Trump and Immigration: The Bar is so low- witness his total confusion / ignorance of the issue, including DACA; his contradicting himself within minutes. Yet, much of the media termed the Tuesday policy meeting “refreshing” and proof that he hasn’t totally lost it. Worse, some rigorously avoided commentary and exclaimed ‘Trump showed the television audience his negotiation skills.”[CNN] Such skills: He did remember names (placards below each person), and he did look around the room, and he said he wants a “bill of love.” I guess that’s enough.
A few hours after the event, Trump, of course, thought it was ‘great’: “A lot of those [TV] anchors sent us letters saying that was one of the greatest meetings they’ve ever witnessed.” https://thinkprogress.org/trump-immigration-meeting-tv-anchors-letters-74922d07c751/
Matthew Iglesias:
Donald Trump’s entire political career has been a bizarre exercise in large-scale lowering of the bar for what’s considered acceptable conduct in a high-ranking public official. But we as a society somehow reached a new low Tuesday afternoon after Trump staged a pointless, unproductive televised discussion of immigration policy with several members of Congress and successfully earned media plaudits for the feat of not suffering from any obvious symptoms of dementia.
I wish I were exaggerating, but this literally happened.
Emily Stephenson, a Politico editor, tweeted that the session was “a rebuke of reports that [Trump] is less than fully capable” while promoting a Louis Nelson story that congratulated the president for his ability to recall the names of the participants in the meeting he organized.
I asked what about the meeting demonstrated that Trump is capable, and she replied that she meant, quite literally, that the meeting seemed to show that Trump knows the names of several members of Congress.
This tendency reached comical new heights via David Martosko of the Daily Mail, who first congratulated Trump for a commanding display the likes of which we’d never seen from Barack Obama before swiftly retreating to the contention that Trump had proven he’s not senile.
… An effective president doesn’t need to understand all the details of every policy issue under the sun, but he needs to understand some of them (the ones he’s made the focus of his administration, for example), and he needs to demonstrate a capacity to get up to speed on the whole range of often unexpected problems that end up landing on the president’s desk. The meeting yesterday was a clear indictment of Trump in this regard.
The issue at hand was the fate of hundreds of thousands of DREAMers whose lives Trump capriciously threw into chaos last year. Time is running out for these people, whose welfare has been jeopardized through his own action. And by far the most important takeaway from the president’s day of DACA is that he is doing this for no good reason and, indeed, barely seems to understand what’s happening. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16872068/trump-daca-negotiations
‘Dreamers‘ Protected by Ruling; Trump Fumes
President Trump called the United States courts system “broken and unfair” on Wednesday, the morning after a federal judge’s ruling that ordered the administration to restart a program that shields young, undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Republicans and Democrats are in the middle of a legislative battle over the program created by President Barack Obama, called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Lawmakers met with President Trump on Tuesday to discuss the program’s future.
“We find this decision to be outrageous, especially in light of the president’s successful bipartisan meeting with House and Senate members at the White House on the same day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement released Wednesday morning.
Hours after the White House meeting, Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco wrote that it was not proper to kill the program, and that the administration must “maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis” as the legal challenge to the president’s decision in September to end the program moves forward.
Mr. Trump has previously criticized the courts system after judges have halted or held up his policy initiatives. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/us/politics/outrageous-white-house-says-of-judges-daca-ruling.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fpolitics&action=click&contentCollection=politics®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0
Migrants Push Northward picks up, as the slowing with Trump’s election- the Trump Effect’ – appears to have worn off.
Migrant shelters along the southern border are filling up again. Immigration lawyers in the region say their caseloads are spiking. Across the Southwest, border officers are stopping more than 1,000 people a day.
Just months after border apprehensions hit a 17-year low, which administration officials proudly celebrated as a “Trump effect,” the number of migrants trying to enter the United States has been surging, surpassing 40,000 along the Southwest border last month, more than double the springtime numbers, according to new data from the Homeland Security Department.
Many factors, including the Central American economy and gang violence, play a role in migration patterns. But it also appears that any deterrent effect of Mr. Trump’s tough talk and ramped-up immigration enforcement has begun to wane.
In interviews, volunteers and lawyers along the border say that migrants and smugglers have stopped lying low, deciding that trying to get a foothold in a well-off and safe country was no riskier than in the past.
“I think this was a ‘Let’s wait and see what’s going to happen’ period,” said Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House, a shelter in El Paso that provides housing to recent border crossers as they search for more permanent places to live. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/us/border-crossings-trump-effect.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Fusion GPS’s Simpson’s Testimony: The Questions by Republicans were all aimed to take down Simpson, not learn more about Russian interference in our election. Indeed, congressional Republicans have merely backed Trump’s ongoing obstruction, demonstrating no interest in combatting Russia’s efforts.
Brian Beutler:
The other half is a monument to Republican complicity in Trump’s jaw-dropping misconduct.
