I noticed that this is specifically for presidential campaigns, and the people who must sign off on it are political appointees, not career DOJ lawyers, who would presumably be less partisan and subject to political pressure from the incumbent. After all, Barr must protect Dear Leader, who has demonstrated he has zero ethics or morals to restrain him, in the upcoming election.
Quote: Attorney General William Barr announced Monday that he would raise the threshold for opening counterintelligence probes into presidential campaigns after accusations that the investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign was flawed.
Now, investigations into presidential candidates will require the signature of the attorney general and the head of the FBI, Barr said in a news conference with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-ba ... rations-at
The trouble with this decision, though it may be judicially sound, is that this administration is sleazy and will exploit every loophole they can, to continue to separate kids from their parents as a "deterrent" for asylum seekers. I happen to think that separating a child from its parent(s) because of a 10-year-old DUI or parent's HIV status is beyond sick. But, with a court case failed, the only way this will stop is if there's political pressure on the administration. Or on Congress to pass a law. Or by electing someone who is not corrupt and willing to do anything in pursuit of a political aim and/or to keep himself/herself in power.
Quote: A U.S. judge ruled the Trump administration acted within its authority when it separated more than 900 children from their parents at the border after determining the parents to be unfit or dangerous.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw’s ruling rejected the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) claims that the administration was returning to the previously condemned policies of widespread child separation by using minor criminal history as criteria to separate families.
Sabraw indicated he was uncomfortable questioning the administration’s choices to separate children if the parents were designated as unfit or dangerous or based on other factors like criminal history, communicable diseases and doubts about parentage, The Associated Press reported...
And IMO the doubts about parentage stuff is crap, unless you have solid evidence there's something criminal going on. So a child is better off in an institution or tent city than with someone he/she loves, because of genetics? (See, for instance, the young girl separated from her loved ones when she was evacuated to the US after the hurricane in the Bahamas. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... 33792.html And I'm quite sure there are others who don't have the contacts, etc. to make the news. ) Give me a break.
Trump is really demonstrating the limits of our checks and balances lately.
And it seems his rash and frankly scary decision to risk a major conflict in the Middle East resonates with some people. If Iran hadn't responded with surprising restraint (so far), it could be starting to get ugly instead.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administra ... nship-game
Quote: The president and first lady, smiling and waving, held hands as they traversed the field from the 15- to 40-yard line with the honor guard just after 7 p.m. local time. They were greeted by loud cheers and roaring chants of “USA! USA!” and “Four more years!”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/13/pr ... ity-based/
Quote: Praise for the Suleimani Strike Isn’t Based in Reality
The ideological architects of one of the United States’ most disastrous foreign-policy decisions—the 2003 invasion of Iraq—are spinning a tale to support Trump’s most dangerous move to date.
Quote: As the Middle East convulses from the Trump administration’s killing of Iranian military leader Qassem Suleimani—and as U.S. military forces and their Iraqi partners endure Iran’s reprisals—a subset of foreign-policy veterans has cheered the decision. As the New York Times reported on Jan. 6, the strike even elicited praise from some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s consistent critics on the right, including leading Iraq War proponents who have otherwise found him too timid on the world stage....
The most prominent such argument relies on the idea that Iran and its proxies understand only the language of strength and military might. That’s why, in the parlance of some supporters, the hit against Suleimani was necessary to “restore deterrence.”
In truth, whatever the concept of restoring deterrence may promise in theory, it bears little resemblance to reality. Trump’s defenders, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, may claim that the strike has thrown Iran off balance. But in truth, the level of uncertainty and risk on both sides remains extremely high. ...
...After all, a supposed need to restore deterrence will always be available as justification for further military action. As if on cue, after the strikes on Iraqi bases, Trump’s defenders, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham and television commentator Sean Hannity, have already called for additional U.S. action to—once again—restore deterrence.
