Russia Law Firm of the Year Concocts Bogus Plan for Trump

Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics:

We can’t risk creating the perception that government leaders would use their official positions for profit. That’s why I was glad in November when the President-elect tweeted that he wanted to, as he put it, “in no way have a conflict of interest” with his businesses. Unfortunately, his current plan cannot achieve that goal.

It’s easy to see that the current plan does not achieve anything like the clean break Rex Tillerson is making from Exxon. Stepping back from running his business is meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective. The Presidency is a full-time job and he would’ve had to step back anyway. The idea of setting up a trust to hold his operating businesses adds nothing to the equation. This is not a blind trust—it’s not even close.

I think Politico called this a “half-blind” trust, but it’s not even halfway blind. The only thing this has in common with a blind trust is the label, “trust.” His sons are still running the businesses, and, of course, he knows what he owns. His own attorney said today that he can’t “un-know” that he owns Trump tower. The same is true of his other holdings. The idea of limiting direct communication about the business is wholly inadequate. That’s not how a blind trust works. There’s not supposed to be any information at all. 

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This isn’t the way the Presidency has worked since Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978 in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Since then, Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all either established blind trusts or limited their investments to non-conflicting assets like diversified mutual funds, which are exempt under the conflict of interest law.

Sophie Tatum reports at CNN:

Morgan Lewis, a law firm representing President-elect Donald Trump, was named the "Russia Law Firm of the Year" last year by a group that ranks legal organizations.

Facing the press Wednesday for the first time since being elected president, Trump yielded a significant part of his news conference to an attorney from the law firm, which is helping separate him from his various business ties.

In highlighting its receipt of the Russia award, Morgan Lewis' website cites Chambers and Partners.

"This active Moscow office of an American firm offers top-level advice in regards to the energy sector and also houses very strong banking and M&A teams," Chambers and Partners writes about the award.

Losing Ground

Gallup reports:

Asked about the state of the nation over the past eight years, Americans say the U.S. gained ground in four of 19 policy domains, and they say it lost ground on 14 and held steady on one. More Americans see progress than decline on the situation for gays and lesbians, energy, climate change and the economy. They see the biggest setbacks on the federal debt, crime, the gap between the rich and the poor, and race relations. They are divided on whether the nation has made progress or lost ground on healthcare.

Trump and RFK Jr.

REPOSTED FROM AUTISM POLICY AND POLITICS:

Many posts have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  (He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.)

This summer, Trump met with Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British doctor who is largely responsible for the autism-vaccine myth.

His nominee for HHS Secretary belongs to an antivaccine group.

Julie Beck reports at The Atlantic:

On Tuesday, Donald Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer and activist, who also happens to be an outspoken vaccine conspiracy theorist. After the meeting, Kennedy told reporters it went “very well,” and said that Trump “asked me to chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.” He also said that Trump called him to ask for the meeting.

But Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, said in a statement that nothing is certain yet. “The President-elect enjoyed his discussion with Robert Kennedy Jr. on a range of issues and appreciates his thoughts and ideas. The President-elect is exploring the possibility of forming a commission on Autism, which affects so many families; however no decisions have been made at this time,” the statement reads. (It is interesting that the team refuted Kennedy’s statement that he would lead a vaccine commission by saying Trump is considering forming a commission on autism, when vaccines are not related to autism.)  [emphasis added]

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

In 2005, both Rolling Stone and Salon published “Deadly Immunity,” an article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. accusing the federal government of a massive conspiracy to cover up a connection between vaccines and autism.

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In 2011, Salon retracted Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Deadly Immunity” article. Editor Kerry Lauerman noted that Salon had run five corrections in the days after publication. “At the time,” he wrote, “we felt that correcting the piece — and keeping it on the site, in the spirit of transparency — was the best way to operate. But subsequent critics … further eroded any faith we had in the story’s value. We’ve grown to believe the best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.”

Despite these developments, activists have continued to argue for a vaccine-autism link, with some effect. When they packed the room at a 2012 House hearing on autism, several lawmakers voiced agreement with them. More important, they have raised doubts about the safety of vaccines, leading some parents to delay or forgo immunizations for their children.

Poor Grades for Trump

Pew reports:

The latest national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted Jan. 4-9 among 1,502 adults, finds that 39% approve of the job President-elect Trump has done so far explaining his policies and plans for the future to the American people, while a larger share (55%) say they disapprove. Overall ratings have changed little since December and remain highly partisan: 72% of Republicans and Republican leaners approve of the job he is doing, compared with just 13% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

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When it comes to making important decisions, most Americans (58%) think that Trump will be too impulsive, while 34% think he will be about right and just 4% think he will be too cautious in his decision-making. During the campaign, voters expressed concerns about Trump’s temperament: In October, 69% described him as “reckless” and 65% described him as “having poor judgment.”

