When Attorney General William Barr wrote his three page “summary” of the Mueller report, excising everything that cast the slightest doubt on Donald Trump and taking fragments of sentences hugely out of context, there was one man he credited with helping to make the instant determination that Trump had done no wrong—Rod Rosenstein. When Barr took to the stage to pre-spin the redacted report before its release, he brought Rosenstein up with him so the Deputy Attorney General could contribute his fixed and glassy-eyed stare to the proceedings.
As it turns out, both Barr and Trump have a lot to be thankful for when it comes to Rosenstein. Because, as the Washington Post makes clear, Rosenstein did everything he could to keep Trump happy and keep his job at the DOJ—even if that meant he knowingly lied about the outcome of the investigation.
Rosenstein — who, by one account, had gotten teary-eyed just before the call in a meeting with Trump’s chief of staff — sought to defuse the volatile situation and assure the president he was on his team, according to people familiar with matter. He criticized the Times report, published in late September, and blamed it on former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose recollections formed its basis. Then he talked about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and told the president he would make sure Trump was treated fairly, people familiar with the conversation said.
If Rosenstein looked like a zombie on stage with Barr, it’s because he sold his soul to hang onto his job. Rosenstein threw Andrew McCabe under the bus, promised everyone a good outcome from Mueller, and assured Trump that he was “on his team” while getting weepy over the idea that Trump was mad at him. And the final nail in the coffin of Rosenstein’s integrity—he sold himself to Trump as the man who could make things look legit, while delivering the answer that Trump wanted.
“I give the investigation credibility,” Rosenstein said, according to an administration official with knowledge of what was said during the call. “I can land the plane.”
And he did it. He genuinely made people concerned that his departure would have had a negative effect on the investigation. He made us believe that he was the one good man standing between Trump and ending the investigation … when he had already made it clear to Trump that was going to “land” the report in a way that would work for the White House.
The truth is that, even now, with the redaction-laden report in hand, we don’t know what instructions Rosenstein provided to Mueller. However, we can be pretty sure on one point—Rosenstein allowed Mueller to investigate past real-estate transactions, tax fraud, and bank fraud carried out by Paul Manafort. But Rosenstein did not allow Mueller to look into these same issues when it came to Trump or any member of his family.
All right, let’s read pundits.
Rod Rosenstein
Charles Pierce has his take on the breaking news about Rosenstein.
Esquire
It is impossible to come out of a newspaper story worse than Rosenstein does here. He is now marked as some weird hybrid of L. Patrick Gray and Uriah Heep, with a dollop of Ottoman eunuch in there somewhere. Gaze in awe. …
Rosenstein's credibility, such as it ever was, is now completely in tatters. I suspect that his future includes many appearances before many House committees and perhaps, as my pal, Bill Livingston, the Commodore of the Cuyahoga, once put it, riding every ride at Depositionland. The credibility of the Department of Justice is in even worse shape. We're very likely to hear more and more about Rosenstein's relationship with Robert Mueller and his prosecutors, and I suspect that will not be pretty. At least now we know what accounts for Rosenstein's animatronic mien at William Barr's pre-Mueller press conference.
Even those tatters look tattered. And as a million people have already pointed out — Bill Clinton exchanging pleasantries for a few minutes with an attorney general who recused herself from the investigation is still treated on the right as a “lock her up” moment (any “her” will do these days), but Trump directly talking with Rosenstein about the investigation, receiving multiple calls from Rosenstein assuring him that he was “not a target” and having Rosenstein beg to be left in place so he could “land” this thing for Trump … no, sorry, there’s no way this isn’t 1000x worse.
Climate Change
Will Bunch on the coming, inevitable flood of climate change refugees.
Philadelphia Enquirer
Let’s stipulate right here that President Trump doesn’t understand a lot of things, even as he enters his 28th month in charge of the massive bureaucratic battleship that is the U.S. government. But no issue has flummoxed our rage-prone 45th president more than the rise in unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border -- even after promising his xenophobic base that his harsh immigration crackdown would make America great again.
When numbers came into the White House showing this decade’s biggest surge in refugees at the border -- with Border Patrol agents detaining as many as 4,000 migrants, many of them women and children, in a single day -- Trump reportedly went ballistic. He yelled and fumed at his then-Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen until he finally forced her out of the job, partly because she wouldn’t buy into the president’s ideas to fight migration with moves that were probably illegal and unworkable and certainly immoral.
Pausing a second to think about positions immoral enough to send Kirstjen Nielsen to the sidelines …. okay, continue.
