Another day, another outrage . . . or three.

As the Labor Secretary Alex Acosta's legal critics rebut his explanation for the light sentence against child sexual trafficking, his position became untenable -- even in the dysfunctional, morally challenged White House.    Acosta resigned Friday.

Here's the hub of the problem.   Trump gave him the boot, not because he (Trump) was upset about the case in question or about what the victims endured.  Trump was upset because it wasn't playing well in the media.    See, it's never a moral question of doing the right thing.   It's all about whether the public will buy the story.   And in this case it also keeps Trump's former close association with Jeffrey Epstein in the news.  Journalists will keep digging for more, possibly implicating Trump himself..

Here's another outrage story that came out in the middle of the Acosta fiasco.  Naturally it got buried by the more sensational story.  Reported by Carol Davenport in the the New York Times:

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"A State Department intelligence analyst has resigned in protest after the White House blocked his discussion of climate science in Congressional testimony, according to a person familiar with the matter.

"Rod Schoonover, an analyist with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Reseaarch testified last month before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on the effects of climate change on national security.  But in a highly unusual move, the White House refused to approve Dr. Schoonover's written testimony for entry into the written Congressional Record.

"The reasoning, according to a June 4 email reviewed by the New York Times, was that the science cited in Dr. Schoonover's testrimony did not correspond with White House views.  Ultimately, Dr Schoonover did deliver the oral testimony before the committee, but his accompanying written statement was not included in the official record of the hearing. . . . 

"Experts said that the exclusion of Dr. Schoonover's testimony from the written Congressional Record amounted to a significant suppression of factual analysis by an  intelligence agency.

"'Intelligence analysts, as a rule, are very committed to objective truth,' said Francesco Femia, the head of the Center for Climate and Security, a research organization in Washington.  'And when something extraordinary happens to try to politicize . . . or suppress their analysis, as happened in this case, that flies in the face of their professional integrity.' . . .

"The . .  . Bureau of Intelligence and Research has long been regarded as one of the most scrupulous and accurate in the federal government.  In the prelude to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, the agency stood almost alone in asserting -- correctly, but contrary to the positions of the White House and the CIA -- that Iraq was not reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

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Now they're not only just "disagreeing" with their own intelligence and scientific advisers, they're even expunging their scientific findings from official records.    News flash to the Trump Administration:   Truth will out.   You don't get to decide what are the facts, especially about science, for which you have no knowledge and no respect.

Ralph

A few news briefs

1.   The Guardian reports today that lawyer and Trump's Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta was a Federal Prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida 12 years ago, when he worked out a sweetheart plea deal for billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who had been indicted for sex trafficking with underage girls.   Some of them had been brought into the country for that purpose and were featured at  private, elite parties for men like Epstein and his friends.

In other words, Epstein was originally charged with sex trafficking with girls as young as 14, which ordinarily would have carried heavy jail time.   Instead of bearing the full brunt of such serious charges, however, Acosta worked out with Epstein's powerful defense lawyers a plea deal that amounted to a slap on the wrist. 

Yes, he had to register as a sex offender and was sentenced to 18 months in prison -- which he was allowed to serve by spending one night a week in jail, then released from that after 13 months -- not quite the same as "spending time in jail."   So who was thinking about the plight of these girls, if it was not the prosecutor?

Acosta defends this light sentence saying that it was a question of what he was charged with and whether it would be a state or a federal crime.    He says the state would have given him no jail time and no sex offender registration.    Not true, says a judge from the Florida state court at the time;   they took sex trafficking in young girls quite seriously.

Because of some new charges of sexual trafficking with underage girls against Epstein, the case has been reopened in the Southern District of New York Federal Court, and the perpetrator, Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested again and jailed.   Jeffrey Berman, the Federal Prosecutor at the SDNY has been scathing in his comments about how the case was handled years ago.

 Acosta is not involved in the current case.   However he is coming under heavy fire, in part because of changed attitudes toward sexual victims, especially young ones, since the original case.   But there's no doubt;  even 12 years ago, what Acosta agreed to was a shockingly light sentence for this wealthy, influential man with criminal behavior toward teenage girls.    Epstien legal defense team included Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr, among others.

But, really, how much has changed with such insensitive men?   My original focus was to be on Acosta as Labor Secretary, after I saw an announcement yesterday in The Guardian that Acosta has proposed a major cut in the Labor budget, including slashing 80% of the funds for the agency that combats sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of children.

