Category: Politics

This week Trump make moves to have undocumented immigrants go uncounted in the Census.

Protestors in Portland have come on in larger numbers than recent weeks to stand against the militarized DHS, including a contingent of moms.

Trump said on Monday that more cities will be targeted: “New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore and all of these—Oakland is a mess—we are not going to let this happen in the country, all run by liberal Democrats,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you.”

David Grahm writes in the Atlantic that Trump Administration is trying to create a national police force akin to what some countries have in their Interior Ministry: “The agents out on the streets of Portland are detailed from Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Among the forces deployed in Washington last month, when Trump briefly barricaded himself within the White House, were officers from the Federal Bureau of Prisons…. The reason these agents are the ones being deployed is simply that they’re the ones who are available. In the absence of a federal police force, the administration is simply pulling in any federal law-enforcement officer that it has the power to reassign…. Whatever his motives, the precedents he’s creating are likely to endure: His successors will have a blueprint for the creation of a national police force that answers to the president.”

Wittes and Jurecic write: The tactical divisions of the Homeland Security Department from which the officers in Portland appear to hail—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—are not typically deployed at protests, but charged with enforcing immigration law and guarding the U.S. border. And as an internal department memo obtained by The New York Times shows, the officers sent into Portland’s streets were not trained to handle crowds.
So why is the Trump administration sending into American cities officers who aren’t appropriately trained for the mission, are acting on legal authority that will require litigation to defend, and are being deployed to address a problem that the federal government could address by means far less provocative and in a fashion far less likely to escalate disorder?

Here is one more theory for Trump’s actions: In deploying federal forces, Trump appears to be trying to provoke clashes with protesters, which he can use to convince white suburban voters that he’s the last line of defense between them and the chaos allegedly incubating in cities, Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, told me. Referring to the street battle between construction workers and anti-war protesters in Manhattan in 1970, Emanuel said, “Trump is trying to create his own hard-hat riot, and they are wearing [law-enforcement] helmets.”

Wednesday night the mayor of Portland joined the protests and was tear gassed by unidentified DHS officers.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump Administration was looking to escalate conflict with protestors in June but when the protests and statue vandalism died down, they chose to focus on Portland where the federal courthouse is being attacked nightly: One of the officials said the White House had long wanted to amplify strife in cities, encouraging DHS officials to talk about arrests of violent criminals in sanctuary cities and repeatedly urging ICE to disclose more details of raids than some in the agency were comfortable doing. “It was about getting viral online content,” one of the officials said.

Congressional talks between Republicans and the White House broke down this week over new stimulus money.

And there was more bad jobs news: New state unemployment claims increased last week for the first time in nearly four months, disturbing evidence that the struggling economy is backsliding at a time when coronavirus cases are on the rise.

The New York Times wrote a long piece about how Trump turned against stopping the virus in April and May: But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Some key findings: “Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.
The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. But more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting the president’s push to crank up the economy. The result was to intensify Mr. Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing…”

After being re-arrested this week, a judge turned Michale Cohen free: “I make the finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory,” the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said in court. “And it’s retaliatory because of his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book and to discuss anything about the book or anything else he wants on social media and with others.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.20%

COVID-19 Cases/Deaths: 4,099,310 / 160,220

Below is a monthly update, marking key metrics and commentary in from mid-June to mid-July, the fourth month since lockdowns began.

Polling Round Up

More people became concerned about COVID infection this month. According to Gallup (July 6-12) , people who are Some-Very Worried of contracting the virus rose to 53%, a 4 point increase over last month. And the people are are worried about Financial Hardship is now 50-50, a 6 point increase from the month before.

The Five Thirty Eight Tracker, which averages all COVID polls, found a 3.7% increase in people who are worried about the virus.

On July 15, only 38% of the country approved of Trump’s handling of the crisis. The approval spread increased from 12% underwater to 19.3% underwater, with 57.5% disapproving. This month was the highest jump in that spread.

Political Weirding

Cases began to climb this month: “Nationwide, cases have risen 15 percent over the last two weeks. Cases are rising in 18 states across the South, West and Midwest. Seven states hit single-day case records Saturday, and five others hit a record earlier in the week.”

Trump urged for a slowdown in testing at the Tulsa rally (June 20), and resumed rhetorically connecting the virus with China, calling it Kung Flu.

Dr. Fauci and three other leaders of the government’s coronavirus response who testified on Tuesday (June 21) cast a cloud over the sunny accounts offered by the president as he has portrayed the United States as a nation bouncing back from the brink…. “The next couple of weeks are going to be critical in our ability to address those surges that we are seeing in Florida, in Texas, in Arizona and other states,” Dr. Fauci added.

