases to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in the US.)

There were suggestions a few weeks ago that Trump might throw Giuliani under the bus, but the opposite has happened. Trump has hosted Giuliani at the White House as recently as last Friday, and a Wall Street Journal article describes Trump talking to Giuliani as soon as he got back from his recent Ukraine trip. According to Giuliani, Trump asked “What did you get?” and Giuliani answered “More than you can imagine.” A New Yorker article by Adam Entous quotes Giuliani as saying that he had, indeed, torpedoed US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch “because I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way. She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.” (This is a major concession.) And today, Trump praised Giuliani as “a great person who loves our country and he does this out of love.”

This sort of oligarchic system, in which rich men evade the law by cozying up to the nation’s leader, is what Republican leaders are now stuck trying to defend. As expected, last night’s letter from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has boxed Republicans into a corner. Schumer’s requests were based on rules the Republicans set during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and his request for fact witnesses and documents was kind of a no-brainer.

So Republicans today have floated the idea that the Senate is simply a jury and that the place for pursuing facts was in the House. If the Democrats missed that opportunity it’s not the Senate’s problem. Law professor and former US Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said “The technical legal term to describe this argument is… dumb. It would mean prosecutors could never introduce testimony or evidence that wasn’t presented to the grand jury. McConnell should just say what is really motivating him: he is scared silly of what the witnesses will say.” [I cleaned up the punctuation in Katyal's tweet.]

Democrats are talking about passing the articles of impeachment but then simply holding onto them, leaving Trump impeached but not exonerated. This would keep the Senate from whitewashing the Ukraine scandal. It would also drive Trump nuts. We’ll see how that plays out.

The Republicans are doubling down on Trump in part because he has solidified his hold on the Republican Party by alienating everyone else. Today’s Republican leaders know they cannot win in a free and fair vote, so they are working to purge Democrats from voter rolls.

On Friday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that last year’s poll closures in Georgia prevented between 54,000 and 85,000 voters, primarily Democrats, from casting ballots. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Stacey Abrams lost to Georgia’s Secretary of State, Republican Brian Kemp, who oversaw the voting procedures. (Kemp was also the only state election official to refuse help from the Department of Homeland Security to protect against Russian cyberattacks in 2016, and when election observers sued to examine the insecure servers for signs of a breach, technicians wiped the servers clean and, two months later, also wiped clean the backup servers.) Abrams lost by just over 50,000 votes. She refused to concede the race, acknowledging that Kemp had won, but maintaining that the election had been tainted.

Today, a federal judge in Georgia permitted Georgia to purge more than 313,000 voters, about 4% of the state’s total. Fair Fight, an organization Abrams started to fight voter suppression, asked for an emergency hearing hours before the purge was due to begin. The judge has scheduled the hearing, but is permitting the purge to start with the expectation that people culled from the rolls unjustly can be quickly reinstated.

Georgia’s voter purge looks much like what we saw happen on Friday in Wisconsin. In a victory for Republicans, Judge Paul Malloy ordered a purge of more than 234,000 voters from the rolls in Wisconsin, a key state for Trump’s ability to win the Electoral College even if he loses the popular vote.

Just as happened in Georgia, conservatives employed a technique known as “voter caging.” They sent out letters to 234,000 voters, primarily in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and if those voters did not return the letter, they were marked as having moved and thus no longer eligible to vote from that location. It’s an old trick. The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is evenly split between the parties, asked Malloy to put the decision on hold until after the 2020 election, but he declined. The case will be appealed and will go to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 split that favors Republicans.

There things stand in the impeachment crisis, but I cannot let one other blockbuster story go by. None of us has paid enough attention to last week’s Washington Post story about the war in Afghanistan. Post reporter Craig Whitlock examined documents and interviewed generals both on and off the record to reveal that "senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” The parallels to the Pentagon Papers, which indicted political leaders of both parties for misleading the American people about Vietnam, is unmistakable.

America has sent more than 775,000 troops to Afghanistan. Twenty-three hundred have died and 20,589 have been wounded in action. More than 64,000 Afghan security forces have died, along with more than 43,000 civilians. More than 5000 aid workers, contractors, coalition troops and journalists have also died. We have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, and that does not include money spent by the Department of Veterans Affairs or the CIA. Observers estimate true numbers closer to $1 trillion dollars. And all, it appears, for naught.

I watch news stories like this, and the mounting outrage against Big Pharma for lying about the safety of opioids, and repeated stories about how tax cuts that were supposed to help us all have only helped the wealthiest Americans, and the increasing pressure of evidence against Trump's gaslighting, and it seems to me that after almost forty years of refusing to grapple with reality, America is coming to a reckoning.

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Notes:

Cornyn on no testimony: