New York's Legal Threat to Trump

 In  Defying the Odds, we discuss  Trump's record of scandal.  The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Going to say it again:  though it got little attention outside of New York State, the Democratic takeover of the state senate is a very big national deal.   There was no chance that the double-jeopardy bill would pass as long as Republicans held control of the chamber.

Bill Mahoney at Politico New York:

The federal government is barred from trying somebody twice for the same crime. But New York’s statute takes this further than is constitutionally necessary by saying state prosecutors can’t charge someone who has received a federal pardon with a related state crime.

New Attorney General Tish James made closing the so-called double jeopardy loophole a regular talking point on the campaign trail. She has been pressing lawmakers on the issue in recent weeks.

“I think we’re getting close,” said state Sen. Todd Kaminsky (D-Nassau), the bill’s sponsor and a former federal prosecutor. He said that James and the Assembly “are working out some language. ... It’s clear the bill is a priority, it’s something I’m confident we’re going to move this session, and we just want to do it so it’s not too over-broad.”

The legislation was initially proposed by former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. While his career ended in disgrace mere weeks after the bill was introduced, the idea has continued to receive attention as the number of people with ties to the president who have been indicted — including several for crimes allegedly committed in New York — continues to tick up. Just two weeks ago, reports surfaced that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. has begun to draf tstate charges against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, but it could face a hurdle in the form of the current state law.

Trump, Existential Fear, and Evangelicals

In Defying the Odds, we discuss cultural reasons for Trump's victory.  The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

A.J. Nolte at The Bulwark:

...Obergefell came as a huge shock to conservative evangelicals. They’d rapidly gone from certainty that they were winning big cultural fights to a very real fear that their views on marriage would be regarded as proof of bigotry. Given that the Obama administration regarded forcing nuns to provide contraception as a moral imperative, this fear was, perhaps, not totally groundless. Bluntly put, many evangelicals panicked.

Existential fear’s impact on political behavior is something political scientists have studied extensively. One of the primary drivers of this type of fear they’ve identified is when rising expectations about the future are dashed. In essence, this explains what happened to evangelicals, just as it explains the role declining trade between Britain and Germany may have played in World War I. And, as in war, pretty much the first thing a political movement does when faced with existential fear is to look for allies: the tougher, stronger, and scarier, the better.

Counterintuitively, the fact that Trump is bellicose, bombastic, insulting, and lives according to a code at odds with evangelicals’ beliefs actually made him more attractive as an ally, not less. “Evangelical nice” is a real thing, and like all good satirical characters, there’s a solid core of truth in The Simpsons’ depiction of Ned Flanders. That made evangelicals unlikely to see one of their own as capable of defeating an existential threat. But Trump embodied the opposite values, and he seemed determined to fight the people they were fighting

...
 In the long run, of course, the evangelical alliance with Trump is almost certain to do more harm than good. Trump’s administration has certainly used executive action to follow through on some evangelical priorities related to abortion and religious freedom, and has appointed one, maybe two, reliably conservative Supreme Court justices. On the other hand, he’s also alienated millennials, ethnic minority voters, and college-educated suburbanites, and this alienation is making evangelicals and their positions more unpopular by proxy. It also doesn’t particularly help that, while past evangelical efforts on religious freedom (such as the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act and 1998 International Religious Freedom Act) were explicitly designed to apply to Christians and non-Christians alike, Trump’s flirtation with things like Muslim bans undermines this universal argument in significant ways. Critics of broad religious freedom protections argue that they amount to “Christian special pleading”; it’s not a particularly good idea for evangelicals to condone any of Trump’s actions that give support to that argument.

Trump and Antitrust

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's approach to the media -- which is Nixonian.  The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

If proven, such an attempt to use presidential authority to seek retribution for the exercise of First Amendment rights would unquestionably be grounds for impeachment. https://t.co/F1UANzeD2q

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) March 4, 2019

As the Washington Post reported in 1997, Nixon talked to Chuck Colson in 1971 about using antitrust threats: "`If the threat of screwing them is going to help us more with their programming than doing it, then keep the threat,' Nixon told a White House aide in a tape-recorded Oval Office conversation recently transcribed for the first time. `Don't screw them now. [Otherwise] they'll figure that we're done.'"

Jane Mayer in The New Yorker:

The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN. Time Warner saw the deal as essential to its survival at a time when the media business is increasingly dominated by giant competitors such as Google and Facebook. Murdoch understood this impulse: in 2014, 21st Century Fox had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Time Warner. For him, opposing his rivals’ deal was a matter of shrewd business. Trump also opposed the deal, but many people suspected that his objection was a matter of petty retaliation against CNN. Although Presidents have traditionally avoided expressing opinions about legal matters pending before the judicial branch, Trump has bluntly criticized the plan. The day after the Justice Department filed suit to stop it, he declared the proposed merger “not good for the country.” Trump also claimed that he was “not going to get involved,” and the Justice Department has repeatedly assured the public that he hasn’t done so.

