Well, it’s been a week. It’s been such a week that the last witness of the impeachment hearing to appear before the House this week only wrapped up a few hours ago. Acting Assistant Secretary of State Philip Reeker hasn’t gotten a lot of publicity, and didn’t seem to be a key witness. Certainly Republicans were dismissive of Reeker as just “another hearsay witness.” The major value of his testimony, coming in for a rare Saturday session, seemed to be in speaking about the plot that Rudy Giuliani and pals launched to oust Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
As Giuliani was trying to find someone who would play along with announcing an investigation into Joe Biden (and, of course, Hillary Clinton’s emails) he regarded Yovanovitch as someone who was a stumbling block. Honesty and dedication are always issues for the Trump White House. So Giuliani and now-jailed associated Lev Parnas cooked up a scheme to paint Yovanovitch as that scummiest of human beings—a never-Trumper. Giuliani and Parnas fed Trump a line that, when she thought she was speaking off the record, Yovanovitch was always running down Trump to the Ukrainian officials. Just like that, a diplomat with thirty years experience and a deep working knowledge of Ukraine was out.
When Reeker, who had charge of policy across Europe, heard about the smear campaign launched against Yovanovitch, he stood up for her. He didn’t just declare his personal support for the embattled ambassador, he took his concerns up the line to Ulich Brechbuhl, the top assistant to Mike Pompeo. What he got back was the message that Yovanovitch was out, and Pompeo was not going to make any public announcement either to help her hold her position or to praise her lengthy service. But to what extent Pompeo was directly involved in these events, or what orders came to the State Department from Trump, isn’t clear. Which is why Reeker was on Capitol Hill.
Then he went behind closed doors and spoke for over eight hours. So … whatever he had to say, it seems he either said it in quantity or in extreme detail.
Reeker is yet another State Department official who appeared despite instructions from both Pompeo and the White House to steer clear of the inquiry. And he comes at the end of another week in which the inquiry continued to fill out and confirm its information. But if it seems that this point they’re revisiting some of the same ground already covered, they are. Even though the inquiry announced a handful of additional witnesses (including, ahem, Ulich Brechbuhl), don’t expect these current closed door sessions to go past the middle of November. Republicans have been calling for open hearings. They’re going to get them a lot sooner than they’d like.
Let’s go read pundits.
Jonathan Chait on how Republican Senators are hedging their bets on Trump.
New York Magazine
President Trump is probably going to survive impeachment. But even though he only needs 34 Senate Republicans to keep him in office, that outcome is hardly preordained. Far from standing behind him, the Senate is keeping the backdoor unlocked.
The latest machinations in Congress are designed to create the appearance of staunch partisan support for President Trump. In reality, it indicates the opposite. Senator Lindsey Graham, who has positioned himself as one of Trump’s most debased sycophants, has tried to assemble a show of support. But Graham has only been able to get 44 of the 54 Republicans to sign his resolution. And even mustering that rather tepid showing, reports Jonathan Swan, required negotiating with Mitch McConnell to soften the wording.
The resolution itself, tellingly, contains no substantive defense of Trump’s behavior whatsoever. It merely complains that the House impeachment has been conducted in secrecy, and urges some procedural changes. Trump should be permitted “to call witnesses on his behalf, and have a basic understanding of the accusations against him that would form any basis for impeachment.” (Of course, if Trump having a “basic understanding” of the charges is necessary to impeach him, he’s in the clear, since he seems to lack the capacity to understand the offense.) It likewise calls for the House “to vote to initiate a formal impeachment inquiry.”
On top of all that, Graham’s the-Democrats-aren’t-doing-it-right bill was made absolutely irrelevant by the Friday ruling from Judge Beryl Howell. The judge made absolutely clear what Graham, and ever Republican in Matt Gaetz frat boy riot, already knew — Democratic leadership in the House has been extremely careful to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ of this inquiry. The absolutely last thing that Nancy Pelosi or Adam Schiff want is to give Trump some form of technical out. So, despite Republican claims to the contrary, they’ve followed the rules super carefully … the rules, by the way, that the Republicans wrote.
