Crooked Comey Cartoons

Nick Ayers, considered candidate for White House chief of staff, 'departing' at year's end

Vice President Pence's chief of staff, Nick Ayers, who was considered a front-runner to replace John Kelly as White House chief of staff, announced Sunday: "I will be departing at the end of the year."
Ayers revealed the news in a tweet. Its full text read: "Thank you @realDonaldTrump, @VP, and my great colleagues for the honor to serve our Nation at The White House. I will be departing at the end of the year but will work with the #MAGA team to advance the cause. #Georgia"
The Wall Street Journal originally reported that Trump and Ayers could not reach agreement on Ayers' length of service and that he would instead assist the president from outside the administration.
Ayers and Trump had discussed the job for months. The new hire was to be key to a West Wing reshuffling to shift focus toward the 2020 reelection campaign and the challenge of governing with Democrats in control of the House.
Officials said Trump and Ayers could not agree on his length of service, but Trump wants his next chief of staff to hold the job through the 2020 election. Ayers, who has young triplets, had long planned to leave the administration at the end of the year, and reportedly discussed taking the job on an interim basis only through next spring.
Trump said Saturday that he expected to announce a replacement for Kelly in a day or two, and it was not immediately clear whether he had a new favorite for the post.
Sources told Fox News on Sunday evening there have been “conversations” about Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., becoming chief of staff. Meadows serves as chairman of the influential House Freedom Caucus.
Trump reportedly is considering four candidates for the post, including Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney, The Associated Press added.
Sunday night, Trump took a potshot at the media, while also tweeting his next steps: “I am in the process of interviewing some really great people for the position of White House Chief of Staff. Fake News has been saying with certainty it was Nick Ayers, a spectacular person who will always be with our #MAGA agenda. I will be making a decision soon!”
Trump had developed confidence in Ayers, in part by watching the effectiveness of Pence's largely independent political operation. Ayers also earned the backing of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president's daughter and son-in-law and senior advisers, for taking on the new role, White House officials said.

President Donald Trump's top pick to replace chief of staff John Kelly, Nick Ayers, apparently took himself out of the running for the job Sunday. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) 

ANDREW MCCARTHY: HOW COHEN MEMO MAKES IT LIKELY TRUMP WILL BE INDICTED

Ayers, 36, would have been the youngest chief of staff since 34-year-old Hamilton Jordan served under Jimmy Carter.
Kelly is 68.
Ayers instead will be leaving the administration to run a pro-Trump super PAC, The Associated Press reported citing a person familiar with his plans who was not authorized to discuss them by name.
Pence thanked Ayers for his service in a tweet early Sunday evening.
Its full text read: “.@nick_ayers has done an outstanding job as my Chief of Staff and I will always be grateful for his friendship, dedication to the @VP team and his efforts to advance the @POTUS agenda. Thank you Nick! Karen and I wish you, Jamie and the kids every blessing in the years ahead.”
GOP RUSHES TO PASS BORDER WALL LEGISLATION, JUSTICE REFORM BEFORE DEMS TAKE HOUSE
Trump announced Saturday that Kelly would leave around year's end.
Kelly, whose last day on the job is set to be Jan. 2, had been credited with imposing order on a chaotic West Wing after his arrival in June 2017 from his post as homeland security secretary. However, he also alienated some longtime Trump allies, and over time he grew increasingly isolated, with an increasingly diminished role.

Comey: Trump is lucky a sitting president can’t be indicted for being linked to Cohen case

Former FBI Director James Comey said Sunday in an interview that President Trump, if it's proved that he directed illegal hush-money payments to women, would be in violation of campaign finance laws, but he is lucky that the rule of the Justice Department remains that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
“I don’t know,” Comey replied to an MSNBC host at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, when asked if Trump is now an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the case of Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. “Not in the formal sense that he’s been named in an indictment. ... But if he’s not there, he’s certainly close given the language in the filing that the crimes were committed at his direction.”
In filings Friday, prosecutors in New York linked Trump to a federal crime of illegal payments to buy the silence of two women during the 2016 campaign. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office also laid out contacts between Trump associates and Russian intermediaries, and suggested the Kremlin aimed early on to influence Trump and his Republican campaign by playing to his political and personal business interests.
In the legal filings, the Justice Department stopped short of accusing Trump of directly committing a crime. However, it said Trump told Cohen to make illegal payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom claimed to have had affairs with Trump more than a decade ago.
When asked if anyone other than a president were implicated in the way that Trump has been, Comey responded: “Well, that person would be in serious jeopardy of being charged.” He continued, “because the government wouldn’t make that sponsoring allegation if they weren’t seriously contemplating going forward with criminal charges.”
Comey added, “Now where it stands here, I can’t say.”
SCHIFF: DEMS WANT COHEN BACK ON CAPITOL HILL AFTER THEY RETAKE HOUSE
In separate filings, Mueller's team detailed how Cohen spoke to a Russian who "claimed to be a 'trusted person' in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign 'political synergy' and 'synergy on a government level.'" Cohen said he never followed up on that meeting. Mueller's team also said former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort lied to them about his contacts with a Russian associate and Trump administration officials, including in 2018.
Multiple Trump associates, including Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Cohen, have pleaded guilty to lying about their interactions with Russians during the campaign and presidential transition period. Manafort's foreign dealings, including to an associate the U.S. says has ties to Russian intelligence, also have attracted law enforcement scrutiny.
COMEY IS A DISGRACE TO THE FBI, FORMER ASSISTANT DIRECTOR SAYS
Trump, who fired Comey in May 2017, has denied wrongdoing and has compared the investigations to a "witch hunt."
The president repeatedly has portrayed Comey and Mueller as exceptionally close as part of a long-running effort to undermine the investigation and paint the lead figures in the probe as united against him.

Evidence linking Trump to campaign finance crimes is not there, top lawyer says

An expert campaign finance lawyer said in an interview published Monday that he is not impressed with the Department of Justice's evidence that effectively links President Trump to campaign finance violations after the recent release of the Michael Cohen sentencing memo.
Dan Backer, the lawyer, told Forbes that there appears to be no evidence to corroborate the DOJ’s apparent assertion of any illegality on Trump's part.
Cohen admitted to violating federal campaign finance laws by arranging hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal in the weeks leading up to the election of then-candidate Trump, according to the plea.
Prosecutors in New York, where Cohen pleaded guilty in August to campaign finance crimes in connection with those payments, wrote in the filing, "With respect to both payments, Cohen acted with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election. Cohen coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments. In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.”
The filing does not name Trump, but references "Individual-1," who became president in 2017. Trump has not been charged.
Trump's lawyers have downplayed the severity of campaign finance crimes, but some Democrats consider it an impeachable offense.
Backer, a veteran campaign counsel, said it is common practice for high-profile individuals and companies to take part in these kinds of payment arrangements. He said Trump is a brand, he has carried out similar payments for years and these so-called "hush-buys" will likely continue.
"Brand protection is not a campaign contribution," he told the magazine.
"The notion that every penny a candidate personally or professionally spends is somehow reportable to the FEC is utter nonsense," he continued.
On Sunday, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the web of federal and state campaign finance laws is so complex that it presents fairness issues.
"There are thousands and thousands of rules. It’s incredibly complicated, campaign finance," Paul said. "We have to decide whether or not really criminal penalties are the way we should approach campaign finance."
Cohen's plea does not necessarily indicate that prosecutors could have successfully prosecuted a campaign finance case against Cohen or Trump.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, wrote on FoxNews.com that Trump is very likely to be indicted for violating campaign finance laws.
"If the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all. Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud, involving millions of dollars,” he wrote.
Cohen is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 12.