By midweek the crisis in southern and western states was clear. Arizona testing centers were slammed and unable to process all the test requests: The United States’ coronavirus testing capacity has begun to strain as the pandemic continues to spread, with over 35,000 cases recorded Tuesday. Across the country, more than a dozen public laboratories say they are now “challenged” to meet the demand.

The Atlantic: Yesterday [June 23], the U.S. reported 38,672 new cases of the coronavirus, the highest daily total so far. Ignore any attempt to explain away what is happening: The American coronavirus pandemic is once again at risk of spinning out of control. A new and brutal stage now menaces the Sun Belt states, whose residents face a nearly unbroken chain of outbreaks stretching from South Carolina to California. Across the South and large parts of the West, cases are soaring, hospitalizations are spiking, and a greater portion of tests are coming back positive.

This Atlantic piece is a good summary of the Sunbelt spikes, listing all the key data metrics. It is also an important historical record of the politics that lead to the spikes: what unites some of the most troublesome states is the all-or-nothing approach they took to pandemic suppression. The stay-at-home order in Texas, for instance, lifted on April 30. A day later, the state allowed nearly all of its businesses and public spaces—stores, malls, churches, restaurants, and movie theaters—to open with limited capacity. …A form of wishful thinking seemed to drive these decisions: If the virus could be ignored, then it might go away altogether….Eventually, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Doug Ducey* of Arizona went even further, blocking cities and counties from implementing any pandemic-related restriction more stringent than that required by the state….Both governors finally reversed those policies last week. (“To state the obvious, COVID-19 is now spreading at an unacceptable rate in Texas, and it must be corralled,” Abbot said at a press conference on Monday. This had not been obvious to the governor less than a week earlier, when he told Texans that the state’s record-breaking number of new infections was “no reason today to be alarmed.”)

On testing: National testing capacity has expanded significantly since the start of the pandemic, recently reaching half a million daily tests. Federal health officials testified at a congressional hearing this week that the country has the capacity to do 15 million coronavirus tests per month; they expect that number to reach 40 million to 50 million by the fall. Experts have estimated that at least 500,000 coronavirus tests daily are what the country needs to safely reopen.

New York Times: For the first time, some governors are backtracking on reopening their states, issuing new restrictions for parts of the economy that had resumed…. The decisions in Texas and Florida to revert to stronger restrictions represented the strongest acknowledgment yet that reopening had not gone as planned in two of the nation’s most populous states, where only days ago their Republican governors were adamantly resisting calls to close back down.

The New York Times has to add a “Reversing” designation to its tally of lockdown categories for the states.

Arizona: At critical junctures, blunders by top officials undermined faith in the data purportedly driving decision-making, according to experts monitoring Arizona’s response. And when forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.

And Texas halted its reopening plan: bars closed; indoor dining reduced from 75% to 50% capacity (“If I could go back and redo anything, it probably would have been to slow down the opening of bars,” Mr. Abbott said in an interview with KVIA-TV in El Paso on Friday evening.)

Florida: no alcohol sales; restaurants must remain at 50% capacity (new rules put on place Friday June 26)

Frum has a good history of the politics of the pandemic.

Republicans began encouraging mask wearing this week (of June 28).

This reporting by the Washington Post shows how Coronavirus is becoming central to both presidential campaigns: The [Trump campaign] goal is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus — that schools should reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the year and the economy will continue to improve.
White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official.

As more school districts release their reopening plans for the fall: “I disagree with @CDCgov,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, a day after hosting a series of calls and events to pressure schools to reopen fully. “While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!”

During a coronavirus task force briefing later Wednesday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the C.D.C. would issue new recommendations next week.

An unreleased CDC report on schools: “While many jurisdictions and districts mention symptom screening, very few include information as to the response or course of action they would take if student/faculty/staff are found to have symptoms, nor have they clearly identified which symptoms they will include in their screening,” the talking points say. “In addition, few plans include information regarding school closure in the event of positive tests in the school community.”

By Friday (July 10) the death toll had begun to tick up nationally.

Some new restrictions were put back in place across the South and West:
Louisiana: no more indoor bars and restaurants, and outdoor mask requirement
South Carolina: no alcohol sales after 11pm
Las Vegas & Reno, Nevada: bars closed
New Mexico: no indoor dining

California closed all bars and indoor dining. Oregon issued an outdoor mask order.

In Georgia: On Friday, a day after suing the mayor of Atlanta for mandating virus-fighting rules that were stricter than his own, Gov. Brian Kemp said he would not stand down as the mayor’s “disastrous policies threaten the lives and livelihood of our citizens.” Mr. Kemp, a Republican, stood by his decision to sue Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and City Council members over their move to require masks and revert the city to the most restrictive reopening phase.

Sunday the New York Times released insider reporting on Trump April decision to downplay the virus and push responsibility to the states.

Economic Outlook:

Sewer interviewed people in some of the 10,000 cars who sat in a food line in Texas: Although a few had recently seen their finances improve, most had been struggling since the 2008 recession and the anemic recovery that followed. Very few of the people I spoke to saw a culprit—while some were inclined to blame the Trump administration, and others held the Chinese government responsible, the vast majority saw the pandemic as an unlikely event no one could have planned for.
He cites this statistic: Among those still employed, the pain has not been evenly distributed. More than half of those making less than $50,000 have seen their hours cut, compared with 36 percent of those making $50,000 to $100,000 and 28 percent of those making more than $100,000.

His close: Trump’s theft of the meager economic gains since the Great Recession may foil his bid for a second term. But if Biden takes office and fails to heed Roosevelt’s example, then he will be leaving the majority of Americans in the same place they were at the end of the last recession: defenseless against calamity. The vast queues of struggling Americans lining up for food will not just be the nation’s present, but its future.

Reviving the economy will be difficult. Reinvigorating American democracy will be much harder.

Annie Lowrey writing in the Atlantic forecasted the economic outlook: Retail sales rose 18 percent in May, and the economy added 2.5 million jobs. But absent dramatic policy action, a pandemic depression is possible: the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that the American economy will generate $8 trillion less in economic activity over the next decade than it projected just a few months ago, and that a full recovery might not take hold until the 2030s.
She concludes: Ending the pandemic would have been the single best thing the federal government could have done to preserve the country’s wealth, health, and economic functioning. The Trump administration, in its hubris, obstinacy, and incompetence, failed to do it.

Still, a second Great Depression is not inevitable.

The White House began releasing negative stories about Fauci to the press this week.

Larry Hogan, GOP governor of Maryland, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. First he recounts how he got COVID tests from South Korea and feared the Trump Administration would confiscate them: Then a caravan of Maryland National Guard trucks escorted by the Maryland State Police drove the tests from the airport to a refrigerated, secure warehouse at an undisclosed location. The federal government had recently seized 3 million N95 masks purchased by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. We weren’t going to let Washington stop us from helping Marylanders.

He puts the blame squarely on Trump:

• I’d watched as the president downplayed the outbreak’s severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals. … So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response.

• So many nationwide actions could have been taken in those early days but weren’t

• instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans.
• Describes briefing of Governors Association in early February: It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts’ warnings and the president’s public dismissals. Weren’t these the people the White House was consulting about the virus? What made the briefing even more chilling was its clear, factual tone. It was a harrowing warning of an imminent national threat, and we took it seriously — or at least most of us did. It was enough to convince almost all the governors that this epidemic was going to be worse than most people realized.
• an undertaking as large as a national testing program required Washington’s help. We expected something more than constant heckling from the man who was supposed to be our leader.

Trump’s DHS sent civilians in unmarked military gear into Portland to arrest protestors.

One of the protestors who was beaten and tear gassed spoke with the AP, 53-year-old Christopher David: “They came out in this phalanx, running, and then they plowed into a bunch of protesters in the intersection of the street and knocked them over. They came out to fight…They are thugs and goons. I couldn’t recognize anything tactically that they were attempting to do that was even remotely related to crowd control. It looked to me like a gang of guys with sticks.””

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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.2%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 3,630,587 / 138,782

The Supreme Court ruled that the Manhattan DA can get access to Trump tax record in the Stormy Daniels case, and that the lower courts have to apply a stricter standard before letting Congress have his tax returns.

While the rulings are a rebuke to Trump’s legal argument, Frum argues they are a gift to Trump candidacy: But Trump’s legal strategy was cannier than his legal arguments. The strategy was to play for time, to push the day of reckoning beyond November 2020. That strategy has now paid off….It will catch up to him. But Trump never thinks so far ahead. In law, as in his approach to the pandemic, Trump’s one thought is: Save myself today; I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. The Supreme Court saved Trump today.

Geoffrey Berman, who stepped down form the SDNY, told his story to the House on Thursday in a behind closed doors session: He said Barr offered him other jobs, and then threatened to fire him, to get him to step down: But under questioning, Mr. Berman called the attorney general’s actions irregular and said they raised serious concerns in his mind. He told lawmakers that he believed that Mr. Barr’s plan to replace him with an outsider would “delay and disrupt” important cases under his watch. And when asked specifically by Republicans whether Mr. Barr had offered him a quid pro quo, he said he believed the description would fit an offer of a job in return for his resignation, according to three people familiar with the testimony who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was private.