Experts (admittedly, non-persons in Trumpland) believe that a sizable portion of the recent steep increase in migrants making the long and dangerous journey from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are doing so because record drought in the region -- the result of a warming planet -- has destroyed crops and left destitute farmers desperate to save their families. Simply put, images of armed U.S. officers seizing kids at the border still won’t deter parents who see the only alternative as famine and crushing poverty.
Note that this isn’t a prediction about the future. This is a “sizable portion” of the current increase in the number of refugees. But that number is going to get worse. Much worse. And Trump is not just failing to plan for it, he’s ordering people to fail to plan.
Jonathan Chait is genuinely ready to go backwards on environmental policy.
New York Magazine
Last month, the Green Advocacy Project conducted a poll on the Green New Deal. The results are alarming. Slightly more Americans oppose the idea (46 percent) than support it (43 percent), but the truly catastrophic finding is the imbalance in passion. The opposition is extraordinarily intense, with nearly all opponents of the Green New Deal registering strong opposition, while those in favor are split between supporting it strongly and only somewhat. And this of course is happening before anybody has even attempted the difficult-to-impossible task of translating the Green New Deal’s mostly popular precepts into specific proposals with concrete trade-offs.
So, remind me, why are we doing this again?
Well, we’re doing this because it’s necessary. And the reason that the polling isn’t great is … hang on a second. Who is the “Green Advocacy Project?” I have to say I never heard of them before. And as far as i can tell, they’ve never done a poll before, and they provide very limited information on the methodology for this poll. Looking at their web site, they seem to consist of three people, only one of whom has any background in climate change advocacy at all.
So here’s a better question: Why is Jonathan Chait citing this poll? Because it tells him what he wants. Chait has been attacking the Green New Deal from the moment it appeared, along with attacking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other freshman Democrats, and has reported inaccurately about the plan and what it contains — which he does again this week.
And no, “let’s just do what Obama did” is not an alternative plan. President Obama would gladly tell you as much.
Conservative Elites
Paul Krugman on how Trump’s financial pick really hates the “heartland.”
New York Times
“If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.” So declared Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to install on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, during a 2014 event held at a think tank called, yes, the Heartland Institute.
Did Trump remind the people he was visiting in Green Bay last night of this statement? No? I can’t imagine why not.
Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics — always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it — is utterly disqualifying.
His remarks about the Midwest, however, highlight more than his unsuitability for the Fed. They also provide an illustration of something I’ve been noticing for a while: The thinly veiled contempt conservative elites feel for the middle-American voters they depend on. …
Look at where the belief that liberals don’t respect the heartland comes from, and it turns out that it has little to do with things Democrats actually say, let alone their policies. It is, instead, a story line pushed relentlessly by Fox News and other propaganda organizations, relying on out-of-context quotes and sheer fabrication.
Conservative contempt, by contrast, is real. Moore’s “armpit” line evidently didn’t shock his audience, probably because disparaging views about middle America are widespread among right-wing intellectuals and, more discreetly, right-wing politicians.
They’re absolutely true for Donald Trump. For Trump, the Midwest is a reliable source of suckers to buy into his “university” and pump their fist at his rallies. It’s not like Trump was visiting Green Bay when he wasn’t running for something.
2020 Democratic Candidates
Renée Graham wants Elizabeth Warren to keep on doing what she has been doing.
Boston Globe
Senator Elizabeth Warren is running the most fearless campaign of this still-nascent presidential season.
She was the first Democratic candidate to call for impeachment hearings against the president. In this post-Mueller report era, that also puts her ahead of skittish House Democratic leaders. Warren has offered a detailed plan to cancel billions in outstanding student loan debt and make public colleges free. Her proposal also calls for at least $50 billion in funding for historically black colleges and universities, some of which are struggling to survive.
At her recent CNN town hall, Warren was clear about the anti-competitive antics of Big Tech behemoths like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and forceful about why she believes they should be broken up.
Allow me to state the obvious: if Warren were a white man, she’d likely be surging past her competition vying for the Democratic nomination.
I can’t match Graham’s certainty on that note, but I will match her in praising how Warren has handled her campaign over the last month. She’s been forthright. She’s been clear. She’s refused to hide behind rhetoric or to dodge questions. And she’s hit one policy after another out of the park with strong positions and clear explanations.
She certainly deserves to be doing better in the polls.