Some of Trump’s backers have also made the case that the Suleimani operation will weaken Iran—both at home and abroad. In their telling, the killing demonstrated to the Iranian people that their regime is not invincible and untouchable. Some have pointed to the protests currently roiling Iran to bolster this claim. In doing so, they ignore the backdrop of deep and persistent (and understandable) public anger at Tehran’s incompetence, corruption, and authoritarianism as drivers of the current unrest. In this case, Tehran’s initial dishonesty over the downing of the Ukrainian airliner was the trigger, much as a controversy over gas prices sparked anti-government protests late last year....
Japan's prime minister is in the Middle East, trying through diplomacy to reduce the tensions Dear Leader inflamed. (you know, something we used to do before we decided constantly flexing our military might was a better approach. )
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/ ... 03286.html
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/ ... -tensions/
Quote: Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on a visit to the Middle East hoping to calm ease tensions sparked by the killing of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, has warned that military confrontation with Iran will harm peace and stability across the world....
Macron is also working to decrease tensions.
Quote: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe embarked on a five-day trip to the Middle East on Saturday as part of Tokyo’s efforts to help reduce tensions in a critical region for resource-poor Japan. The trip will take him to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, countries which Japan sees as important players in stabilizing the situation in the Middle East, according to Japanese officials.
The visit came ahead of Tokyo’s dispatch of Self-Defense Forces personnel and assets to the region to help secure the safe passage of shipping by enhancing intelligence-gathering capabilities.....
Meanwhile, Trump says on Fox news...
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... sh-936623/
I thought those people were called mercenaries.
Quote: During President Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Friday, the president spoke about his positive relationship with Saudi Arabia, including how the country is paying to use American troops. Conservative Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who until recently was a Republican, responded to Trump’s remarks in a tweet, saying, “He sells troops.”
“Saudi Arabia is paying us for [our troops]. We have a very good relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. “I said, listen, you’re a very rich country. You want more troops? I’m going to send them to you, but you’ve got to pay us. They’re paying us. They’ve already deposited $1 billion in the bank.”...
[This doesn't seem to have been reported by many sites, other than the original interview on Fox, and some of them are not reliable news sources. Rolling Stone seemed the best of the lot. I also linked to a second site earlier, with a warning that they're not reliable, just because they had a good political cartoon. Decided to delete that link.]
And $1 billion is, I'm sure, a drop in the bucket in all the money we've spent on wars in the Middle East in the last 20-odd years. It's funny how the media rarely talks honestly about the financial costs of all these military exercises and wars, when it reports the news. And it doesn't look like they've brought much in the way of benefits, to anyone involved. The more I read about Iraq, the more it looks like we made a mess of the place and its government is a disaster. Where Trump is probably not helping those factions friendly to the US by digging in his heels and loudly refusing to even consider leaving.
Related, a perspective on our foreign policy blunders. Agree with him or not on specific details/actions, he makes some good points. :
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/13/tr ... gn-policy/
Quote: Why Is the United States So Bad at Foreign Policy?
It’s not just Trump. Washington hasn’t had a coherent strategy for decades.
Quote: In my last column, I described the “brain-dead” qualities of the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East and especially Iran. In particular, I stressed that the administration had no real strategy—if by that term one means a set of clear objectives, combined with a coherent plan of action to achieve them that takes the anticipated reactions of others into account.
What we have instead is brute force coercion, divorced from clear objectives and implemented by an ignorant president with poor impulse control. After nearly three years in office, President Donald Trump has managed to increase the risk of war, push Iran to gradually restart its nuclear program, provoke Iraq into asking the United States to prepare to leave, raise serious doubts about U.S. judgment and reliability, alarm allies in Europe, and make Russia and China look like fonts of wisdom and order....
Unfortunately, this strategic myopia goes well beyond the Middle East....
...In short, despite recognizing that the China challenge was the most important item on America’s foreign-policy agenda—with the possible exception of climate change itself—Trump and company have pursued a series of policies that almost seem tailor-made to give China as many advantages as possible.