Trump commuted Roger Stone’s 40 month sentence on Friday night.

Within a day of the commutation, Mueller wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, reminding the country of Stone’ crimes: A jury later determined he lied repeatedly to members of Congress. He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases. He in fact updated senior campaign officials repeatedly about WikiLeaks. And he tampered with a witness, imploring him to stonewall Congress.

Wittes writes in Lawfare that the commutation is especially corrupt because the president is using his powers to pardon a person who committed a crime to expressly protect that same president.

COVID-19

Trump wore a mask in public for the first time on Saturday, arranges a dramatic video at Walter Reed Hospital: “Anticipation over whether he would wear a mask had been building, after the president had repeatedly dismissed suggestions that he wear a mask, frequently appearing in public spaces without one, mocking those who did and ignoring public health rules in several states…. ““I’ll probably have a mask, if you must know… I’ve never been against masks, but I do believe they have a time and a place.””

Personal Log: A close relative–a dear aunt–died on Friday after a week long hospitalization with COVID-19. She is a victim of skyrocketing cases happening in Florida.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.1%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 3,106,931 / 132,855

In Russia News

On Sunday the Washington Post reported that US intelligence believes Americas were killed due to the Russian bounty. As to the administration’s response: The administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, preferred confronting the Russians directly about the matter, while some National Security Council officials in charge of Russia were more dismissive of taking immediate action, the official said. It remained unclear where those discussions have led to date.”

The New York Times also followed up their original story with more details about how US intelligence came to believe the bounties had been delivered: The crucial information that led the spies and commandos to focus on the bounties included the recovery of a large amount of American cash from a raid on a Taliban outpost that prompted suspicions. Interrogations of captured militants and criminals played a central role in making the intelligence community confident in its assessment that the Russians had offered and paid bounties in 2019

As for the administration’s response: One senior administration official offered a new explanation on Sunday, saying that Mr. Trump was not briefed because the intelligence agencies had come to no consensus on the findings. But another official said there was broad agreement that the intelligence assessment was accurate, with some complexities because different aspects of the intelligence — including interrogations and surveillance data — resulted in some differences among agencies in how much confidence to put in each type.

At 10:40 pm Sunday Trump tweeted: Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks, wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!

Monday night reporting: “the intelligence was included months ago in Mr. Trump’s President’s Daily Brief document — a compilation of the government’s latest secrets and best insights about foreign policy and national security that is prepared for him to read. One of the officials said the item appeared in Mr. Trump’s brief in late February; the other cited Feb. 27, specifically.”

Tuesday night reporting: American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, evidence that supported their conclusion that Russia covertly offered bounties for killing U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan, according to three officials familiar with the intelligence…. The disclosures further undercut White House officials’ claim that the intelligence was too uncertain to brief President Trump. In fact, the information was provided to him in his daily written brief in late February, two officials have said.

Ignatius connects some dots: Nicholson’s 2018 interview was a rare public protest by a U.S. official. Trump didn’t press the Russians to stop, and so they continued. The GRU military-intelligence units that were helping smuggle weapons to the Taliban in 2018 may have been the forerunners of GRU operatives who U.S. intelligence analysts suspect are the new bounty hunters…. U.S. military and intelligence officials became increasingly concerned, several told me. By March, they were pressing for a top-level review by senior Trump administration officials of this still-unconfirmed threat to U.S. soldiers…. Trump is an obstacle to good policy. Either people don’t tell him the truth, or he doesn’t want to hear it. Whichever way, he’s defaulting on his most basic responsibility as commander in chief.

This is how the White House may be trying to get out of this: A memo produced in recent days by the office of the nation’s top intelligence official acknowledged that the C.I.A. and top counterterrorism officials have assessed that Russia appears to have offered bounties to kill American and coalition troops in Afghanistan, but emphasized uncertainties and gaps in evidence, according to three officials…. both its timing and its stressing of doubts suggested that it was intended to bolster the Trump administration’s attempts to justify its inaction on the months-old assessment, the officials said. Some former national security officials said the account of the memo indicated that politics may have influenced its production.

A new Trump campaign theme emerged over the July 4th holiday: In a speech at the White House on Saturday evening and an address in front of Mount Rushmore on Friday night, Mr. Trump promoted a version of the “American carnage” vision for the country that he laid out during his inaugural address — updated to include an ominous depiction of the recent protests over racial justice. In doing so, he signaled even more clearly that he would exploit race and cultural flash points to stoke fear among his base of white supporters in an effort to win re-election.