Joan Walsh on how the widening gyre is likely to slurp down a clutch of Trump supporters.
The Nation
I’ve predicted it often: As Donald Trump goes down, he’s taking a lot of people with him. Fittingly, that includes the thugs and/or toadies who’ve stuck with the president even as his administration has cycled through more top personnel than any in modern history. It makes sense that those who stick around the narcissist in chief are men who are better at ass-kissing than doing their actual jobs. But at some point, incompetence and/or corruption will take their toll. And over the weekend it became clear that’s happening, quickly, to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Giuliani, of course, doesn’t technically work for the administration, but with his interventions in Ukraine and other scandals, he and Trump have blurred the lines of public and private. Weeks ago, we learned that Attorney General William Barr was miffed to hear that Trump lumped him with Giuliani as one of the people Ukrainian officials were expected to cooperate with in investigating Democrats, before Trump would come through with political and military support that the new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, badly needed. This weekend, the Justice Department struck back against Trump’s grifting lawyer, with a statement announcing that its attorneys would never have met with Giuliani to discuss one of his clients had they known that two of his “associates”—Ukrainian Americans Lev Parnas and Igor Frumon—were under investigation by the Southern District of New York for, among other things, funneling foreign cash to Republicans. (They were indicted two weeks ago.)
Republicans stumbling out of today’s hearing with Reeker kept repeating that the testimony of the assistant secretary of state didn’t lay a glove on Trump. That may even be true. But Reeker’s testimony appears to underline the lies, conspiracy, and intimidation being carried out by Giuliani, and it also makes clear—again—how involved Mike Pompeo is in this mess.
The testimony being heard over the last few weeks isn’t all about nailing Trump. It’s about bringing down the whole criminal gang.
Michael Tomasky on the irreparable damage being done by Trump’s congressional cadre.
Daily Beast
They are no longer merely lying. Lying is covering up the truth. Lying is, No, Mom, honest, I didn’t break Aunt Donna’s Hummel. Or: No, Your Honor, I did not bilk my investors out of $4 million and abscond to Grand Cayman.
What these people are doing goes way beyond that. It’s a direct nuclear assault on the truth. It’s not: I didn’t break the figurine. Instead, it’s:
Mom, not only did I not break it, but Susie broke it, and I painstakingly glued it back together after she did so, and the facts that a) Susie has been away at camp all this time and b) you’re looking at it there on the dining room table in 37 pieces are tricks, delusions—manifestations of a vast, fake-news conspiracy against me orchestrated by Susie and Aunt Donna. They’ve met together recently on more than one occasion, after all, and people are saying that Aunt Donna bought two boxes of Samoas and one box of Tagalongs from Susie; and that, dear Mother, is proof of the cabal!
For this, we do not have a word. In the entire English language. Chew on that for a minute.
Not only are we short of words, we’re running damn thin on metaphors. Because there’s so much more to what Trump and the Republicans are doing.
Will Bunch has been watching The Watchmen … and you should, too.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Many of the 1.5 million folks who tuned in Sunday night to watch the premiere of HBO’s transformational comic-book adaptation The Watchmen clearly had a hard time unseeing the horrific first eight minutes of the series, as the words “TULSA 1921” flashed on the screen.
An angry, chaotic mob of white people, some in ivory robes, firing rifles at random black citizens or beating them up on dusty streets, while one hurls a Molotov cocktail into a black-owned business. A young African-American boy, hidden in the back of a coach attempting to flee the massacre, peers through a bullet hole to see the corpses of two black men dragged across the pavement of the Oklahoma city.
As soon as the episode ended, thousands took to the internet asking variations of the same question: Did that really happen?