Doesn't sound like Trump's Labor Secretary has learned much since the Epstein original case that's coming back to haunt him.  The question now is whether Trump will keep him in the cabinet.   He shouldn't.

I haven't even mentioned Trump's relationship with Epstein, but they used to be close friends -- once throwing a party at Mar-a-Lago where they invited 28 young women (supposedly of legal age) and with Trump and Epstein as the only two guests.   It was a mock "calendar competition."   Trump now says he and Epstein fell out years ago over a business deal and haven't spoken in years.

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2.  (Washington Post's Paul Waldmon) tells us that the most unpopular politician in  America is not Donald Trump, but Mitch McConnell, who is up for re-election.   And he now has a serious challenger in Amy McGrath.   Here's part of what she said in her announcement speech, quoted by Waldmon:

"Everything that’s wrong in Washington had to start someplace. How did it come to this? That even within our own families, we can’t talk to each other about the leaders of our country anymore without anger and blame? Well it started with this man [picture of McConnell playing in the background], who was elected a lifetime ago, and who has, bit by bit, year by year, turned Washington into something we all despise. Where dysfunction and chaos are political weapons. Where budgets and health care and the Supreme Court are held hostage. A place where ideals go to die."

Waldmon continued:  . . . "McGrath is right. There are two figures more responsible than anyone else for making Congress what it is today: Newt Gingrich, who made politics more vicious and mean than it had been before, and McConnell, who realized that in the pursuit of power any norm could be violated, any rule broken, any tactic justified if you’re shameless enough. And if you win, you’ll pay no price for what you did along the way. It’s no accident that one biography of McConnell was titled The Cynic, nor that McConnell counts the theft of a Supreme Court seat as one of the proudest moments of his career.

"McGrath, a retired fighter pilot and lieutenant colonel in the Marines, talks a lot about her military service, in part because that’s where she made her career and in part because she hasn’t held elected office before. She lost a bid for a House seat in 2018 to incumbent Rep. Garland 'Andy' Barr, falling short by just three points in a district Trump won by 16.

"Which was an admirable performance, but she has a major problem she’ll have to find a way to solve, and it goes by the name of Kentucky.  Simply put, the state is really, really conservative. Trump beat Hillary Clinton there by 30 points. The last time a Democrat won a Senate race there was 1992 . . .

"Which brings us back to McConnell’s unpopularity, which isn’t just national but is also true at home. Despite having been elected and reelected six times, McConnell is deep underwater. In this poll, he’s the only senator in America whose disapproval cracks 50 percent; in this one his disapproval was 56 percent, with only 33 percent approving. . .  The question is, are Republicans who are displeased with McConnell going to vote for a Democrat to replace him?  And are they going to do it in a presidential election year? . . .

". . . [McGrath] probably won’t have trouble raising money . . .  But what it may take for her to prevail is an absolute Democratic blowout on the national level, an election that not only sends Trump packing but reverberates all the way down the ballot.

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3.   (And based on a VOX article):   With just over a year until the 2020 elections, the Senate is finally going to have a briefing on election security.   Democrats have been pushing for it -- but for some reason Mitch McConnell has resisted.  McConnell's concerns are said to be about not wanting to interfere with state and local control over their own election processes.   Well, there's that.   But isn't this a federal election?    Doesn't the federal government also have a major interest in the security and fairness of the process?

Ralph

Trump's desperation move on the census

The Supreme Court turned down Trump's case to require the citizenship question on the 2020 census, saying the Justice Department's case had to valid explanation.   At first, it was assumed that was it;  even the Justice Department seemed to accept it.

But then Trump said no.   They would come back with another explanation, so I thought that meant the DoJ lawyers would try again.    But this op-ed by Washington Post editorial writer, Greg Sargent, tells another story -- one of apparent disagreement within the DoJ, so that now Trump has gone to outside lawyers to argue his case.

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"Extraordinary new details are emerging about President Trump’s efforts to rig the census to benefit the Republican Party — and those details provide an occasion to take stock of William P. Barr’s role as hidden enabler of the president’s deepening corruption.

"We are now seeing Trump’s attorney general assume this role on multiple fronts — and we are only beginning to glimpse the damage that could result from all of it.

"The Justice Department just announced that it will swap out the lawyers who are representing the administration in the legal battle over the effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. This battle continues because Trump ordered the administration to keep fighting to add the question, even though officials had surrendered after the Supreme Court ruled against it.