By my count, over the course of about five hours, Chuck Grassley’s lawyers asked Simpson literally zero questions designed to increase their own understanding of Russian efforts to disrupt the election. They likewise asked no questions aimed at establishing Simpsons’ level of confidence in the information in the dossier, or in documentary evidence he compiled of Trump’s involvement in money laundering and his ties to organized crime.
They spent their hours instead trying without much success to impeach Simpson’s credibility and paint him as a partisan. They were particularly interested in skewing the composition of Simpsons’ client base to make it seem tilted to Democrats (it isn’t), and in getting Simpson to testify that he had a financial interest in triggering an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign (he didn’t). Confronted with the allegation that the Trump campaign was complicit in a criminal plot to sabotage the Clinton campaign, Grassley’s representatives wanted to know why Simpson had the nerve to try to alert the public, through the media.
Grassley doesn’t work for Trump and neither do his aides, but their conduct blends seamlessly into the obstructive behavior Trump and his advisers exhibited during the campaign and after, and thus represents a total abdication of their Constitutional roles. Rather than alert the FBI, as requested, about Russian meddling, the Trump campaign cooperated with Russian hackers, and used their stolen materials to maximum benefit. When the FBI acknowledged the existence of its investigation of the Trump campaign, Trump called it a witch hunt and tried to quash it, along with parallel investigations limping along on Capitol Hill. Grassley’s efforts began where Trump’s left off. The special counsel’s investigation of the Trump campaign continues, so Grassley has devoted himself to proving that it is the fruit of poisonous partisanship. First, they hoped Simpson would melt and confess to being a high-rent version of Roger Stone. When they failed to discredit Simpson, Steele, and the dossier, or to establish that the dossier triggered the FBI’s investigation, Grassley tried to bury the testimony, and then to discredit the dossier by proxy with a baseless accusation that Steele is a criminal.
Trump’s lickspittle propagandists remain as determined as ever to manufacture a scandal out of the nexus between law enforcement and the private investigators who tipped them off, on the singular basis of the investigators’ clients. Before Feinstein posted Simpson’s testimony, they alleged, without evidence, that Steele’s dossier was the progenitor of the FBI’s Trump investigation. Amid the ruins of that theory, they have unblinkingly adopted the incompatible view that the real outrage is that the FBI tipped its hand to a witness that an investigation was already underway. https://crooked.com/article/crime-worse-coverup/
Trump Pulls Back Promise to Meet with Mueller. He’s no longer willing to meet up.
President Trump declined on Wednesday to commit to being interviewed by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating whether his campaign colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election, backing off his statement last year that he would be willing to talk to Mr. Mueller under oath.
“I’ll speak to attorneys,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference with Prime Minister Erna Solberg of Norway, when asked whether he would agree to an interview. “We’ll see what happens.”
That answer was a marked change from June, when Mr. Trump defended his firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, denying that it was related to his handling of the Russia investigation, and said he would be “100 percent” willing to give a sworn statement to Mr. Mueller.
It came as the president’s advisers have been discussing whether Mr. Trump should submit to what would be an extraordinary but not unprecedented instance of a president being interviewed by a prosecutor investigating him for wrongdoing. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/us/politics/trump-russia-election-interference.html
Senate Democrats Seek Trump Response on Russian Cyber Actions: Those on the Foreign Relations Committee castigated Trump for ‘barely acknowledging’, i.e. the outright denial of, Russian interference.
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are calling on the Trump administration to vastly expand the U.S. response to Russian interference in elections, with increased sanctions and a new inter-agency body to coordinate government policies.
In a 200-page report commissioned by Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and released Wednesday, Democratic committee staff describe efforts by Russia to influence elections throughout Europe for years and say many of those countries have made aggressive moves to push back.
With months to go before this year’s midterm elections, the Democrats contend that Washington does not yet have a coherent plan to confront Russian cyber campaigns aimed at disrupting U.S. democracy. Cardin — a longtime critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin — said it was time to develop one.
“This threat existed long before President Trump took office,” he said in a statement. “And unless he takes action now, it will continue long after his administration.”
Democrats don’t dwell in the report on the 2016 presidential election. They focus instead on Russian efforts abroad, such as in Britain’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union and last year’s French presidential elections. They cover similar campaigns in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere.
Committee aides said Republicans were invited to take part in the report — the culmination of a yearlong effort — but chose not to. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bs-md-cardin-russian-20180109-story.html
Voter Suppression: The Supremes are addressing the Ohio Voter Purge.
Adam Liptak:
In a spirited argument on Wednesday, the Supreme Court appeared deeply divided over whether Ohio may kick people off the voting rolls if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a notice from state officials.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Ohio’s approach effectively disenfranchised minority and homeless voters in the state’s major cities and was part of a broader effort to suppress voting.
“All of these impediments result in large numbers of people not voting in certain parts of the state,” she said.
But Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer expressed concern about maintaining the integrity of the state’s list of eligible voters.