But that’s not the bad news. Though the Trump administration may have taken the “no strategy” approach to a new level, this problem has been apparent for some time. ....
Quote: What’s going on here? When did the United States get so bad at strategy? Foreign policy is a challenging enterprise where uncertainties are rife and mistakes are sometimes inevitable. But an inability to think strategically isn’t hard-wired into American DNA. The Truman administration faced enormous challenges in the aftermath of World War II, but it came up with containment, the Marshall Plan, NATO, a set of bilateral alliances in Asia, and a set of economic institutions that served the United States and its allies well for decades. Similarly, the first Bush administration (1989-1993) managed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peaceful reunification of Germany, and the first Gulf War with considerable subtlety, expertise, and restraint. Neither administration was perfect, but their handling of complex and novel circumstances showed a sure grasp of what was most important and the ability to elicit the responses they wanted from both allies and adversaries. In other words, they were good at strategy.
Paradoxically, part of the problem today is the remarkable position of primacy that the United States has enjoyed ever since the Cold War ended. Because the United States is so powerful, wealthy, and secure, it is mostly insulated from the consequences of its own actions. When it makes mistakes, most of the costs are borne by others, and it hasn’t faced a peer competitor that might be quick to take advantage of mistakes. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars may ultimately cost more than $6 trillion and thousands of soldiers’ lives, but the lack of a draft limits public concerns about casualties, and the United States is paying for all of these wars by borrowing the money abroad, running up bigger deficits, and sticking future generations with the bill.
This situation helps explain why few Americans are interested in what is happening overseas or what the U.S. government is doing about it....
When most Americans can’t tell the difference between success and failure—at least in terms of immediate, tangible consequences—then policymakers will be under less pressure to come up with strategies that actually work and posturing will take precedence over actual performance....
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/10/ta ... suleimani/
Quote: Assassination, Extrajudicial Execution, or Targeted Killing—What’s the Difference?
Successive presidents have tried to shape new terminology for political killings. But they’re still mostly illegal.
Quote: ...Perhaps no foreign-policy concept causes—indeed relies on—more confusion about the nature of international law than the practice of targeted killings, which is what the United States often calls its strikes against alleged terrorists abroad. That is because, in contrast to assassination and extrajudicial execution, there is no such concept in international law. The term was originally coined by a human rights organization to distinguish El Salvador death squads’ assassination of individuals from the squads’ wider indiscriminate killings of civilians. Both acts, Americas Watch correctly argued, violated human rights standards as well as the international laws surrounding war.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the United States agreed with Americas Watch’s assessment. It even condemned its ally Israel’s political targeting of Hamas leaders as illegal. But more recently, the term “targeted killings” has seeped into political and public discourse to legitimize the United States’ use of the very same tactic: the extrajudicial execution of nonstate political adversaries.
The rhetorical sleight of hand has been convenient; political assassination has long been seen as taboo in war and is explicitly prohibited by the 1907 Hague Convention, which set out the basic laws for the conduct of hostilities, and 1998 Rome Statute, which articulated which war crimes could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. In peacetime, too, the extrajudicial execution of political opponents—or anyone else—is illegal. It is considered a violation of the human right to life enshrined in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The term “targeted killing,” though, implies that U.S. counterterrorism strikes are something different—something not covered by existing norms. The Suleimani killing, however, may put that idea to rest while also demonstrating precisely why political murder is simply a terrible idea....
[slightly OT: Are some of the Democratic candidates morons or trying to re-elect Trump? Apparently Elizabeth Warren just announced she would immediately bypass Congress to pass a controversial policy, if she's elected. What a wonderful way to help neutralize the criticism that Trump wants to act like a king and not a president. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... -executive
More detailed report:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/1 ... ers-098623
I've been losing more and more confidence in her judgement and ethics, and I really, really hope someone else gets the nomination. I'll vote for a ham sandwich over the disaster that's Trump, but I'll have to hold my nose if that ham sandwich is Warren.
