Digby:
The New York Times followed up on its smear story on Joe Biden and Ukraine of the other day with an update last night. It is a bit more forthcoming about the fact that the Trump people are behind it. As a matter of fact, they openly admit it:
Rudy Giuliani:
We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do. There’s nothing illegal about it. Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.
I guess this is the new normal for Republicans. They've always been more inclined to do dirty tricks but this is them just openly leveraging the power of the presidency and America's vast influence with foreign countries to smear Republicans' domestic political opponents for them.
Essentially Rudy is saying that the President will be very grateful to Ukraine if they investigate and prosecute the son of his political enemy Joe
USA Today editorial:
No, the case against President Trump is far from closed
In this case, the call to move on is being made by actual members of Congress who are undermining their institution and their authority.
One day, they will regret this. They will regret it when a Democrat is next elected president and abuses his or her power. They will regret it when their grandchildren ask about their role in fostering democracy. Perhaps they will even regret it when they next look in the mirror.
McConnell's "move along, folks, there's nothing to see here" approach is contradicted by more than 800 former prosecutors, Republicans and Democrats, who have signed a letter saying the Mueller report provided more than enough evidence to indict Trump for obstruction of justice, were he anyone else but the president.
Barbara McQuade/USA Today:
Trump has entered Phase 2 of his legal defense strategy: All-out war with Congress
In the past, we have counted on norms to help us avoid showdowns between branches of government, sometimes described as a “constitutional crisis.” One of these norms is the process of accommodation, in which branches of government negotiate a resolution that allows the parties to move on without court intervention. President Ronald Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, described accommodation in a 1981 opinion as essential to responsible exercise of government power: “The accommodation required is not simply an exchange of concessions or a test of political strength. It is an obligation of each branch to make a principled effort to acknowledge, and if possible to meet, the legitimate needs of the other branch.”
Even so, we all know by now that “accommodation” is not how Trump rolls. He is a disrupter. He is not afraid to break the norms; in fact, he thrives on it. Norm-busting is part of his appeal to his base. He does not shrink from a good fight. He has made a career of using the legal process to bully others to get his way
Max Boot/WaPo:
Republicans are hall-of-fame hypocrites
“In scandals such as this, it is always members of the president’s party who have particular leverage, and therefore who have a particular responsibility, to hold the president accountable for his actions.”
So wrote noted Republican moralist Bill Bennett in his 1998 book, “The Death of Outrage.” Bennett went on to excoriate Democrats who were “troubled by the credible allegations of ethical and criminal wrongdoing” and who saw “the harm that is being inflicted on America” but failed to say so “forcefully, unambiguously, publicly.” “No Democrat went to the president of the United States and insisted, emphatically, that he do what is right, none insisted that he fully answer questions, stop stonewalling, and come out, immediately, with all of the facts, wherever they might lead,” he wrote. “This is shameful.” (I tip my fedora to the indefatigable researcher Windsor Mann for pointing out this passage.)
How much more shameful is it now that the members of the president’s party — Bennett’s party — will not come out “forcefully, unambiguously, publicly” to call out President Trump for his illegal and unethical conduct and insist that he comply with congressional attempts to unearth the facts.
Julian Zelizer/WaPo:
Democrats are complicit if they don’t impeach Trump
Given the abuses of power by Trump, why are Democrats so worried about starting a process to see whether articles of impeachment are warranted?
The party has good reason to be leery. The Democrats fear triggering a destabilizing political process that should be used only as a mechanism of last resort. Because Republicans in Congress have decided to put partisanship above country on all matters related to Trump, Democrats would go into this process without any chance of bipartisan support. Pelosi and other Democrats want to avoid doing what they believe Republicans did in 1998: They allowed impeachment to become a tool of partisan warfare. Better to wait and be patient, they say, until there is no choice or, better yet, until he loses his position.
Indeed, political concerns are also at work. Sensing that they can win back the White House in 2020, many Democrats don’t want to take a single step that might jeopardize their standing in 2020 by fueling a pro-Trump backlash to Democratic investigations. The worst of all worlds, they say, is to mobilize the president’s base, lose valuable time when they can be discussing key policy issues, and then watch Senate Republicans exonerate him regardless of what the investigations find.
All of these concerns are reasonable.
But sometimes parties can be too scared about using their power when it is necessary to do so, and we keep getting closer to such a moment every day.
Remarkable because the author is not prone to partisanship or hyperbole.
Philip Stephens/Financial Times ($$$):
The hardest thing for a hegemonic power is to see its dominance wane. US president Donald Trump’s angry unilateralism, whether his trade war against China or sanctions against Cuba, is supposed to be proof of power. Another way of looking at the president’s belligerent tweetstorms is as a cry of pain for a mythologised past.When Franklin Roosevelt prepared to meet Winston Churchill during the closing stages of the second world war, the US president received some cautionary advice from his secretary of state on handling the British prime minister. Churchill, Edward Stettinius told Roosevelt, would struggle to accept a new, postwar, international order. Having been a leader for so long, the Brits were not accustomed to a secondary role.Stettinius was right. Britain had been bankrupted by the war. America was booming. The peace marked the formal transfer of western leadership to the US. Washington’s ally found the psychological adjustment long and painful. Even after the humiliation of the Suez expedition in 1956, Britain was loath to own up. Surely, its politicians imagined, it still sat alongside the US and the Soviet Union as one of the “Big Three”? Bizarre as it seems, there remains an echo of this howl of anguish in the “global Britain” fantasies of leading Brexiters.
Andrew Neil is a long time Tory Conservative.
Noah Feldman/Bloomberg:
Executive Privilege Isn’t a Magic Wand to Protect Trump
The attorney general could have redacted parts of the Mueller report to protect presidential confidentiality. He didn’t, and now’s too late.
Barr already had a chance to redact anything from the Mueller report that in his judgment would’ve violated executive privilege — when he did the redaction in the first place.
But Barr didn’t redact anything at all from the report on the basis of executive privilege. In fact, he included plenty of material in the report, such as conversations between Trump and White House counsel Donald McGahn, that arguably could have been included within the privilege.
In other words, Barr has already effectively determined that nothing in the Mueller report needed to be redacted for executive privilege reasons.
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the assistant attorney general in charge of legislative affairs cited just one legal precedent: an opinion issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 1996, when Janet Reno was attorney general.
That letter is inapplicable. In it, the Office of Legal Counsel told President Bill Clinton that he could assert executive privilege over material requested by Congress in connection with the Whitewater investigation — in order to have government lawyers go through the material and determine whether it was in fact subject to executive privilege.
Jonathan Chait/New York magazine:
Trump Is Pressuring Ukraine to Smear Clinton and Biden
Trump is already burbling excitedly about the project. “I’m hearing it’s a major scandal, major problem,” Trump said on Fox News. “I hope for [Biden] it is fake news. I don’t think it is.”
Unlike the Russia scandal, this episode is one that Trump’s reelection campaign can undertake with the benefit of advance planning and some lawyering (Giuliani being at least technically a lawyer, or at least having the benefit of legal counsel he can consult). On its face, there is nothing illegal here. Trump is leveraging his power as president to compel a dependent foreign government to smear the opposition party. It’s just something no president has ever thought to do before. The powers legally available to a corrupt president and a party that has turned a blind eye to his violations of governing norms may be more terrifying than anybody has considered.