“The reason they’re purging them,” Justice Kennedy said, “is they want to protect the voter rolls from people that have moved.”
ustice Breyer fleshed out the point. “Every year a certain number of people die, and every year a certain number move to California,” he said. “We don’t want them on the voter roll. That used to be a big problem, voting dead people.”
… Ohio is more aggressive than any other state in purging its voter rolls. After skipping a single federal election cycle, voters are sent a notice. If they fail to respond and do not vote in the next four years, their names are purged from the rolls.
A few other states use similar approaches, but not one of them moves as fast. “Ohio is the only state that commences such a process based on the failure to vote in a single federal election cycle,” said a brief from the League of Women Voters and the Brennan Center for Justice. “Literally every other state uses a different, and more voter-protective, practice.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/us/politics/supreme-court-ohio-voting-rolls-purge.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Trump Administration Takes Care of Deutsche Bank (and four others), the bank where he owes close to $300,000,000. Furthermore, it’s a bank much penalized, much suspected of money laundering and, reportedly, very much a focus of the Mueller probe.
David Sirota:
The Trump administration has waived part of the punishment for five megabanks whose affiliates were convicted and fined for manipulating global interest rates. One of the Trump administration waivers was granted to Deutsche Bank — which is owed at least $130 million by President Donald Trump and his business empire, and has also been fined for its role in a Russian money laundering scheme.
The waivers were issued in a little-noticed announcement published in the Federal Register during the Christmas holiday week. They come less than two years after then-candidate Trump promised “I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.”
Under laws designed to protect retirement savings, financial firms whose affiliates have been convicted of violating securities statutes are effectively barred from the lucrative business of managing those savings. However, that punishment can be avoided if the firms manage to secure a special exemption from the U.S. Department of Labor, allowing them to keep their status as “qualified professional asset managers.”
In late 2016, the Obama administration extended temporary one-year waivers to five banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank. Late last month, the Trump administration issued new, longer waivers for those same banks, granting Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Barclays five-year exemptions. UBS and Deutsche Bank received three-year exemptions.
In the year leading up to the new waiver for Deustche Bank, Trump’s financial relationship with the firm has prompted allegations of a conflict of interest. The bank has not only sought the Labor Department waiver from the administration, it has also faced Justice Department scrutiny and five separate government-appointed independent monitors. Meanwhile, the New York Times recently reported that federal prosecutors subpoenaed Deutsche for “bank records about entities associated with the family company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.” http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/trump-administration-waives-punishment-convicted-banks-including-deutsche-which
More Trump: Real Estate Sales to Secret Buyers Despite ethics watchdogs urging transparency, the Trump organization continues its opaque sales. Foreign buyers?
Nick Penzenstadler:
President Trump’s companies sold more than $35 million in real estate in 2017, mostly to secretive shell companies that obscure buyers’ identities, continuing a dramatic shift in his customers’ behavior that began during the election, a USA TODAY review found.
In Las Vegas alone, Trump sold 41 luxury condo units in 2017, a majority of which used limited liability companies – corporate entities that allow people to purchase property without revealing all of the owners’ names.
The trend toward Trump’s real estate buyers obscuring their identities began around the time he won the Republican nomination, midway through 2016, according to USA TODAY’s analysis of every domestic real estate sale by one of his companies.
In the two years before the nomination, 4% of Trump buyers utilized the tactic. In the year after, the rate skyrocketed to about 70%. USA TODAY’s tracking of sales shows the trend held firm through Trump’s first year in office.
Profits from sales of those properties flow through a trust run by Trump’s sons. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust and he can withdraw cash at any time. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/01/10/trumps-secretive-real-estate-sales-continue-unabated/1018530001/
Joe Arpaio for Senator ! “I am running for the U.S. Senate from the Great State of Arizona, for one unwavering reason: to support the agenda and policies of President Donald Trump in his mission to Make America Great Again.”
His qualifications include being convicted of racial profiling of Latinos, terming his own jail a “concentration camp” where he terrorized and tortured Latinos, and refusing to investigate child molesters since the victims were undocumented children.
Republican Joe Arpaio, a close ally of President Trump and former sheriff known for his provocative approach to combatting illegal immigration, is running for Senate in Arizona.
The 85-year-old Arpaio could shake up the late August Republican primary in a critical open-seat race to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. Trump pardoned Arpaio last summer, sparing the former sheriff jail time after he was convicted of ignoring a federal court order in a racial-profiling case.
polarizing yet iconic former Maricopa County sheriff, beloved by many conservatives for his hawkish immigration policies, presents an alternative to the unimpressive Kelli Ward and a potential obstacle to Rep. Martha McSally. She is expected to launch within days and is widely viewed as the Republicans’ strongest general election candidate.
In a telephone interview with the Washington Examiner, Arpaio shrugged off concerns about his age, dismissed Republican insiders’ anxiety that his poor reputation with nonwhite voters would put the seat in play for the Democrats in the midterm, and discussed plans to work with Trump on behalf of Arizona. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/joe-arpaio-running-for-senate-in-arizona/article/2645354
shermandigest 