Washington Post: Trump put his strategy to resuscitate his troubled reelection campaign by galvanizing white supporters on display Friday night under the chiseled granite gaze of four past presidents memorialized in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He celebrated Independence Day with a dystopian speech in which he excoriated racial justice protesters as “evil” representatives of a “new far-left fascism” whose ultimate goal is “the end of America.”

More: If his 2016 campaign to put “America first” was focused on building a wall to keep out immigrants and shedding alliances with nations he believed were exploiting the United States, the president is now aiming his rhetorical blasts at groups of liberal Americans who, he believes, constitute a direct threat to the standing of his conservative base.

Dan Balz puts it this way: His enemy, however, is not the Nazis of the 20th century or terrorists of the 21st century. Instead, it appears to be those in America who disagree with him — a caricatured blue America…. Never in our lifetimes has the Independence Day holiday been used for such divisive and personal ends.

Also on Sunday (June 28) Trump tweeted a video of people chanting White Power. It was later deleted and a spokesperson claimed Trump had not heard the audio.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.7%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 2,784,452 / 129,393

COVID-19

By midweek the crisis in southern and western states was clear. Arizona testing centers were slammed and unable to process all the test requests: The United States’ coronavirus testing capacity has begun to strain as the pandemic continues to spread, with over 35,000 cases recorded Tuesday. Across the country, more than a dozen public laboratories say they are now “challenged” to meet the demand.

And Texas halted its reopening plan. And then reversed its reopening, by closing bars. As did Florida.

The New York Times has to add a “Reversing” designation to its tally of lockdown categories for the states.

Other News

Regarding Bolton’s book, Ignatius writes that “the Turkey story — featuring the American president assuring Erdogan he would “take care of things” in an ongoing federal criminal investigation — may be the clearest, most continuous narrative of misconduct by Trump that has yet surfaced.”
He quotes a key passage from Bolton’s book: Trump “then told Erdogan that he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.”
On Oct. 15, as the Ukraine scandal was brewing, Berman’s office indicted Halkbank. Eight months later, Trump fired Berman, just as he had his predecessor Bharara. No explanation was given.

The Halkbank case continues — Trump’s assurances to the Turkish president notwithstanding.

David Frum explains this week’s twist in the Trump-Russia scandal: Aaron Zelinsky, who was a career prosecutor in the Department of Justice, testified on Wednesday in the House of Representatives. Reading his prepared statement, Zelinsky spoke about the Department of Justice’s handling of the case of Roger Stone, a close political associate of President Donald Trump. Back in February, Stone was convicted on seven counts of witness tampering, lying to Congress, and obstruction of a proceeding. Following federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors requested a punishment of seven to nine years. President Trump immediately erupted in Twitter outrage. The next day, senior officials in the Department of Justice withdrew the original sentencing memo and substituted a replacement requesting a substantially lighter sentence. Zelinksy and the three other prosecutors resigned from the case.

The normal mind thinks that way because it cannot readily absorb the combination of recklessness, arrogance, and cluelessness at the core of the Trump presidency. But here we are, June 24, 2020, confronted with it again: sworn congressional testimony that, yes, the attorney general overruled career prosecutors to protect a person whose testimony might implicate the president—delivered on the same day as one of Trump’s appointees to the federal appellate bench delivered an opinion overruling a trial judge, allowing the Department of Justice to protect another Trump associate from his own previous guilty pleas on charges of lying to the FBI.

Watergate produced a saying: The cover-up is worse than the crime. But what if there is no cover-up? The president is staring the country in the eye and acknowledging: “Sure I did it. I’ll do it again. And again. Because nobody’s going to stop me. Cover-ups are for losers.”

In the New York Times: Two Justice Department officials recounted to Congress in stinging detail on Wednesday how political appointees had intervened in criminal and antitrust cases to advance the personal interests of President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.

The New York Times reported that Barr ordered a review of the Michale Cohen case after he came on as Attorney General even though that case had already been tried.

With Roger Stone set to report to prison next week, a prosecutor testified before the House on Tuesday: Senior law enforcement officials intervened to seek a more lenient prison sentence for President Trump’s friend and ally Roger J. Stone Jr. for political reasons, a former prosecutor on the case is expected to testify before Congress on Wednesday, citing his supervisor’s account of the matter. “What I heard — repeatedly — was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president.”

This is an important account of Trump clearing out America’s pro-democracy propaganda networks: Libby Luie president of Radio Free Asia… She’s a great resource for any U.S. administration; this should have been her moment in the sun. Instead, on Wednesday of last week, she was fired. So were her senior colleagues at Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks—the groups that, together, constitute the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Trump got is 200th federal judge this week, the last vacancy available in his term. one-fifth of the federal bench have now been appointed by Trump and McConnell.