Corsi sues Mueller over alleged grand jury leaks, seeks $350M in damages: report

Jerome Corsi, the conservative author accused of lying under oath to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, filed a federal lawsuit late Sunday accusing Mueller of leaking grand jury items and various constitutional violations, including illegal surveillance, reports said.
Politico reported that the newly filed suit claims that Mueller tried to get Corsi to give testimony that Corsi said is false. He is reportedly seeking $100 million in actual damages and $250 million in damages due to injury to his reputation.  The CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency were also named in the suit.
The author has theorized that investigators hoped that he would admit to a connection with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. The connection would bolster their Russian collusion investigation, he said. A link between Corsi and Assange would make it easy to tie in President Trump's former adviser Roger Stone, he said.
American intelligence agencies have assessed that Russia was the source of hacked material released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 election that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mueller’s office is trying to determine whether Stone and other associates of President Trump had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans.
Corsi, the former Washington bureau chief of the conspiracy theory outlet InfoWars, rejected a deal with investigators that would have required him to plead guilty to perjury. He said he could not lie to something he knew to be false, even if it meant living out his life in prison.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Fox News for comment.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington and named Mueller as the defendant. The suit claims that Mueller and his team “demanded” that Corsi falsely testify that he acted as a liaison between Stone and Assange. Politico reported that the suit accuses Mueller of unconstitutional surveillance through the NSA program that was exposed by Edward Snowden, PRISM.
"Defendants Mueller, DOJ, NSA, CIA, and FBI have engaged in ongoing illegal, unconstitutional surveillance on Plaintiff Corsi, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the USA FREEDOM Act as well targeted ‘PRISM’ collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Sovereignties Immunity Act at the direction of Defendant Mueller," the suit said, according to Politico.
National security lawyer Bradley P. Moss has pointed the lawsuit's apparent misciting of "the Foreign Sovereignties Immunity Act" rather than "the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."
"Larry Klayman (Corsi's lawyer) is alleging 4A violations by Mueller against Jerome Corsi in reliance upon section 702 of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act," Moss tweeted. "He meant the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He wrote FSIA."

California Democrat Cartoons

What The Rise Of Kamala Harris Tells Us About The Democratic Party Jul. 24, 2018, at 6:00 AM

Kamala Harris

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In the days after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the two people who seemed like the Democratic Party’s most obvious 2020 candidates, then-Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, hinted that Clinton had gone too far in talking about issues of identity. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman; vote for me,’” Sanders said. Other liberals lamented that the party had lost white voters in such states as Ohio and Iowa who had supported Barack Obama, and they said Democrats needed to dial back the identity talk to win them back.
But that view never took hold among party activists. Liberal-leaning women were emboldened to talk about gender more, not less, after the 2016 election. We’ve had women’s marches and women running for office in greater numbers than ever — all while emphasizing their gender. President Trump’s moves kept identity issues at the forefront, too, and gave Democrats an opportunity both to defend groups they view as disadvantaged and to attack the policies of a president they hate.
The Democratic Party hasn’t simply maintained its liberalism on identity; the party is perhaps further to the left on those issues than it was even one or two years ago. Biden and Sanders are still viable presidential contenders. But in this environment, so is a woman who is the daughter of two immigrants (one from Jamaica and the other from India); who grew up in Oakland, graduated from Howard and rose through the political ranks of the most liberal of liberal bastions, San Francisco; who was just elected to the Senate in 2016 and, in that job, declared that “California represents the future” and pushed Democrats toward a government shutdown last year to defend undocumented immigrants; and who regularly invokes slavery in her stump speech. (“We are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are Native American or your people were kidnapped and placed on a slave ship, your people are immigrants.”)
Sen. Kamala Harris has not officially said she is running in 2020, but she hasn’t denied it, either, and she’s showing many of the signs of someone who is preparing for a run, including campaigning for her Democratic colleagues in key races and signing a deal to write a book. The Californian ranks low in polls of the potential Democratic 2020 field, and she doesn’t have the name recognition of other contenders. (Her first name is still widely mispronounced — it’s COM-ma-la.) But betting markets have her near the top, reflecting the view among political insiders that Harris could win the Democratic nomination with a coalition of well-educated whites and blacks, the way Obama did in 2008.
Whatever happens later, the rise of Harris and her viability for 2020 tell us something about American politics right now: We are in the midst of an intense partisan and ideological battle over culture and identity; the Democrats aren’t backing down or moving to the center on these issues; and politicians who want to lead in either party will probably have to take strong, clear stances on matters of gender and race.