It happened. Though of course, the HBO series undersold the genuine horror of the events that overcame the successful and growing black community of Tulsa. One of the best things that science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction of all kinds can do it take a social issue and recast it in terms that can make viewers or readers who might recoil from facing an issue head on reconsider their positions. The tricks and metaphors that scifi uses to achieve these goals can sometimes be awfully obvious (why, he’s black on the right side!) but they can also be subtle and compelling.
But what happened on The Watchmen last Sunday was something quite different. In addition to an intriguing story of an America where a handful of caped figures had altered the structure of the government and police departments (and the outcome of the Vietnam War), what audiences got was a straightforward history lesson that made it absolutely clear to anyone watching that massive government-sanctioned violence against black Americans did not stop with the Civil War. It also didn’t stop with Tulsa. There’s a good argument to be made that it still hasn’t stopped.
Not only did the 1921 Tulsa massacre actually take place, but the reality is arguably far worse than what was depicted on HBO. The flames that lit the night sky a bright orange in The Watchmen’s depiction destroyed some 35 city blocks when the violence actually occurred on May 31 and June 1 of 1921. The fact that America went out of its way to avoid talking about what happened those two dreadful days has also made it impossible to get an exact toll of what many were killed in the worst outbreak of racial violence in U.S. history, but best estimates are that between 100 to 300 people were murdered — nearly all African-American.
Nancy LeTourneau on how Hillary Clinton was right … again.
Washington Monthly
Even though Clinton didn’t say the name of the person she was referring to, Tulsi Gabbard immediately knew who she was talking about and responded with an unhinged rant about Clinton on Twitter—then proceeded to go on Tucker Carlson’s show to repeat her attack.
A lot of reporters in the mainstream media claimed that Clinton had accused Gabbard of being a Russian asset without any evidence, while Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, took to the New York Times to suggest that Clinton’s remarks were a conspiracy theory based simply on innuendo.
I suspect that Clinton chose her words carefully and, rather than accuse Gabbard of anything, was connecting the dots about Russia’s interference based on evidence that has been widely reported. For example, back in February, Robert Windrem and Ben Popken reported that “Russia’s propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard.”
Analysis has demonstrated that the same Russian sites and bots that supported Trump in 2016 have targeted their support at a single candidate in the 2020 Democratic nomination. And they did so long before Hillary Clinton spoke up.
Having been on the front line of Putin’s last attempt to interfere in a presidential election, Clinton is very aware of the tactics that were used against her. It wasn’t simply that Moscow supported Donald Trump. In his indictment against those who participated in Russia’s social media campaign, Robert Mueller documented that they were also involved in supporting candidates during the Democratic primary.
…
The evidence is clear: Russia established a pattern of attempting to disrupt the Democratic primary in 2016 and is obviously doing the same thing this year. The only remaining question is why they chose Tulsi Gabbard.
And yes, this is not LeTourneau’s newest column. I focused on this one … because I wanted to. Go read the whole thing.
Laurie Roberts on ICE deporting a troubled vet to San Salvador.
Arizona Republic
A Marine combat veteran, one who served two tours in Iraq where he was seriously injured, has received the thanks of a grateful nation.
Late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, he was kicked out of the country, deported from Arizona to El Salvador where his life may be in danger given his U.S. military service.
“They snuck him out in the middle of the night,” Texas attorney Tom Sanchez told the Orange County Register.
Take a good look in the mirror today, America. Tell me, what do you see?
Maybe you know the story of Jose Segovia Benitez. The 38-year-old Marine was brought to this country from El Salvador when he was 3 years old. He grew up in Long Beach, Calif., and was a legal permanent resident. A week after graduating from high school in 1999, he became a U.S. Marine. He did two combat tours in Iraq, returning home in 2004 after a bomb blast left him with a traumatic brain injury.
Forget for a moment the millions of other people going through this experience. This single account is more than sufficient to damn the morality of the nation.
