Friday: multiple big breaking news stories

Friday was a big day for news -- two huge breaking stories -- Roger Stone's indictment and ending the shutdown.   There's also news from Thursday that needs some digesting.  So this is a day for multiple short takes.

1.   Government re-opened.  On the 35th day of the longest government shutdown ever, a deal was reached between President Trump and congressional leaders to fund -- and thus to re-open -- the federal government on a "continuing resolution" for three weeks, until February 15th.

   Friday had brought a new sense of urgency, culminating with the air traffic controllers union putting out a statement saying that they were concerned about air safety due to reduced staff showing up for work.

   With some skillful negotiating between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell -- and keeping Nancy Peolsi and Donald Trump in the background -- a deal was agreed to by all parties that will:   (1) fund government until 2/15 without including any money for a border wall;  (2)  form a bipartisan committee to negotiate funding for homeland security;  (3)  if no deal is reached by 2/15, either another shutdown can occur or President Trump can declare a national emergency.

   Or, as one MSNBC commentator suggested, they could just pass a budget without border wall funding and pretend it all never happened.   That, of course, would require Trump to accept permanent defeat, after having to swallow the two big defeats this week:  (a) having to bow to the public pressure to end the shutdown and (b) being schooled by Nancy Pelosi in the meaning of the word "No" regarding giving the State of the Union speech in the House chambers.

2.   Roger Stone indicted.   Long-time political adviser to Donald Trump, political operative Roger Stone has been indicted by Robert Mueller on seven felony counts including obstruction of justice, making false statements to congress, and witness tampering.   This relates mostly to Stone's communicating with and about the Wikileaks release of the Russia-hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign.    Mueller used the indictment, once again, to spell out in some detail what evidence he has, including email communications between Stone and at least one senior member of the Trump campaign, as well as more marginal advisers and operatives connected with the campaign.

   So, assuming that Mueller has much more than he actually put in the indictment, this may very well be the link that shows the Trump campaign's involvement in conspiracy with Russia to influence the election of Donald Trump.  At least it's the first publicly known evidence of a specific contact between someone from the Trump campaign and Russia, with Roger Stone and Wikileaks as the intermediaries.

   Stone is defiant in his denial, as well as his declaration that he "will never testify against President Trump."    This remains to be seen, but it also raises questions about whether he has been promised a pardon.   As a guest on "All In With Chris Hayes" on MSNBC, however, pointed out, if Trump pardons him, Stone can then be forced to testify fully.   If you've been pardoned, you can't then take the 5th amendment to avoid self-incrimination, nor can you be given immunity to testify.   So at least Trump can't pardon him without the risk of Roger having to tell all he knows about Trump.

3.   Security clearance scandal at White House.   News broke on Thursday about security clearances at the White House.   It started with reporters staying on the story of why it took so long for Jared Kushner to get his security clearance.   It is now revealed that Kushner had to amend his original security application 40 times, because he initially had reported that he had no foreign contacts, but eventually revealed that he had 40, as well as extensive business dealings with foreign individuals and banks, as well as frequent foreign travel --- all of which should have been reported initially.

   Because of all this, as well as some questionable business dealings, Jared was initially given a clearance of "secret," which is the third down from the top and superseded by the #2 "top secret" and by the #1 "sensitive compartmented information" (CSI) clearance.

   Without going into detail, the FBI does the background check and a specialist group then decides on the level of clearance.   They initially gave Jared simply "secret" clearance;  but the White House person in charge (a Trump appointee) over-ruled it and gave him a "top secret" clearance.    But then he also decided to try to get the #1 CSI clearance, which requires, not just FBI but CIA investigation.    The CIA's response was:   No way;  why did they even give him a top secret clearance?

   So reporters looked into the matter.   It seems that the White House supervisor, who had been brought over from another department by the Trump team, had not only over-ruled the investigators on Jared;   there had been 30 security clearances for White House personnel that he had over-ruled and given a higher clearance to.

   This story, by itself, should have major "legs," but it's already gone within 24 hours, given the two big new stories on Friday.   Let's hope someone revives it when we calm down from this week.