One week after the Trump campaign demanded a retraction an apology from CNN for a poll that said Biden was 14 points ahead of Trump, a New York Times poll found the same result.

In Russia News

All three major papers–New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post–reported this weekend that US intelligence believes that Russia’s GRU paid Taliban to kill American soldiers: The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

On Saturday the White House press secretary released this: “the C.I.A. director, national security adviser and the chief of staff can all confirm that neither the president nor the vice president were briefed on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence.” This was widely disbelieved.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.6%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 2,459,472 / 124,976

Trump issued an executive order on policing, seen by most reformers as weak.

The White House threatened to sue Bolton to stop the release of his book.

Excerpts of Bolton’s book were published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, saying that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

The Supreme Court overturned Trump’s attempt to end DACA, meaning that the Dreamers are protected for now. Roberts wrote: “We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” the chief justice wrote. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.”

Here are Peter Bakers 5 takeaways for the New York Times.

Trump fired Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for SDNY. First Barr fired him on Friday, but Berman refused to step down becasue Barr is not authorized. Then on Saturday Barr said Trump fired him, and Berman agreed to step down because his trusted deputy will take over in his place and continue current cases free of political interference.

Trump’s rally in Tulsa was his first since early March. It was widely under-attended, with only about 6,000 supporters showing up.

According to the New York Times: President Trump and several staff members stood backstage and gazed at the empty Bank of Oklahoma Center in horror…. The campaign had hoped to use the Tulsa event as a reset after the president’s slide in the polls in the wake of his administration’s failures responding to the coronavirus

Facebook on Thursday removed advertisements posted on its platform by the Trump campaign that prominently featured a symbol used by Nazis to classify political prisoners during World War II, saying the imagery violated company policy.

Personal Log: Our daycare opened this week, with strict social distancing measured including only 10 people in a class; we are opting not to attend until maybe the fall. New Jersey allowed other businesses to open this week, including outdoor dining. I saw chain restaurants in north and south Jersey setting up tents and tables in parking lots with diners being seated by masked waiters.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.1%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 2,215,618 / 119,055

Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff apologized for joining Trump in the Lafayette Square photo op: “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

The New York Times got a hold of interviews and other documents about the use of the National Guard to suppress protests in D.C.: “Senior Army leaders — in an effort to prevent what they feared would be a calamitous outcome if President Trump ordered combat troops from the 82nd Airborne Division holding just outside city limits to the streets — leaned heavily on the Guard to carry out aggressive tactics to prove it could do the job without active-duty forces.
Along with the troops, National Guard units from other states brought weapons and ammunition. Tens of thousands of rifle and pistol rounds were stored in the D.C. Armory and partitioned in pallets, labeled by their state of origin, to be used on American citizens in case of emergency.”

Kara Swisher in the New York Times has one of the clearest descriptions of recent events: “Readers may miss a critical frame of reference when there are so many frames to choose from. And some public figure may take advantage of that, slipping in and out of frames like the portraits at Hogwarts, without being tagged for revolting behavior in one when moving to the next.

Consider the master at this: President Trump. He has perfected a sick performative art form of playing the worst troll in Twitter’s history, even as he struts on the world stage with a flag backdrop and a White House podium playing a great leader.

While sometimes he crosses the streams — like in the recent bizarre Bible-prop photo op — he is expert at obscuring the links between extremely offensive and pure crazy. Thus, the dirty work is done on Twitter, and the modestly cleaned-up version is presented elsewhere by him and in talking points of his many minions.

Mr. Trump did it Tuesday with a truly hideous tweet aimed at the 75-year-old Buffalo protester who was knocked to the ground by the police. We all saw the video, but rather than deplore the over-the-top behavior, Mr. Trump shared a tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory that included Antifa, jamming police radios and I don’t even know what other cockamamie ideas.”

On Wednesday “A retired federal judge accused the Justice Department on Wednesday of a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power” and urged a court to reject its attempt to drop the criminal case against Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser.”

Trump will resume his rallies next week: The sign-up page for tickets to President Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa next week includes something that hasn’t appeared ahead of previous rallies: a disclaimer noting that attendees “voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19” and agree not to hold the campaign or venue liable should they get sick.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.1%

COVID cases / death: 2,038,344 / 114,625

George Floyd Protests

After many peaceful protests on Sunday, there was more violence at night. Here is a round up of the clashes.