[Deleted a gossipy controversy manufactured by the Warren campaign that was both easily shown implausible and promoted heavily by CNN. No point in giving that sort of nonsense more attention. Especially when many of the left-leaning news sites seemed to be ignoring this significant statement by Warren, at least yesterday.]
Also, a somewhat snarky guide to the Democratic and Republican candidates - especially amusing toward the end, with the little-known also-rans. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... de/582598/ ]
EDIT:
I won't hold my breath to see what the Party of Trump's justification is for this one.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/478 ... w-backlash
I guess they're afraid we'll see too much and they might lose their jobs in the next election?
Quote: Reports of a planned crackdown on media access to the upcoming Senate impeachment trial of President Trump is drawing fierce criticism from members of the press.
Roll Call first reported on Tuesday that the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms and Capitol Police are adding restrictions on members of the press during the trial, including additional screening and new constraints on reporters' freedom of movement in the Capitol. ...
“Reporters will be kept in pens, meaning only senators seeking out press coverage will get covered,” Wire tweeted.
The restriction allows just one video camera and no still photography or audio recording in the trial...
EDIT 2:
And the documents from Lev Parnas are released. It looks like they directly contradict some of the things Trump and his defenders have been saying. This does not look good for Dear Leader, though his GOP allies will no doubt close their eyes and ears and deny everything. There are links to the documents in this article.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/trump-i ... ident.html
Quote: A trove of new evidence in the impeachment case against President Donald Trump will be delivered to the Senate by the House Judiciary Committee...
The evidence includes new text messages and phone records from Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American business partner of Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer.
"In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you on this upcoming Monday, May 13th or Tuesday May 14th," Giuliani wrote in a letter passed to an aide to Ukraine's president....
As recently as last November, Trump was asked by former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly what Giuliani was doing in Ukraine on Trump's behalf. Trump replied that had no idea. "You have to ask that to Rudy, but Rudy, I don't, I don't even know. I know he was going to go to Ukraine and I think he canceled a trip. But, you know, Rudy has other clients other than me. I'm one person," Trump told O'Reilly. Giuliani has done "a lot of work in Ukraine over the years, and I think, I mean, that's what I heard, I might have even read that someplace," Trump said.
He also claimed not to know about Parnas and Fruma...
But an email between Dowd and Trump's personal attorney Jay Sekulow, released Tuesday as part of the cache of new evidence, suggests Trump knew the two Giuliani associates previously...
They were also having Ambassador Yovanovich followed. Some people are interpreting some of the information in the notes, etc. as implying actual threats against her. A few new details here: https://www.businessinsider.com/documen ... ign-2020-1
Quote: In one exchange with Parnas, [former prosecutor general of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko] wrote, referring to Yovanovitch: “And here you can’t even get rid of one [female] fool.”
Parnas replied: “She’s not a simple fool, trust me. But she’s not getting away.”
https://twitter.com/rfhyde1/status/1217291153982312449
Quote: In another March 2019 text exchange, Parnas communicated with his associate, Robert F. Hyde, about tweets and videos accusing Yovanovitch of being anti-Trump.
Hyde wrote: “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in that.”
Hyde later sent several texts suggesting he was surveilling Yovanovitch in Ukraine, adding, “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price.”
Afterward, Hyde wrote, “Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money.”
In another text message, Hyde told Parnas on March 27, 2019, “It’s confirmed we have a person inside.”
Hyde sounds desperate on Twitter:
Quote: "How low can liddle Adam Bull Schiff go? I was never in Kiev. For them to take some texts my buddy’s and I wrote back to some dweeb we were playing with that we met a few times while we had a few drinks is definitely laughable. Schiff is a desperate turd playing with this Lev guy."
Probably by tomorrow there will be more analysis of this but Trump's associates sound like a bunch of gangsters to me.
And I suppose there will probably be a blizzard of rabid tweets from our beloved president about treasonous Democrats and whatnot tonight.