Trump Databases

At Mashable, Marcus Gilmer writes:

First up, there's the matter of Trump's many campaign promises. After all, he's already backing off threats to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server.

That's where TrumpTracker comes in. Created by Viren Mohindra, it collects Trump's numerous campaign promises, cross-referenced with sourcing from major media outlets, Trump's own website, and even video of Trump's speeches.

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With all of the subjective spin that permeates politics, from social media to news analysts, it can be difficult to track what, exactly, is the source of a particular debate or frenzied headlines.

Which is why FactBase's Trump database is such an interesting — and essential — searchable database. As the site's mission statement heralds, there are no stories or spin here, just the words used by Trump from speeches, debates, books, and tens of thousands of tweets.

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In a similar vein, the Internet Archive has launched its own Trump database "with 700+ televised speeches, interviews, debates, and other news broadcasts related to President-elect Donald Trump."

Featuring over 520 hours of Trump-related content going back to December 2009, the archive also features an open-sourced fact-check spreadsheet that will continue to grow as the archive does.

Obama and the Democrats

On This Week George Stephanopoulos spoke with President Obama:

STEPHANOPOULOS: What has to be a disappointment on the home front is that-- it looks like the Democratic Party got pretty hollowed out on your watch, about 1,000 seats lost in the Congress, Senate, governors, state houses. Is that on you?

 OBAMA: I take some responsibility on that. I-- I think that some of it was circumstances. If you look at-- what happened, I came in in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike FDR who waited-- well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.

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So-- so some of this was circumstances. But what I think that what is also true is that partly because my docket was really full here, so I couldn't be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Part of your job now?

OBAMA: Well, I think that it's something that I have an interest in. As-- as you know, George, my entire career, I started as a community organizer. Every one of my campaigns was premised on getting new people involved. And if there's a theme in my public career it's that if ordinary people get involved then good things happen. So I want to see the Democratic Party move in that direction. And what that means is that we aren't just micro-targeting to eke out presidential victories; it means that we're showing up in places where right now we're not winning a lot.

And if you look at sort of how politics has divided itself here in this country, the big divide right now is between urban areas, which have become increasingly Democratic, and rural or exurban areas that feel as if they're being ignored. And if Democrats are not showing up in those places, even if you-- even if you're not gonna win right away but if you're not in there at least making an argument that, "Hey, you know what? It's the Democrats who are trying to raise your minimum wage.

"It's the Democrats who are trying to make sure you got health care or that your health care costs aren't killing ya. It's Democrats who were making sure that your kids aren't drinking polluted water. It's Democrats who are trying to reign in the banks if they engage in excesses so that you don't end up having a problem." If we're not there making the argument then the-- the cultural gulf that Republicans try to exploit saying, "Ah, these city slickers: they're all looking down on you, they don't care about you. They're just trying to help out their various special interest constituencies," that argument ends up being successful. And so we've got to do a better job of showing up. And I was able to do that when I was the candidate. But I have not-- I've not seen or-- or presided over that kind of systematic outreach that I think needs to happen.

 At The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby appraises Obama:

As a candidate for president, Obama promised to soothe America’s bitter and divisive politics, and to replace red state/blue state animosity with cooperation and bipartisanship. But the healer-in-chief millions of Americans voted for never showed up.

According to Gallup, Obama became the most polarizing president in modern history. Like all presidents, he faced partisan opposition, but Obama worsened things by regularly taking the low road and disparaging his critics’ motives. In his own words, his political strategy was one of ruthless escalation: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” During his 2012 reelection campaign, Politico reported that “Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.” And when a Republican-led Congress wouldn’t enact legislation he sought, Obama turned to his “pen and phone” strategy of governing by diktat that polarized politics even more.

To his credit, Obama acknowledges that he didn’t live up to his promise to reduce the angry rancor of Washington politics. Had he made an effort to do so, perhaps the campaign to succeed him would not have been so mean. And perhaps 60 percent of voters would not feel that their country, after two terms of Obama’s administration, is “on the wrong track.”

Trolling from Putin's B-Team

The Russians wanted to help Trump win, and now they are trying to discredit his critics. Sometimes, they are not doing it well.

When the top comment on a @Slate article about #ICreport is an apparent #Russian troll who isn't even a good one. pic.twitter.com/rRL7hiz94X

— David Filipov (@davidfilipov) January 7, 2017