TWGB: Charlie and the Foxtrot Factory

Even in a White House of never-befores, this may be one of the more head-spinning: The president’s chief of staff is trying to join a lawsuit against the president. ⁦@maggieNYT⁩ https://t.co/XzZVkKPSZx

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) November 10, 2019

I'm not exactly sure how the Trump White House actually works, but it seems like the stuff of pure imagination. Can you imagine working there, yourself? All these people in what should be "golden ticket" jobs, the almost-poetic ejection of player after player according to some fault found by the um, well, testy Oompa Loompa who is actually in charge. How strange and wonderful!

If you want to change the world, there's nothing to it.

Except bribery and extortion and obstruction of justice and the whole deal looking more and more like a giant revolving clusterfuck.

Leading with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney's lawsuit is an example of the kind of thing we're talking about: the story suggests there's a mystery around why Mulvaney is suing to determine whether he needs to comply with a House subpoena. He has two other choices--he simply refuses to comply, as others are doing, or he can just show up for questioning, so why opt for door number three? Because he already confessed to the quid pro quo part really publicly and cannot reverse-dive back onto the diving board, and the testimonies of Dr. Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman both strongly implicate him as having relayed the terms to Ambassador Gordon Sondland. The freeze in the aid to Ukraine starts with, apparently, Trump's direction through the offices of Mulvaney and acting OMB Director Russell Vought.

Mulvaney himself could be caught on the horns of a dilemma: he can't testify because he already looks like he's highly "burnable" by Trump and because it would wreck his name with fellow Republicans, but he has a lot of exposure if he doesn't because Trump might have indicated he's already looking to unload him anyway (when I see journos the President questions about Mulvaney's future, I assume they aren't reading tea leaves but hearing chatter). So, if a court order compels him to talk, he wins because what choice did he have? And if the court goes along with a claim of "absolute immunity" (I guess that means a VIP-level executive privilege, no?) well he also wins because he doesn't have to talk and Trump has a little more reason to keep him.

Living there, you'll be free, if you truly wish....

Of course, waking up from that dream means still being really, really implicated in a conspiracy with extortion and bribery with lots of obstruction of justice on the side. And while the president might not be subject to being charged while he's in office (debatable) and might not be removed by trial, nothing quite so cozy pertains for Mulvaney.



In other exploits of "pure imagination", the transcripts released this week point to how the opinions of the HOLIC (Head Oompa Loompa in Charge) have been formed. For one thing, Trump has shown himself to be susceptible to believing what he hears from other leaders, such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. This may in large part be because he's lacking in the context and understanding of history necessary to understand why they might be trash-talking Ukraine or its leader--he doesn't pay attention to briefings or trust US intelligence. He's basically being played. We learn from Hill's testimony:

Trump: "We're respected all over the world!" "“We are respected again, I can tell you that. We are respected again.”
Dr. Fiona Hill: "As I said, we found disparaging remarks by pretty much every world leader and official at different points about the President." pic.twitter.com/ku9G0mgUtm

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) November 9, 2019

but we also learn that a former staffer of Rep. Devin Nunes (yes, the guy who is suing an internet cow), Kash Patel, was misrepresenting himself to Trump as the point person in Ukraine, which was a bit of a stunner to the folks actually doing the diplomatic work there. He was feeding Trump misinformation.

That sounds like a kind of clusterfuck--what was that guy doing briefing the president? Who is managing who gets access to the president and briefs him on things?

Would you believe that is the job of the Chief of Staff? Like, managing the flow of who goes in and out of the Oval and tells Trump shit, really falls on Mick Mulvaney.

Anyway, another person who has Trump's ear is Giuliani, who was also doing this whole smear campaign thing to Trump, and that was basically a continuation of what Trump likely heard from Manafort. So, what is very interesting is, you know those two guys who were associates of Giuliani's who got arrested at Dulles? Funny thing, they leaned on Ukraine's previous president, Petro Poroshenko, to open an investigation into the 2016 election. Weird, right? It's a good hustle if you can find the right oligarchs to fund it and the right appropriately corrupt US government to """try and fight Ukrainian corruption""" by """being super-corrupt""". (Insert thunderous implied eyeroll and increasing levels of sarcasm air quotes.)

To end on a serious note, I've talked before about the "fear and smear" tactics Trump and his associates are employing to try to intimidate witnesses and future whistleblowers, as well as their defenders. This is still apparent. In addition to former Ambassador Yovanovich experiencing threats, Dr. Hill has also recounted experiencing them. Trump's surrogates (including his Number One son) have threatened to out the whistleblower or forwarded rumored names of people who could be the whistleblower. This is a malicious act of intimidation and thoroughly unnecessary--it has no bearing on what Trump and his staff have actually done, and Trump and any other participants in the fear campaign should be held responsible for what they do. It is also obstruction of justice to tamper with witnesses, just as it is to tamper with jurors (something that is apparently being attempted with the Roger Stone trial by noted asshole Alex Jones).

The statement of the whistleblower has been strongly corroborated by, among other things, the call summary released by the White House and all the testimony from the closed door hearings that have been released. This is well-demonstrated by this annotated whistleblower complaint. Trump has said: Read the transcript! He means of the call. Senator Lindsey Graham says he isn't even going to bother with reading the transcripts of the actual fact witnesses to how Trump's foreign policy eroded regarding Ukraine--look, loyalty has a place, but there's a bigger picture here. You can't threaten a fact with death. You can't beat up the truth, even if you try to shape it to your own ends. You can try to bury it, but it has a way of inconveniently rising. And fact patterns, the connecting of the dots, tell a story about how and why things are. Facts don't care about your feelings, but when you look at a set of facts, they can make you feel some kind of way.

I love science. I care about things like the environment and people's health based on empirical reasoning because it speaks to me. Journalism, at its best, is like science--fact-based. It draws conclusions from the facts. It lays out details, it speaks in numbers. I like blogging that talks about things that are real. Law, in its way, in the best tradition, is about evidence. Justice, real justice and not revenge, is based in truth. Not the truth that is allowed to come out through chokeholds and with lies and subterfuge mixed in, having been warped and pummeled and pruned into some new and adjusted shape that is no longer truth at all. Real truth. Real facts.

If you need a bullied and colored truth, then you don't want truth at all, you want a world of pure imagination. If you need to misrepresent the law, even the black letter law not even a layperson needs special training to read, you aren't on the right side of it. If you want to hunt up years-old Tweets from someone's attorney and craft from there a special conspiracy theory--is that about truth? Or is that about some other thing? If events unfold that are especially incriminating to someone you put your faith in, that should tell you more about them than "who told?" And if your faith was misplaced--blame the person who misrepresented themselves. Don't blame the person who pointed it out to you. You can just actually look at what the transcripts say, what the facts are, what the timeline shows. Put them together yourself.