Peg Kerr's Reading Page

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1837166

Special counsel Robert Mueller was reportedly planning to deliver his report in the Russia counterintelligence investigation as soon as next week and then just as quickly, he wasn't. But as pundits pondered the notion that this might really be it, they were befuddled, perplexed, and even anxious at the prospect of the special counsel delivering anything so definitive with so many strands related to Donald Trump's inner circle still in a tangle of mystery. Those strands include everything from the very central indictment of Trump confidant Roger Stone for lying about his interactions with Russians to Don Jr.'s unforgettable Trump Tower confab with a Russian delegation to the more distant indictment of Paul Erickson, a conservative political operative and boyfriend of the also-indicted Russian spy Maria Butina. 

This week's rigorous speculation centered both on what findings would be included in Mueller's report and how much of that report would ultimately be relayed to Congress and made public by Trump's newly installed attorney general, William Barr. If I were a betting woman, I'd guess that Mueller's final determination will certainly lay out impeachable offenses, including an airtight case for obstruction of justice, while perhaps leaving some of the criminal conspiracy threads for another day under another prosecutor. But exactly how much of Mueller's report will ultimately reach lawmakers and the public will be a test of the man now charged with wide discretion over disseminating Mueller's revelations. 

Whatever Barr may have done or said to obtain the position he now holds doesn't exactly indicate what he's likely to do. As Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro has observed, the notion that absolute power corrupts absolutely is actually an overhyped axiom. "Power doesn't always corrupt," he offered, after years of studying Johnson. "What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do." President Johnson, of course, managed to enact some of the most pivotal civil rights laws of the 20th century after having a pretty abysmal voting record on civil rights legislation as a U.S. Senator.

What Attorney General Barr really wants to do with the position he auditioned for with Trump remains to be seen. But Democrats are already girding for battle if necessary.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1837166

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836575

If you thought Donald Trump’s obsession with personal loyalty and secrecy was just about FBI directors and payoffs to porn stars, think again. Trump’s unprecedented use of non-disclosure agreements for White House staff extends all the way down to interns, Asawin Suebsaeng reports. 

Interns aren’t just warned about leaking; they’re faced with someone from the White House counsel’s office “warning them that a breach of the NDA—blabbing to the media, for instance—could result in legal, and thus financial, consequences for them.” Since senior White House staffers have been told to sign NDAs with $10 million penalties for violations, this threat to interns is potentially terrifying. The Trump White House labels these threats as “ethics training,” despite Trump’s own wholesale rejection of the very notion of ethics.

As one former Obama administration official put it, while working in the White House requires discretion at all times, “this White House’s approach to non-disclosure agreements, even for interns, seems to suggest that guarding against criticism of the president and his family—what most of us would consider to be protected speech—is just as important as safeguarding the sensitive information the American public entrusts to the government.”

The good news is that White House NDAs are likely unenforceable. In fact, one ethics expert says, Trump officials could face serious penalties for trying to prevent any employee from talking to Congress about what they witnessed in the White House. But even an unenforceable intimidation tactic can work to intimidate, particularly when wielded against vulnerable interns. That’s the Trump way, though: bully, intimidate, and lie about your leverage over people. And since the other Trump way is to hire only multimillionaires and billionaires, $10 million may not sound like that much of a threat to these interns anyway.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836575

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836642

We don’t really need any more reasons to know that Donald Trump’s border wall is a terrible and ghastly idea. But just in case the waste of money, blatant xenophobia, lies, lack of public support, and complete failure to meaningfully address drug addiction aren’t enough, here’s one more: The plan will destroy sacred sites, including cemeteries. 

The Los Angeles Times reports that in 2018, the Trump administration was fully preparing to bulldoze its way through cemeteries near the border in order to build a fence. They received the  approval to do so from officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who waived laws that were previously designed to protect certain sites from fencing and barrier projects—including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts and a prohibition against disturbing the dead. In other words, Trump wants his base to have a wall so badly that he is willing to destroy wildlife refuges and build on top of dead bodies, robbing people of the right to pay respects to their relatives. 

How completely repugnant and shameful.

And it gets worse. In one Texas town, building Trump’s border fence would destroy an important piece of American history. The Jackson Ranch Church Cemetery, which sits north of the Rio Grande, is the resting place of families who bore the surnames Jackson and Ramirez. Nathaniel Jackson, born in 1798, was the heir to a plantation in Alabama. Jackson fell in love with an enslaved woman named Matilda Hicks, with whom he married and started a family. When the Civil War broke out and threatened their interracial family, they fled to Texas, stopping at the Rio Grande where they could also get to Mexico, which had already abolished slavery. 