An opportunity

Harris, who went from district attorney of San Francisco to attorney general of California, was a heavy favorite in her 2016 Senate race. But once elected, she was expected to become a virtually powerless freshman senator in Hillary Clinton’s Washington. In fact, she might have been only the second most important person in Washington from her family, since her younger sister, Maya, was a top Clinton policy adviser on the campaign and in line for a senior White House job.
But Clinton’s loss created an opportunity for Harris. The Democrats had the normal leadership vacuum of a party without control of the White House but also a specific void of people who were well-versed in immigration issues and were willing to take the leftward stances on them that the party base wanted as Trump tried to push U.S. immigration policy right. Meanwhile, Biden and Sanders were not natural figures to defend Planned Parenthood when, as part of the repeal of Obamacare, the GOP sought to bar patients from using federal funds at the nonprofit’s clinics. African-American activists went from being deeply connected to the White House to basically shut out of it, as Trump had few blacks in his Cabinet or in top administration posts. And, electorally, while Sanders or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren were obvious potential presidential candidates for the populist wing of the party that backed the Vermont senator in the 2016 Democratic primaries, the coalition of minorities and more establishment-oriented Democrats¹ who had backed Clinton didn’t necessarily have an obvious standard-bearer, particularly with the uncertainty over Biden’s status as a candidate in 2020.
While veteran party leaders like Biden may have wanted the party to move to the center on identity issues, Democratic voters had moved decidedly to the left, a process that was happening under Obama but may be accelerating under Trump. For example, a rising number of Democrats say that racial discrimination is the main factor holding blacks back in American society, that immigration is good for America and that the country would be better off if more women were in office.

“The Democrats are the party of racial diversity, of gender equality — and there’s no going back from that,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the think tank New America, who has written extensively about the growing cultural divide between the parties.
Harris has seized the opportunity. From attending the annual civil rights march in Selma to pushing legislation that would get rid of bail systems that rely on people putting up cash to be released from jail, she has seemed to try to lead on issues that disproportionately affect black Americans and to position herself as their potential presidential candidate. She was one of the earliest critics on Capitol Hill of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies, and her push for a government shutdown over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program delighted party activists (even if the strategy ultimately failed). Harris was among the first Senate Democrats to call for Minnesota’s Al Franken to resign amid allegations that he groped several women, and she has been a strong defender of Planned Parenthood.

A different moment

You might be thinking, “Didn’t we just have a biracial person (who was often described as and embraced being a ‘black’ politician) who was fairly liberal on cultural issues as a major national political figure? Wasn’t he president of the United States?”
Well, yes. But here’s the big difference: Obama didn’t emerge as a presidential candidate by highlighting his strong stands on these divisive, complicated cultural issues, as Harris is attempting to do. In fact, his rise was in large part because he implied that America was not as divided on those issues as it seemed — and that those divides were diminishing. The 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that launched him to the national stage seems, now that we are in the Trump era, almost crazily optimistic. (“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” he said back then. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”)
Whatever the reality of such statements, the political strategy behind them made sense: It’s hard to imagine that America a decade ago would have embraced a nonwhite politician who wasn’t downplaying cultural divides and emphasizing unity. Back then, someone regularly talking about his or her ancestors being kidnapped and enslaved probably had no chance at being elected president.
But 2018 is much different than 2004 or 2008 in terms of the national debate on identity issues. For example, compared with a decade ago, a much higher percentage of Americans, particularly Democrats, see racism as a major problem. Over the past decade, Americans went through the birther movement, shootings of African-Americans by police captured on video, Black Lives Matter protests, Trump’s racial and at times racist rhetoric and Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark. And it’s not just race — think about #MeToo, the legalization of gay marriage and new debates on the rights of people who are transgender.
Harris can’t take the Obama “Kumbaya” route to the White House — I’m not sure at this point that a white Democrat could, either. By the end of his term, Obama didn’t sound particularly hopeful about America getting beyond its cultural divides. Clinton spoke more directly about race and racism in 2016 compared with Obama in 2004 and 2008. Sanders and other white Democrats are already talking taking fairly liberal stances on these issues, and I expect that to continue into next year.
I’m not sure Harris had much choice anyway. She is a Democratic senator from heavily Latino California with Trump as president, so it’s a virtual job requirement for to her to take leftward stances on immigration issues. She is a minority woman at a time when minorities and women are trying to gain more power in national politics, particularly within the Democratic Party — and she is the only black female senator. In other words, Kamala Harris and Barack Obama are, of course, different people. But they also arrived on the national scene at much different political moments.
“When you speak truth, it can make people quite uncomfortable,” Harris told a group of Democratic activists earlier this year in a speech in Henderson, Nevada. “And for people like us who would like to leave the room with everyone feeling lovely, there’s sometimes a disincentive to speak truth.
“But this is a moment in time in which we must speak truth.”