While many cops are running amuck indiscriminately firing rubber bullets and tear gas on both people who are and are not protesting, others are kneeling along with protestors as a sign of solidarity: “The scenes offered a stark contrast to images of officers ignoring the pleas of protesters in other instances, and at times resorting to the use of overwhelming force, sometimes seemingly unprovoked by the crowds before them. In numerous cities, including New York and Los Angeles, police vehicles were filmed plowing into throngs of people.”

There have been many report of police targeting journalists: The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker and a writer for the Bellingcat website have each tracked about 100 instances of reporters being harassed or injured at the protests.

Experts on policing said that the videos showed, in many cases, examples of abrupt escalation on the part of law enforcement that was difficult to justify.

There was serious unrest and protests outside of the White House Sunday night. And word spread over the weekend that Trump was taken into the White House bunker Friday night due to protests near the White House.

On Wednesday in New York City, police were enforcing the 9pm curfew: The police were quicker to enforce the clampdown than they had been before, moving swiftly to disperse demonstrators from rainy city streets and to arrest those who failed to clear out. The curfew was lifted over the weekend.

According to the Washington Post: Barr was tapped by President Trump to direct the national response to protests.

Even before the photo op George Will wrote a blistering column calling for voters to sweep Trump and the Republican Senate out of power: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.

Monday: the church photo-op

Trump made a Rose Garden address where he said: “If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” Mr. Trump told the Army on Monday to deploy active-duty military police to Washington. “I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.”
He also had a call with governors in which he argued for swift and strong breaking of the protests: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Mr. Trump said. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

“And just before the city’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect, they were hit with flash-bang explosions and doused with tear gas.

It was because the president, who spent part of the weekend in a secure bunker as protests roiled, wanted to have his picture taken holding a Bible at a battered church just beyond the gates.”

“He did not pray,” the bishop, Mariann E. Budde, said in an interview. Referring to the death of the black man in police custody that set off the protests, she added: “He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years. We need a president who can unify and heal. He has done the opposite of that, and we are left to pick up the pieces.”

After the photo-op, the Mayor of DC tweeted: I imposed a curfew at 7pm. A full 25 minutes before the curfew & w/o provocation, federal police used munitions on peaceful protestors in front of the White House, an act that will make the job of
@DCPoliceDept officers more difficult. Shameful!

Here is some before and after video. The Washington Post has a minute by minute account of the attack on protestors.

Here is how NPR covered it: Trump’s Rose Garden remarks came as just across the street, law enforcement officers deployed tear gas and shot rubber bullets to forcefully disperse peaceful protesters. Washington, D.C., had set a curfew Monday of 7 p.m. ET.

The protesters were removed from the Lafayette Square area across from the White House, apparently to clear the way for the president to walk to St. John’s Church, where he posed briefly for photographers, holding a Bible.

Yglesias point out the significance of the timing:

But starting at 7 pm, a group of officers forcibly expelling protesters from the park would have been enforcing the law.

Doing it at 6:36 pm or so served no real purpose except to make the law enforcement action flagrantly abusive. And that itself sends a powerful message.

Washington Post: Hundreds of protesters were pushed away from Lafayette Square, where they were protesting the police killing of George Floyd, by the National Guard, U.S. Park Police and Secret Service. The ambush began half an hour before the city’s newly imposed curfew of 7 p.m. went into effect. When the crowds were cleared, the president walked through the park to visit the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had been set on fire Sunday…. the scene in front of the White House when federal law enforcement descended was far from the “violent mobs” Trump described in his speech. The gathering was smaller and calmer than previous evenings, with people dancing and singing to a woman playing a guitar instead of knocking over barricades. … The FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals and Bureau of Prisons were all involved in the federal response, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.

The Washington Post reports: Attorney General William P. Barr personally ordered law enforcement officials to clear the streets around Lafayette Square just before President Trump spoke Monday, a Justice Department official said, a directive that prompted a show of aggression against a crowd of largely peaceful protesters.

The DOJ had activated riot police from the Bureau of Prisons to gather in unmarked gear in Washington DC.

Administration Response

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper initially tried to send home a small portion of the 1,600 active-duty troops on Wednesday, only to have Mr. Trump order him to reverse course during an angry meeting. The president finally acquiesced on Thursday, according to an administration official who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations, but it did not appear the two men spoke directly.

Military and IC Response

The Washington Post rounds up interviews with CIA analysts and people who have covered dictatorships, who say what they have seen this week in the US has shaken them: “It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world,” CIA analyst Polymeropoulos said on Twitter. Referring to the despotic leaders of Iraq, Syria and Libya, he said: “Saddam. Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”
Former intelligence officials said the unrest and the administration’s militaristic response are among many measures of decay they would flag if writing assessments about the United States for another country’s intelligence service.