In a recent Vox interview, author and philosopher Kate Manne said, “People always say they want substance, but when it’s a woman bringing it, it seems unexciting. My worry is electability is a smokescreen for this sadly common thing, which is not wanting to support a female candidate. It seems to me that the ‘she’s not electable’ excuse could be just that, an excuse.”
Hours after Warren shared details about her proposals during her town hall, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked one of her male opponents why his website doesn’t even have a policy section. After some hemming and hawing, he said, “I also think it’s important that we not drown people in minutiae before we’ve vindicated the values that animate our policies.” Wut?
I’ll see that “Wut” and raise it an “ugg.” Everyone who has bought into the pre-conceived notion that Warren as a dry academic who doesn’t bring passion to her speeches has not been watching Elizabeth Warren. They’ve been watching pundits talk about Elizabeth Warren.
Joan Walsh on Biden’s not so slick entry into the race.
The Nation
I’ll admit it: I’m skeptical about former vice president Joe Biden’s third presidential run. But when I read last week—in The Atlantic and the Philadelphia Inquirer, two outlets I trust—that he planned to launch his campaign with a speech in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Wednesday, I thought: That’s bold, given the backdrop of the appalling August 2017 white-supremacist riot there that killed protester Heather Heyer, which Donald Trump refused to condemn. That’s daring. Maybe he’s going to run a campaign that’s in step with the new, multiracial, progressive Democratic Party.
But within a day or so, the same outlets reported that no, Team Biden wasn’t doing that. Instead, he’d launch with a video announcement on Thursday, and then head to Pittsburgh for his first official appearance, in a union-heavy crowd, on Monday. Nope: It’s clear Biden still intends to center his campaign on blue-collar white men. Meanwhile, he can’t care about his reputation for being too close to corporate America, the author of a bankruptcy bill that’s emerged as a case study in how Democrats, not just Republicans, sold themselves out to the banking industry—and sold out millions of Americans. Biden’s first actual campaign event—it’s not public—will be at a fund-raiser held by Comcast senior vice president David Cohen in Philadelphia on Thursday.
Biden may still be the frontrunner in this race, but there’s absolutely no sign that he gets where he’s out of step with the party base. I hope he enjoys his campaign launch, because it could be his best week on the trail.
I like Joe Biden. I really do. I liked Joe Biden during his previous runs. His personal story is touching. His appeal to rust-belt voters is genuine. And I love, love, every single one of those Barack and Joe memes. But Biden’s entry into the race has been the opposite of smooth. His refusal to apologize to Anita Hill for his own actions is beyond regrettable. His embrace of can’t-we-all-get-alongism is plain frightening. And his policies seem less well developed than many candidates who haven’t been at this game for decades. Let me just say that “electability” is the least electable quality a candidate can have, no matter what the week one polls are saying. Biden needs to inspire if he wants to win, and he hasn’t demonstrated that Joe Biden, take three, is capable of being more than a nostalgia trip. But hey. It’s early.
Michael Tomasky on Biden’s intro video … and expecting the party to meet him in the middle.
Daily Beast
Well, it wasn’t the smoothest launch from Joe Biden, was it? First it was Wednesday, and three speeches. Then it was Thursday. But still a speech, or so I thought. Then it was just a video. …
He could have started this video in a thousand different ways. The obvious thing, of course, would have been Scranton. His hometown, which codes Pennsylvania working class like few other places, has the benefit of making some people smile as they think of the Dunder-Mifflin gang. Plenty of upsides there.
So it was interesting that he chose Charlottesville. He started with Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. Then the music changed to a minor key, and he upshifted to what happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Stark images of Nazi flags and marching thugs carrying torches. Reference to “Europe in the 1930s.” Reference to Donald Trump’s “very fine people”—words, he said, that “stunned the world.”
“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d seen in my lifetime.”
Biden is not wrong about that. I’ve definitely heard … someone say it before.
Charlottesville is Biden’s bid to get the attention of some younger voters, while the video’s second half is aimed squarely at his base, the kinds of Democrats whose blood still stirs at the sight of men storming Utah Beach.
By the way, those Democrats still exist, in very large numbers. This is one proposition Biden’s candidacy will put to the test—whether the center of gravity in the Democratic Party today has shifted irrevocably to the younger and leftier crowd one encounters on social media.
In December, Gallup asked Democrats whether on the whole they’d rather see their party become more liberal or more moderate. More moderate won, and pretty convincingly: 54 to 41 percent. By the way, Gallup asked Republicans that question too, about their party, except of course “more conservative” instead of “more liberal.” Shockingly (not), Republicans said more conservative by 57-37 (can you imagine? More conservative than this!).