   Of course, the real question, which no one can do anything about, is whether Donald Trump himself could even get the lowest level of clearance -- especially considering his years of dealing with foreign money launderers and foreign mafia investors, to say nothing of his relationship to Putin.

   Why do we not require presidential candidates to pass the highest security clearance before they can be an official candidate?    It makes no sense.

4.  Humiliation for Donald Trump.    This has to be the most humiliating week yet for Donald Trump.   Stories abound of his intolerance for smart, powerful women.   He fears those he can't intimidate, so he tries to put them down by bullying or demeaning them.   But there are a few he caves in to, like Ann Coulter, who got him to change a major decision simply by tweeting that he was "dead in the water" if he did what he was planning to do.   So he promptly caved.
   Then there was the power struggle with Nancy Pelosi about the State of the Union address.   It's her prerogative as Speaker of the House to issue the invitation to the president to give his State of the Union message in the House chamber, which she had done in early January.   Then, because of the shutdown, she disinvited him, saying they should wait until after the government reopened because of security concerns with reduced staff due to the shutdown.
   Trump wrote back -- trying to intimidate her by saying that he had been assured by the DHS and Secret Service that security could be provided so he intended to give his speech at the date and place as originally planned.   Pelosi wrote back politely explaining that there would be no joint resolution of the House and Senate during the shutdown (a necessary step to authorize the speech).  In effect she was telling him that this was her decision to make and that No means No.
   He found out he couldn't bully her.  In fact, was politely scolded and put in his place by a strong woman, and he backed down.    So it could only have added to his misery this week, when Ann Coulter responded to that with this tweet:
   "Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush.  As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as president of the United States."

Now there's a woman who knows how to hurt Trump.   But Pelosi knows how to stand up to him -- and preserve a working relationship -- by far the better outcome.  Nancy Pelosi is the heroine of the moment;   those who opposed her having another term as Speaker should take lessons and be glad she's the one dealing with this bully.

Ralph

God save us from "Christians" who think like Jerry Falwell, Jr.

One of the plaguing questions about Donald Trump's election has been:   Why do the evangelical Christians support Trump?    With his celebrated immoral life style, his cheating in business, his lack of charity, his saying he's never asked for forgiveness for anything -- why do they choose to have any association with him -- other than to save his soul, which none of them apparently seems to care one fig for attempting?

No, it's what he can do for them, namely appoint conservative judges, including the two he has already put on the Supreme Court, in the hope that they will overturn Roe vs Wade, and outlaw abortions and gay marriage.

Here's some insight from the son of famed evangelist Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell, Jr., who is president of Liberty University, the Christian college founded by his father.   These quotes are from an article in Slate.

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"The Ugly Nihilism of Jerry Falwell, Jr.'s 

Comments About Trump"

 by Laura Bennett

"Jerry Falwell Jr. endorsed Donald Trump early, before the 2016 Iowa caucus, and in the years since, he’s become one of the president’s most ardent evangelical defenders. The Liberty University president blamed a Republican establishment “conspiracy” for the leak of the Access Hollywood tapes and appeared on CNN to assure viewers that Trump was a “changed man.” He later praised the president’s response to the racist rally in Charlottesville, said Trump wouldn’t need to apologize publicly for any extramarital affairs, and defended family separation at the border as “tough love”. . .

". . . [T]he Washington Post ran an interview [in which] Falwell . . . speculated that it may be immoral for other evangelical leaders to not support Trump. He said the midterm elections somehow proved 'the American people are happy with the direction the country is headed.'   And he also offered one of the tidiest articulations of the contortions that evangelical Trump supporters have had to make in order to stand by their man.  [What follows is Falwell, Jr.'s view:]

"'There’s two kingdoms. . . the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom. In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated. In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country. Think about it. Why have Americans been able to do more to help people in need around the world than any other country in history? It’s because of free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurism and wealth. A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It’s just common sense to me.'