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen spoke out in a piece in the Atlantic: I am less confident in the soundness of the orders they will be given by this commander in chief, and I am not convinced that the conditions on our streets, as bad as they are, have risen to the level that justifies a heavy reliance on military troops. Certainly, we have not crossed the threshold that would make it appropriate to invoke the provisions of the Insurrection Act.

Mattis released a statement on Wednesday: Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.”
We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

Floyd’s funeral in Minneapolis was on Thursday.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.6%

COVID Cases/ Deaths: 1,891,690 / 109,192

Below is a monthly update, marking key metrics and commentary in from mid-May to mid-June, the third month since lockdowns began.

Polling Round Up

According to Gallop tracking polls, the number of Americas who are worried about catching the virus has declined for the second month in a row, from a high of 57% in mid-April to 49% in mid-June. However the drop was only two points this month, compared to 6 points last month. A more significant shift was need in the financial hardship question. Last month the number of Americans somewhat-to-very worried about financial hardship increased five points over the month before. This month that number dropped 9 points. Only 44% are concerned about their personal financial situation, down from 53% last month.

In the fivethirtyeight average of polls, there was a similar decline in the number concerned about catching the virus (64% down 3.7%). On the larger questions of Americans concerned about economy: 84% are some/very concerned, down 1.9% from last month.

Disapproval of Trump’s response continues to climb, with disproval/approval at 54%/42%. The disapproval margin is now 12.1%, up from -9.2% in Mary and -1.1 in April.

Political Weirding

The most significant event this month was the police murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day and the ensuing weeks of protest that brought huge crowds into the streets across the country and sparked debate over how serious the COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing measures can be going forward.

However, in the week before that, here is some of what the conversation was about:

A New York Times piece on Biden moving toward a more expansive agenda: Democratic leaders say that if they hold power next January, they must be prepared to move to pump trillions more into the economy; enact infrastructure and climate legislation far larger than they previously envisioned; pass a raft of aggressive worker-protection laws; expand government-backed health insurance and create enormous new investments in public-health jobs, health care facilities and child care programs…. “There is a recognition that this event is more transformative than 2008, more transformative than 9/11, more transformative than the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a centrist Democrat.

The Republican governor of Ohio Mike Dewine wrote this on Twitter Monday May 18: We are marshaling all the resources at our disposal to assemble a large contingent of law enforcement and health officials from across state agencies and from our local communities. We will coordinate with them as part of the Department of Public Safety’s Ohio Investigative Unit. They will surge in to conduct safety compliance checks in crowded bars and restaurants.

Nursing homes where those groups make up a significant portion of the residents — no matter their location, no matter their size, no matter their government rating — have been twice as likely to get hit by the coronavirus as those where the population is overwhelmingly white.

Here is an account of what one New Jersey town is doing to successfully contact trace 90% of their COVID-19 cases.

Early June saw new stages of reopening across the country, including Las Vegas: Vegas reopened casinos over the weekend: Dealers and players are separated by Plexiglas, dice are doused in sanitizer after every throw, and guests, encouraged though not required to wear masks, are subject to mandatory temperature checks.

In NYC, the first phase of reopening began on Monday, with construction cites and retail stores. The case count is low enough “for New York City’s corps of contract tracers, who began work last week, to try to track every close interaction and, officials hope, stop a resurgence of the virus.”

News of increasing case counts in certain states: Since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, according to data tracked by The Washington Post: : Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

The second week of June as a time of great (pessimistic) reflection on our collective battle against the virus.

Douthat: With this last turn, we’ve reached the end of the progression, because it means the original theory behind a stern public health response — that the danger to life and health justified suspending even the most righteous pursuits, including not just normal economic life but the practices and institutions that protect children, comfort the dying, serve the poor — has been abandoned or subverted by every faction in our national debate. … [which] does signal that there will be no further comprehensive attempt to fight the virus. Trump and conservatism won’t support it, the public health bureaucracy won’t be able to defend it, and we didn’t use the time the lockdowns bought to build the infrastructure to sustain a campaign of actual suppression.

Writing in The Atlantic: These numbers all reflect infections that likely began before this week of protest. An even larger spike now seems likely. Put another way: If the country doesn’t see a substantial increase in new COVID-19 cases after this week, it should prompt a rethinking of what epidemiologists believe about how the virus spreads…. If so, it won’t be because the United States made concerted, coordinated decisions about how to balance the horrors of the pandemic and the frustration of pausing everyday life. Instead, the United States has moved from attempting to beat the virus to managing the harm of losing.