Subsequently, Jackson bought a ranch that became a stop on the Underground Railroad. He was never caught, and after his death, he was buried in a family plot on the ranch. His children were also buried nearby in a second cemetery. For years, generations of the family maintained both the cemeteries. As time went on, the Jacksons intermarried with Tejano families—hence becoming Ramirezes. Their black ancestry faded eventually, but the Ramirezes continue to maintain the cemeteries to this day, which also now include monuments to their descendants who fought in World Wars I and II and Korea. In one, there is even a headstone honoring an ancestor who fought for the South in the Civil War, placed there before the Ramirez family knew their family history of involvement in the Underground Railroad. 

The family has obtained a lawyer and joined local activists in fighting the plan for the border fence, which would be built along a levee and cut off access to part of the cemeteries. While the government has given Trump the go-ahead to ruin not just sacred burial sites but also this vital part of history, they can’t even answer basic questions about the plan, such as: Will the bodies be exhumed? Will they be moved if they are exhumed? Who will pay for that? Will they consult the Ramirez family to get their permission? 

Just after Trump declared his bogus national emergency to try to get his wall, one of the supervisors on the Border Patrol “wall team” (yes, that’s an actual thing) went on television to discuss construction of the wall. He gave a very vague response to the concerns about the fate of cemeteries in this process, saying that there is no construction planned on the border fence near cemeteries “at this time.”

There are other families in the area that say that past fence construction has cut off their access to cemeteries as well. Those graves were simply bulldozed over, and the relatives were not allowed to visit the area for over a decade. When they finally were permitted access, they couldn’t find the graves of their relatives, and the cemetery was overgrown with brush, having been abandoned that entire time. 

Just when you think this situation can’t get any worse, it does. Trump is hell-bent on getting his border wall and is content to destroy lives in the process. He’ll also ruin a slice of the history marked by courage and determination on behalf of freedom for black Americans. Surely that’s not just coincidence. Trump is nothing if not consistent about making life unbearable for black and brown people, and that’s just what his base wants. Their so-called economic anxiety (read: racism) is so strong, they’ll gladly destroy the past, present, and future in order to preserve their own comfort and way of life. 

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836642

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836906

What do you do if you’re a U.S. attorney who wants to gain political cred with Trumpworld? For one prosecutor, North Carolina’s Bobby Higdon, the answer appears to be prosecuting noncitizens for voting, TPM’s Allegra Kirkland reports. The state election board found 41 noncitizens among the 4.8 million people voting in the 2016 election in North Carolina, and Higdon seems determined to prosecute each and every one of them … even though his office ignored multiple tips about the serious Republican-executed election fraud that just led to a new election being called in the 9th Congressional District.

In August 2018, Higdon announced charges against 19 people, most of them legal permanent residents confused about their voting status. One actually presented her green card at the polls, a clear sign that she was acting in good, if misinformed, faith. A judge fined her just $100. A U.S. citizen and former volunteer poll worker who did get two months of jail time for registering her noncitizen boyfriend to vote told the court that she had hoped a current poll worker would tell her boyfriend if he was indeed eligible, and “The reason it happened is because there was no training about whether or not legal aliens could vote―never―all of the elections I’ve ever worked. And I truly didn’t know.”

Higdon hadn’t previously seemed interested in voting issues, having spent years as a prosecutor focusing mostly on drug crimes—and losing one job “after a federal appeals court expressed grave concerns that prosecutors under his leadership had withheld evidence.” But he’s all-in now, and the reasons aren’t hard to guess. “Bobby has always been a diehard, unapologetic conservative Republican and proud of it,” one of his former coworkers told TPM. “Bobby is quite ambitious politically,” said another North Carolina lawyer. And in today’s Republican Party, going after vulnerable people who acted out of confusion and ignorance is a more sure-fire way to fulfill ambitions than, say, clamping down on all-out election fraud being conducted by Republicans.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836906

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1837129

On Friday, along with new rumors, replacing the old rumors, to suggest that Robert Mueller will not release any report next can another bit of news that seems genuinely curious. As reported in the New York TImes, Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen is still having conversations with federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York to inform them about issues related to the Trump Organization.