[Note that Falwell does not consider that "what's best for the country" might be to encourage us as a nation to "treat other nations as we'd like to be treated."   Apparently in the "heavenly kingdom," there is love, compassion, sharing, cooperation, caring, giving;    whereas the earthly kingdom is about competition, power, winning, and trampling over those who have less, are weaker, who need help.]

"Falwell’s dismissal of the poor was quickly pilloried by critics, some of whom observed that Jesus pointedly praised the small offering of a “poor widow” in contrast to the donations of the rich. Others noted that low-income communities have massive collective purchasing power and that—until recently, anyway—it was their spending that drove the American economy.

"Like most of Trump’s evangelical supporters, Falwell has never tried to claim that Trump is a good person. But it’s helpful to see his argument for why that doesn’t matter. The idea of dividing God’s sovereignty into 'two kingdoms' comes from the 16-century reformer Martin Luther, and it generally refers to a kind of separation between church and state: the idea that spiritual righteousness and civil righteousness are two different things . . . .  In more extreme versions, however, the doctrine is used to dismiss the prospect that individual morality is relevant to the ruling of the state.  As Falwell put it, 'Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome.' And it’s a 'distortion,' he said, to imagine that the country as a whole should love its neighbors and help the poor just because Jesus told individuals to do so. . . .

". . . .  [This view] puts him at odds with his own institution, Liberty University, . . .[whose] mission statement [includes] ". . .  sensitivity to the needs of others [and] social responsibility.” . . .

"At one point, reporter Joe Heim asked Falwell whether there is anything Trump could do that would endanger his support from Falwell and other evangelical leaders. He answered, simply, 'No.'   His explanation was a textbook piece of circular reasoning: Trump wants what’s best for the country, therefore anything he does is good for the country. There’s something almost sad about seeing this kind of idolatry articulated so clearly. In a kind of backhanded insult to his supporters, Trump himself once said that he could 'stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody' without losing his base. It’s rare to see a prominent supporter essentially admit that this was true."

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This Slate article does not go into analysis of what may be the more practical aspects of Falwell's explanation -- which, I have to admit, is pretty extreme in its bald, bold candor.   I think most evangelicals would have attempted to give something more of a dressed up version of "ends justify the means," usually expressed as something like:  "God sometimes uses bad people to accomplish good things" -- rather than, as Falwell seems to do -- to dismiss as unimportant whether government leaders have values and ideals for their country.

If Nelson Mandella had followed Falwell, Jr.'s brand of Christianity, South Africa would still be stuck in apartheid.   The United States would still have slavery.

But Falwell just lays it out there:   a complete separation of church and state -- of the spiritual and the civil -- without even any idealism that spirituality and goodness might influence our civic, community life.

Don't misunderstand.  I do not take the position that Christianity -- or religion, in general, for that matter -- is the only source of goodness, compassion, and charity.   Democracy itself is a big step toward treating other people as we would want to be treated.

Let's take it one step further and ask:    Does Falwell put any value on democracy itself?   Or would he be satisfied with a dictatorship, as long as the dictator decreed policies that Falwell himself wanted?    Would he give up freedom as long as he could have his way on abortion and gay marriage?   I'm inclined to think the answer is yes, although I doubt he would be very comfortable with that admission.

Now I understand the "nihilism" in the author's choice of title.   It's a pretty sad commentary on goodness and on Christianity, in my opinion.   Falwell, Jr. is saying that Jesus' social gospel -- essentially the "golden rule" -- has no place at a community level;  it's only for individuals.   He seems to think there's no point in applying compassion and caring at the community level -- or even the democratic principle of letting the people decide?

Frankly, I'd rather live in a community of compassionate, sharing people than in a community of rich people.

Ralph

If Trump did tell Cohen to lie to Congress, that's clearly an impeachable offense.

[Read through to the end for the big story behind the minor one about whether Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress.]

Thursday night Buzzfeed reported that one of their reporters had two sources (federal law enforcement officers) who told him that they have seen evidence, in the form of texts and emails, as well as verbal sources, that show President Trump telling his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress about when they ended the negotiations to build a Trump Tower Hotel in Moscow.