"As The Post reports, the change in the legal team might signal 'legal or ethical concerns' about Trump’s handling of the affair. One source said such concerns were harbored by some 'career attorneys.'

"It gets worse. A Justice Department lawyer tells the New York Times that due to the switch, no lawyers from the division that defends administration policies in court — the federal programs branch — will be working on the case.

"The Times adds that the move strongly suggests that career lawyers 'decided to quit a case that at the least seemed to lack a legal basis,' or worse, could force them to defend statements that 'could well turn out to be untrue.'

Tellingly, the Times reports that those career lawyers appear to have concluded that 'there were difficulties in finding a new justification' for the citizenship question 'that would not seem invented out of whole cloth.'

"Translation: The lawyers knew they couldn’t come up with another fake rationale to replace the last fake rationale, without it being blindingly obvious that the new one is just as fake as the last one.

"The last rationale offered by the Commerce Department — which oversees the census — was that the question will help enforce the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court ruled that this rationale was a “contrived” pretext — that is, fake. . . ."

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Of course, it's obvious to the Court, as it is to anyone looking at the case, that the whole thing is contrived.   It's a scare tactic to discourage anyone who is not a citizen from participating in the count.  Non-citizen residents are supposed to be counted in the census;  it's officially a count of who lives here, not a citizenship count.

Understandably in today's anti-immigrant climate, people are afraid that they will be picked up and deported if they participate in the count.   The object is to sow confusion and fear, in order to lower the count and give the Republican Party an advantage in all the districting and appropriations that are based on the census.

All you need to know is that this idea was initially pushed by Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach, "two of Trump's most virulently anti-immigrant advisers," as Greg Sargents puts it.

So now Trump will try some more pliant lawyers to see if they can come up with another fake rationale that just might squeak through the courts -- or at least buy him so more time to sew chaos.

Ralph

PS:  Speaking of compliant lawyers:   Late yesterday, Attorney General Barr issued a statement saying he believes there is a way to include the question, without getting court approval -- or at least that's what he seemed to indicate.  He did not detail how it would be done.

I'm afraid the damage has already been done now -- making people afraid to participate in the census.   Who would trust the Trump administration . . .  no matter what they say now, and risk being deported?

Iran gives ultimatum -- Trump is responsible by withdrawing from deal that was working

First, an acknowledgement:   President Trump's commandeering of the Independence Day celebration in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall was not as bad as I had feared.

Yes, it perverted, for many, the real meaning of the day by emphasizing the military rather than the principles of democracy and freedom.   But at least he didn't turn it overtly political.    There's no way it could not have political overtones -- in the middle of a re-election campaign and with this president -- but his speech was careful to sound non-partisan-- so I'm told;  I did not watch or even read about it,

Well, Walter Schaub, former chief of government ethics department, says that the real purpose was what will come later -- campaign ads, featuring the president as commander-in-chief.   All at taxpayers' expense.    Meanwhile, we can speculate how much Trump's hotel on the Mall raked in?   Oh, well . . .

My intended subject for today was the Iranian activity over increasing the amount of uranium enrichment closer to weapons-grade than had been allowed by the mutli-nation agreement -- and Iran's ultimatum concerning proceeding further unless concessions are made concerning the sanctions.

By all reasonable accounts, this Obama-era 2015 agreement, reached after extensive and delicate diplomatic negotiations over years, was working.   And then Trump pulled us out of the deal.

In other words, Trump made the U.S. the first violator of the agreement.   So we can't legitimately say that the Iranians blew up the deal.

As Danielle Wallace of FoxNews wrote in an online piece:
"The 2015 deal has been unraveling since the U.S. withdrew its support in 2018.  The original deal saw sanctions on Iran lifted in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, but President Trump restored crippling sanctions against Iran upon pulling out of the accord, weakening the agreement altogether."

Trump loudly proclaimed that it was a terrible deal, too weak in its limits on Iran and that he would get a better deal.

Wallace further stated:   "Former President Obama released a statement at the time, arguing the nuclear deal 'is working' and 'has significantly rolled back Iran's nuclear program,' saying that's why Trump's announcement 'is so misguided.'"

Folks, we have a bull in a china shop when it comes to diplomacy on the word stage.  Trump is trying to transfer New York City business negotiations into the world of statecraft and delicate diplomacy.   It just does not work.

We must not elect this man for a second turn.    If we think we have a disaster now, think of the harm he can do with another four years.

Ralph