What makes this particularly odd is that Michael Cohen has already been sentenced. Michael Cohen is already on his way to jail—though his original March 1 reporting date has been moved back a smidge to allow more time for him to appear before Congress. So it would seem that Michael Cohen’s incentive to spill any more beans is pretty limited. However, he does have at least two possible motivations for sitting down to explain what he knows. First, Cohen has been fiercely protective of information about his wife and father-in-law. So much so that the SDNY prosecutors refused to give him much credit for cooperating because he refused to answer questions about potential crimes connected to other members of his family. It’s possible that Cohen is talking now not out of a deal to alter his own sentence, but as part of an arrangement to shelter others.

It’s also possible that he’s just so mad at Donald Trump, that he welcomes the chance to burn him, even if he gains nothing but satisfaction.

Cohen’s reported testimony falls in two areas: “irregularities” at the Trump Organization, and the scheme to fatten the inaugural fund through massive donations that got spent on … something. Though there are many irregularities at the Trump Organization that could have been discussed, it seems that Cohen spoke specifically about a series of insurance claims. This might include $17 million in claims of storm damage at Mar-a-lago; damage that no one on the ground seems to recall.

The second set of questions Cohen addressed related to $900,000 handed over to Trump’s inaugural committee by venture capitalist Imaad Zuberi. Zuberi is just one of several characters under investigation after they made substantial contributions to the apparently limitless inaugural fund, sometimes pairing those contributions with payments to Cohen. That includes a Mar-a-lago member who for whom Trump attempted to strongarm a payment from Qatar.

These questions — about Trump’s business practices and about the activities of the inaugural committee — provide a good preview of what things might look like once Robert Mueller really does step back from the game. Because they suggest that the investigation of Trump is only warming up.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1837129

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836956

● North Carolina: In an astonishing ruling released late on Friday afternoon, a North Carolina state court struck down two constitutional amendments passed by voters last fall, saying that because the Republican-run legislature had been elected under an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, it had "lost its claim to popular sovereignty" and therefore was not empowered to place those amendments on the ballot.​

​Those amendments concerned very different topics: One established a new voter ID requirement while another lowered the cap on the state's maximum allowed income tax rate. Both, noted the court, harm black and Latino voters (the case was brought by the NAACP), with the latter doing so because it "tends to favor white households" and would "reinforc[e] the accumulation of wealth for white taxpayers." Voters approved both measures by double-digit margins last fall.

This ruling is highly unusual but not unique: In 1964, a federal court in Connecticut enjoined the state legislature, which had been elected using unconstitutional districts, from passing any laws until it had reconstituted itself under new maps. In the North Carolina case, the court limited its holding solely to efforts to amend the state constitution, saying the requirements for the legislature to do so "are unique and distinct from the requirements to enact other legislation."

There's no question, though, that Republicans will vociferously challenge this decision on appeal, and it could very well get overturned: Election law expert Rick Hasen opined that it's "not at all clear that this ruling will stand." But if it does survive, it would finally force Republicans to pay a price for their relentless gerrymandering and potentially open up an entire new avenue of challenges to the actions of tainted legislatures elsewhere.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836956

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836926

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

Pelosi just challenged Trump’s corruption and lies. Here’s what should come next.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and her fellow House Democrats just introduced a resolution to terminate President Trump’s national emergency. In coming days, the resolution will likely pass the House, setting in motion a process that will force a Senate vote on it. Either Senate Republicans will side with Trump, or they’ll pass the measure, after which Trump will veto it.

This represents a small challenge to Trump’s corruption and lies — to his corruption of our institutions and political system with autocratic and authoritarian conduct, and to the deep rot of bad faith at the core of his willingness to declare a national emergency to build his wall based on false pretenses and invented metrics.

The move probably won’t succeed in terminating the emergency. But it points to something we need to see a lot more of: discussion of concrete proposals and actions designed to fortify our institutions and democracy against Trump’s ongoing degradations of them, and to restore confidence in them once Trump is gone.

Julie K.Brown wrote the Miami Herald story about Jeffrey Epstein getting away with a slap on the wrist for child sex trafficking.

Bottom line is Acosta, who heads an agency with oversight over human trafficking and child labor — has never explained why he sealed this deal with an accused child sex trafficker. https://t.co/TNFozz0Zlh

Relevant re the Robert Kraft (NE Patriots owner) charges about sex trafficking and solicitation/prostitution.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1836926