I know it’s hard for some people to believe, because some people have a definition of “progressive” that means “supports my candidate and only my candidate,” but practically everyone on Daily Kos is somewhere between very progressive and very, very progressive. Checking again … yep, everyone. So it’s possible that we could be wrong about how many Democrats Biden can pull out of the space anywhere from left of Trump to right of pretty much every other candidate running under the Democratic banner. Maybe that is the winning play. Or maybe there’s a lot of people, like some I’ve met in my own county, who are Democrats only because they used to be Democrats, or because their parents were, but who could not imagine voting for someone these days not vetted by AM radio and approved by Sean Hannity. That second thought … worries me.
Let me note that Biden’s focus on Charlottesville gains potency in light of the horrible events on Saturday and Trump’s appear to Robert E Lee voters.
Nancy LeTourneau on how Kamala Harris is put in a tough spot for being tough.
Washington Monthly
Kamala Harris has been criticized for her time as a prosecutor at the city, county, and state level. Some of the charges have been absurd, like dismissing her candidacy because she was a “cop.” But some of them have been questions she needs to answer, like the ones posed by a young man at a CNN town hall event.
As usual, LeTourneau’s piece includes a lot of quotes from other sources, which makes it difficult to excerpt or summarize here. In this case, there’s also a video so … go watch it.
Leonard Pitts on Franklin Graham vs. Pete Buttigieg.
Miami Herald
At least Judas got 30 pieces of silver. Franklin Graham got a tax cut and the promise of a border wall.
Some may consider it unfair, likening the tragic villain of the Bible to Billy Graham’s controversial son. And no, their sins are not alike. Judas handed Jesus over to his enemies, then killed himself in anguished repentance. Graham is just a fervent supporter of Donald Trump.
But for all the surface dissimilarity of their deeds, the two men are ultimately guilty of the same transgression. Meaning betrayal. And here it must be said in the spirit of Christian humility that Graham is hardly the only one. As flawed and fallible human beings, every Christian at some point betrays Jesus. That’s what forgiveness is for.
But here it also must be said in the spirit of simple truth telling that white evangelicals like Graham have been particularly prolific — and shameless — in that regard where Trump is concerned. He’s a racist, misogynistic braggart and bully who gloated about sexual assault, apparently cheated on his wife with a porn star, could not name a favorite Bible verse nor correctly pronounce the name of one of the best known books in The Book.
Pitt’s does such a fine job here you’d be denying yourself the best of Sunday morning if you don’t get over there and read it. Read it, people.
And let me say that Jesus was so concerned about homosexuality that he mentioned it … not at all. However, he had a lot to say about blowhards who pound their chest in the public square and brag about their own sanctity.
Poway Synagogue Shooting
David Shribman on the the latest Anti-Semitic hate crime.
Los Angeles Times
And so, once again, shots rang out in a synagogue, worshipers were dispersed in horror, death was in the air where, moments earlier, blessings and chants had filled a sanctuary.
The sad truth is that in our age the word “sanctuary” has lost its meaning. And the sad truth — in the wake of this latest shooting — is that the phrase “Chabad of Poway” will have an entirely new meaning, just as the phrase “Tree of Life” no longer denotes a place of worship at the corner of Wilkins and Shady avenues in Pittsburgh, three blocks from my house, but a shooting rampage exactly six months ago that killed 11 congregants and horrified the world.
Chabad of Poway. Tree of Life. Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. The Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec City. The names of these sacred places and too many others have taken on tragic meaning because they are the sites of tragedies.
The frequency of hate crimes in the United States has been so accelerated that there’s a good chance that by the time this runs, my sub-head indicating that this is “the latest” example of an anto-Semitic hate crime … will no longer be true.
In these last six months, there have been vigils, multi-faith sessions, rallies, forums, examinations of the roots of hate, and, this being the age for such things, political recriminations. None of it — not the services, not the essays, not the memories, not even the declaration of community unity across faiths, always with a rabbi, a priest, a minister and an imam present — stopped the shooter in Poway.
There was standing room only in the massive Soldiers and Sailors Memorial and Museum in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh shortly after the synagogue shooting. The outpouring of sympathy, sadness and support gave some succor to a grieving community, to be sure. But it did not stop the Poway shooter.
That’s a lot of thoughts and prayers. And no actual action. While those mourners were gathered in Poway after a 19-year-old gunman who wrote a hate-filled, antisemitic manifesto opened fire in a synagogue, this was going on in Indianapolis.
These two things are not unrelated.