Renée Graham says Trump’s racial issues are simple — he’s a racist.
Boston Globe
President Trump’s tweet comparing the House impeachment inquiry to “a lynching” is callous, inflammatory, ahistorical, and ignorant.
Don’t call it “problematic.”
By dictionary definition, “problematic” means “doubtful, uncertain; questionable.” There’s never anything uncertain about Trump’s actions, and that includes his pointed evocation of acts of racist terrorism. Everything he does is very deliberate. Still, just wait — someone will call Trump’s usage of a term that conjures black pain and should engender American shame “problematic,” as if that even comes close to capturing the agonies he resurrected for his own repugnant self-pity party.
No word has starred in more headlines or news reports throughout the Trump presidency than “problematic.” It’s the go-to expression to describe whatever contemptible behavior or comment he or his administration is inflicting on the nation.
Problematic is what reporters say when they give at least a nod to the fact that Trump and his supporters are regularly engaging in racist slogans, racist statements, racist chants, and racist acts. That’s on a good day. Most of the time they’re afraid to say anything as hard as “problematic.”
Leonard Pitts reminds men that yes, dammit, we are the issue.
Miami Herald
Women are not the problem.
There has always been something grotesque about the idea that they are. But to embrace that idea in the #MeToo era is not just grotesque, but clueless. It suggests that you slept through a reckoning that has shifted the Zeitgeist.
So somebody please tell Ernst & Young to wake up and smell the 2019.
The London-based multinational business services firm has been struggling to contain the fallout of a story posted by HuffPost last week about a June 2018 training seminar at its office in Hoboken. “Power-Presence-Purpose,” conducted, according to the firm, by a third-party contractor, was supposed to offer female employees advice to help them navigate the workplace.
And it did. Problem is, the advice it offered hasn’t been relevant since Ricky spanked Lucy.
“Women’s brains,” this group of women was told, “absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.”
Over the course of three-plus decades, I worked with just about everyone of the big accounting firms on one project or another, including Ernst & Young. I believe it’s safe to say that they were, everyone of them, incredibly riddled with everything that makes a bad boss hate-able—rigid corporate beliefs, the confusing of bullying with strength, a preening sense of superiority, and deeply embedded racism and sexism. Nothing seems to have changed.
There was more. Women were advised to avoid “crying,” being “rambling and redundant” or speaking in a “high-pitched or shrill” voice. One attendee told HuffPost she was advised not to “directly confront men in meetings, because men perceive this as threatening.”
“Don’t be too aggressive or outspoken,” the attendee said she was told. “If you’re having a conversation with a man, cross your legs and sit at an angle to him. Don’t talk to a man face-to-face. Men see that as threatening.”
Please. The next man who says something like this? Threaten them.
Elijah Cummings The fight for the soul of American democracy.
Washington Post
This op-ed is adapted from a foreword that Cummings wrote July 17 for the forthcoming book, “In Defense of Public Service: How 22 Million Government Workers Will Save Our Republic,” by Cedric L. Alexander.
As I pen these words, we are living through a time in our nation’s history when powerful forces are seeking to divide us one from another; when the legitimacy of our constitutional institutions is under attack; and when factually supported truth itself has come under relentless challenge.
I am among those who have not lost confidence in our ability to right the ship of American democratic life, but I also realize that we are in a fight — a fight for the soul of our democracy.
As an American of color, I have been able to receive an excellent public education, become an attorney, and serve my community and country in both the Maryland General Assembly and Congress because of one very important fact: Americans of conscience from every political vantage point took our Constitution seriously and fought for my right to be all that I could become.
This is the personal debt that I and so many others with my heritage owe to our democratic republic — to the 20-million-plus Americans who serve our republic and its values in our nation’s civil service.
And this is also why I, personally, will remain in the fight to preserve our republic and the humane and equitable values at its foundation for as long as I can draw breath.
And that’s the point where I started crying.