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This is a bit longer than our normal Secret Identity column, so let’s skip “What else you should read.” But please contact me at perry.bacon@fivethirtyeight.com for your thoughts on this piece or ideas for upcoming ones.

Mazie Hirono ‘Justice’ By Rod Dreher • September 23, 2018, 1:24 PM

US Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii)

True:

Solzhenitsyn wrote that in the Soviet Union, trials were never to be treated as a matter of the guilt or innocence of the accused, but of furthering the class struggle. https://t.co/VZC6FlkDYM

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) September 23, 2018

You have to watch that clip. Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono says point blank that facts don’t matter. Kavanaugh is guilty of attempted rape decades ago because he is a conservative judge.
This is infuriating. Since all this came up with Christine Blasey Ford, I have tried to be open-minded about it. I said at first that even if the accusation was true, I don’t understand what the actions of a drunk 17 year old tell us about the character of a 53 year old. Some of you explained that to me, such that even though I still don’t agree 100 percent with you, you made me significantly more sympathetic to your point of view. I benefited from listening to you.
This Hirono statement, though, is bone-chilling. Truth, due process — none of it matters to her. Last week, she said that American men should “shut up and step up” — that is, stop defending Kavanaugh, or due process, or anything else, and simply accept that he’s guilty on the basis of a single accusation.
This kind of remark from a senior Democratic politician is why many of us vote Republican even though the GOP doesn’t deserve it: entirely out of self-protection. Unless something unexpected comes out of this week’s Ford testimony, I hope that the Senate Judiciary committee will move Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Senate floor, and that he will be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Here’s one reason why that’s important to conservatives. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll indicates that the GOP is going to be wiped out this November. Excerpt:

The survey, six weeks before Americans head to the polls, shows Democrats leading Republicans by 52 percent to 40 percent for control of Congress. If it holds, that 12 percentage point margin would suggest a “blue wave” large enough to switch control of not just the House but also the Senate.
“The results could not be clearer about making a change in direction from Trump’s policies,” explained Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who helps conduct the NBC/WSJ survey. “Once again, Americans are hitting the brakes in a mid-term.”
In each of the last three off-year elections — 2006, 2010 and 2014 — voters have flipped control of one or both houses of Congress away from the incumbent president’s party. This year, the provocative behavior some voters accepted from Candidate Trump in 2016 has overshadowed everything else, including falling unemployment, surging growth and rising stock values.

The story goes on to say that this is entirely about the majority’s disgust with Trump. I understand that. I genuinely do. I like some of what he has done, but on the whole, Trump has been a bad president. The drama is exhausting.
However, let’s be realistic: when the Democrats take power again — first in Congress (as is most likely), then, eventually, in the White House (whether in 2020 or 2024), they are going to come down like a ton of bricks on social and religious conservatives. The best hope we have in the long term is in the judiciary. Again, barring new evidence emerging this week against Kavanaugh, I hope he is confirmed, and that the GOP-controlled Senate works overtime to confirm as many judges as it can. If the Senate flips to the Dems this November, Donald Trump is not going to get another federal judge confirmed in this term. And Congress will be in the hands of the party of Mazie Hirono, who believes that if you hold the wrong philosophy, you are not entitled to a presumption of innocence.