However, in the late summer of 2017, a few months before the Justice Department filed suit, Trump ordered Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, to pressure the Justice Department to intervene. According to a well-informed source, Trump called Cohn into the Oval Office along with John Kelly, who had just become the chief of staff, and said in exasperation to Kelly, “I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened! I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!”

Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, evidently understood that it would be highly improper for a President to use the Justice Department to undermine two of the most powerful companies in the country as punishment for unfavorable news coverage, and as a reward for a competing news organization that boosted him. According to the source, as Cohn walked out of the meeting he told Kelly, “Don’t you fucking dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.”

A spokesperson for Cohn declined to comment, and Kelly did not respond to inquiries from The New Yorker, but a former White House official confirmed that Trump often “vented” in “frustration” about wanting to block the A. T. & T.-Time Warner merger. “The President does not understand the nuances of antitrust law or policy,” the former official says. “But he wanted to bring down the hammer.” (Last month, a federal court ruled against the Justice Department.)

Obstruction

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character.   The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

"If you use Article Two, it is called obstruction," Trump told CPAC. "But only for Trump, for nobody else." 

Wrong.

From Article I of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon:

In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice...

The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan included one or more of the following:

making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counselling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings;

interfering or endeavouring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees...

Trump at CPAC 2019

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character.   The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Amanda Sakuma sums up Trump at CPAC:

He called the investigations into him “bullshit.” He said John Podesta, the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, “hasn’t gotten over getting his ass kicked.” He mocked the “New Green Deal” — “whatever the hell they call it.” After a while, it was hard to count the number of times he said “damn.”
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Jeff Sessions received the brunt of hate from Trump, who called him “weak and ineffective” as attorney general. Trump went as far as deriding his cabinet member by mocking his southern accent and his decision to bow out of overseeing the investigation. “I’m going to recuse mahhself,” Trump said.

The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and “a dumb southerner.” I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing. He made this up to divide!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2018

More from Sakuma:

Trump set the tone early in his speech with the amount of red meat to throw at the crowd of conservatives, warning of a “socialist takeover” that posed an existential threat to democracy and even going so far as to say outright that some elected officials hate the United States.

“We have people in Congress right now that hate our country... When I see some of the statements being made, it’s very very sad,” he said. “And find out — how did they do in their country? Did they do well?... Some will say it’s terrible he brought that up, but I don’t mind.”

...

His speech really went off the rails (as usual) when talking about immigration. Trump once again stoked fears of a “migrant invasion” at the southern border. He suggested that parents from Central America were sending their daughters with “massive amounts of birth control” to cross the US border illegally, knowing they would be raped by human traffickers ( “True story told to me by the Border Patrol,” he said, “Think of how evil that is.”)

He also resurrected old dog whistles about foreign women who give birth in the US to game the immigration system.

“They used to call it anchor babies but they don’t use that term anymore because it’s not nice,” Trump said.

Donald Trump, Security Risk

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.  The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

At The Guardian, Walter Shapiro explains why Trump is a security risk.

Less than a week after the inauguration, Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, warned the White House Flynn was a security risk potentially subject to Russian blackmail. Instead of having the national security adviser frogmarched to the sidewalk, Trump allowed him to soldier on at the center of national security decision-making for another 18 days.

Then there was the Oval Office moment in May 2017 when Trump the Blabbermouth sold out Israel. Bragging about foiling a plot by the Islamic State in a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Trump inadvertently revealed a major Israeli espionage operation. Russian generosity meant that this information was almost certainly shared with its Iranian allies.

The New York Times reported last October that Trump regularly speaks with friends on an insecure iPhone that is closely monitored by the Chinese...

 The president was equally forthright a month ago when he unequivocally denied that he intervened in any way to get a permanent security clearance for his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

But, to use Watergate lingo, that denial became “inoperative” this week with a new bombshell report from the Times. In May 2018, Trump ordered the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, to grant Kushner a high-level clearance despite the opposition of career intelligence officials.

Cohen Says Trump's Behavior is Un-American

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character.   The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Cohen's closing statement:

I'd like to say directly to the president: We honor our veterans — even in the rain. We tell the truth even when it doesn't aggrandize you. You respect the law and our incredible law enforcement agents. You don't villainize them.

You don't disparage generals, Gold Star families, prisoners of war and other heroes who had the courage to fight for this country. You don't attack the media and those who question what you don't like or what you don't want them to say and you take responsibility for your own dirty deeds.

You don't use your power of your bully pulpit to destroy the credibility of those who speak out against you. You don’t separate families from one another or demonize those looking to America for a better life. You don't vilify people based on the god they pray to and you don’t cuddle up to our adversaries at the expense of our allies. And finally you don’t shut down the government before Christmas and New Year's just to simply appease your base.

This behavior is churlish, it denigrates the office of the president and it's un-American and it's not you.