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.
—
Trump’s Job Approval: 40.6%
COVID Cases / Deaths: 2,459,472 / 124,976