This came days after Trump's nominee for Attorney General had said, in response to questions in his Senate confirmation hearings that:  "If a president . . . suborns perjury or induces a witness to change testimony . . .  then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction."

This set in motion a frenzy of talk about impeachment, with pundits insisting that it was time to begin inquiries into whether there were grounds for impeachment of the president -- because, if true, this is a felony.  It was quite understandable that this would be the response to what sounded like direct evidence from insider, responsible sources -- albeit unnamed to the public.   Nevertheless the lead author of the Buzzfeed article is reputed to be scrupulously honest in his reporting.  He won a nomination for a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting a couple of years ago.

The day after the article was published, a statement was released from the special counsel's office saying that the "specific statements" in the report, as well as the "characterization of documents and testimony" in Buzzfeed's report "are not accurate."

This is vague enough to allow different interpretations.   Trump's defenders claim that this means the entire Buzzfeed report is false.   Others interpret it as only saying that the report is not entirely accurate.    In other words, Trump may still have instructed Cohen to lie to congress;  but they may not have all the documentation that is claimed.  We simply do not know at this point.

The rarity of any statement from Mueller's office gives this great weight.  Speculation suggests that Mueller and his team were concerned that the rush to begin impeachment based on this less that accurate report would be a great disservice to not only the president but to the country.   And they simply wanted to put the brakes on this rush to judgment.

To the interpretation that the report may be partly true -- in fact may be true in its most important fact, suborning perjury, and only inaccurate in details -- is added the fact that Trump has not denied that he told Cohen to lie;   nor has his PR attorney Rudy Giuliani.

In fact, Giuliani emerged the next day to say that discussions about a deal to build Trump Tower Moscow may have continued into November 2016, i.e. up until and maybe after the election.    That certainly contradicts what the president has previously said repeatedly -- that he had "no deals with Russia" and not even anything that might become a deal, "because we hadn't pursued a deal there."

So it's still worth considering what this could mean, if the basic claim turns out to be true:   that Donald Trump, as president of the United States, instructed his lawyer to lie in his testimony to a congressional committee about his business dealings with Russia, an adversarial foreign power, during the campaign to become president and after being elected to that office.

If so, then this would be evidence of "suborning perjury" -- inducing another person to lie when testifying under oath in a congressional hearing, which is a federal crime.

Of course, it is a much stronger case if there is the documentation claimed in Buzzfeed's reporting than if it is simply Michael Cohen's word, which Trump has already tried to dismiss by claiming that Cohen is a proven liar and that he is just lying more, in an attempt to reduce his three year jail sentence for lying.

Pundits have been quick to point out the ludicrous fallacy of lying to reduce your jail sentence.  The last thing you should do when you've been convicted of lying is to lie further.    But Trump never bothers to think through things like that.

Buzzfeed's editor continues to strongly endorse the story and its reporting accuracy, and he has called on the Mueller team to be specific about what they find inaccurate about the story.     The reporter has clarified that his two "law enforcement" sources are not part of Mueller's investigative team, which was the original assumption made by many and may have been part of the thinking that went into Mueller's decision to release the statement.

BUT  HERE  IS  THE  BIG  STORY 
WE  MUST  NOT  LOSE  SIGHT  OF:

Thanks to Natasha Bertrand, writer for The Atlantic for her making this point on MSNBC on Sunday evening.    As she so cogently reminded us:   These details should not obscure the larger story behind them.   Donald Trump was campaigning as the Republican nominee for the presidency while pursuing a huge business deal that Putin had to approve for it to go through;  and, at the same time, Putin was having the emails hacked in the campaign of Trump's opponent and releasing damaging information.  And what did Putin get in exchange?    Trump boasted that, if elected, he would remove the sanctions and tale the U.S. out of NATO -- probably the two top items on Putin's wish list, with NATO being the main deterrent to Russia's expansion into Europe.

 So the big question is:  what did Trump know, and when did he know it?

Well, we've now heard from Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani that discussions about the Trump Tower project in Moscow continued right up until, perhaps through, election day 2016.

I guess some day we'll find out what this was all about.

Ralph