Today's Assignment

... learning about grand strategies, why they're vital to the success of any nation, and why empires fall when autocrats double down on bad decisions instead of building up institutions.

Dr Sarah CM Paine, US Naval War College:

For me, there's nothing better than listening to smart people explain things to me.

Bookmark it, and come back later if you have to, but this shit is important.

Don't Fuck With Katie

In one of her milder moods - which come up when Republicans manage not to be lying sacks of shit about every-goddamned-thing - Katie Porter shivs the GOP for gaslighting us about how it's awful at the border in all places, at all times.

House Oversight Committee hearing 03-07-2023

After all the squawking they've done about "Biden's failure to secure the southern border", I'd like to know what took the Trumpsters so long to get the dogs trained up.

And also too, I think maybe the blindly devoted Supply-Siders aren't the ones we need looking for solutions that have to include the Demand Side.

Just a thought.

New Day, New Shit

Takeaways from the redacted affidavit used for the Mar-a-Lago search

The largest piece of the puzzle about why FBI agents searched former president Donald Trump’s residence is out: the affidavit submitted to warrant the search. In its full form, this usually sealed document spells out exactly what FBI agents thought was hidden at Mar-a-Lago and what crimes may have been committed. But the version the Justice Department released to the public Friday is heavily redacted.

Here’s what we were able to glean about the investigation — and still have to learn.

1. 184 classified documents, including some top secret, were once at Mar-a-Lago

This affidavit, by definition, was written before FBI agents searched Trump’s clubhouse and took away more boxes of suspected classified information. They are likely sifting through that now. But when National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of official material in January from Mar-a-Lago, they found “a lot of classified records,” according to the affidavit, and flagged the FBI.

A subsequent FBI tally of classified information in those boxes found, according to the affidavit: “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”

That’s an astonishing amount of classified material, legal experts said.

In addition, the FBI believed that the material contained what it calls “national defense information,” or some of the most guarded secrets. (The Washington Post has reported the government feared nuclear secrets were at Mar-a-Lago.)

In addition, the FBI was concerned that the classified information was treated carelessly. The National Archives wrote to the bureau that the boxes it retrieved from Mar-a-Lago contained: “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and postpresidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records.’ Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.”

People who have worked at the White House and handled classified documents stress that each document is treated with extreme care; some of the most secret material are returned to a secure room or even a safe after the president or other authorized top officials review it.

“The affidavit confirms that the documents were stored in various locations around Mar-a-Lago and that none of these locations was an approved storage facility for classified material,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor.

2. The Justice Department is suspicious of obstruction by Trump or his allies

“There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the PREMISES,” reads the affidavit. We don’t learn much more than that from this document.

But the affidavit states that the National Archives spent six months in the latter half of 2021 trying to get more documents. And then the FBI got involved. The Post’s Josh Dawsey, Carol Leonnig, Jacqueline Alemany and Rosalind Helderman reported that all this year, Trump resisted handing much of anything over, to the point where his allies feared he was “essentially daring” the FBI to come after them.

Trump was also warned before he even left the White House that taking any official documents with him, let alone national secrets, was illegal under the Presidential Records Act. And even Trump’s attorneys agreed that the former president needed to give the documents back, report Dawsey and Alemany, citing the National Archives’ conversations with Trump’s lawyers.

The Justice Department already released the search warrant that Judge Bruce E. Reinhart signed off on. It was a short document that revealed that the FBI found top-secret information there while looking for evidence of the violation of three potential crimes, including part of the Espionage Act. The affidavit doesn’t shed much more light on that.

3. It’s possible Trump allies were talking to the FBI about all this

Included in the paperwork with the affidavit was a formal notice that the redacted memorandum was being released. In it, the Justice Department writes that the redactions are necessary to protect “a broad range of civilian witnesses.”

“This language suggests that people inside Trump’s former administration, or at Mar-a-Lago, are providing information to the FBI,” McQuade said.

The redacted affidavit itself suggests that the investigation includes detailed monitoring of Mar-a-Lago to find out how many boxes of official material were still there and where they were being stored.

4. What’s missing

We’re not seeing the full affidavit; far from it.

The Justice Department was allowed to pretty liberally ink-out many details of its investigation, because lawyers said this was still in its early stages.

We don’t know exactly what they cut.

But Jack Sharman, a corporate litigator who has been involved in numerous government investigations, said affidavits that get publicly released are usually protective of confidential informants as well as personal identifying information of the informants, or of law enforcement agents, given the threats to law enforcement from some Trump supporters. (The name of the FBI agent primarily responsible for writing the affidavit is withheld.) Also, statements made by witnesses or informants can be redacted. And just about anything having to do with a related investigation or potential subjects or targets is usually cut from these kinds of releases, Sharman said.

5. We still don’t know why Trump wanted these documents

In addition to whether the Justice Department will charge Trump or someone in his orbit with a crime, why all these documents were at Mar-a-Lago in the first place is one of the biggest unanswered questions of this whole thing.

Trump and his lawyers were repeatedly asked to return them. Under requests from the National Archives, a subpoena and visits to Mar-a-Lago from Justice Department officials, they did return some boxes. But much more, it seems, remained in Trump’s possession.

6. The full affidavit is a road map to potential prosecution

An affidavit is essentially a report of all the evidence and witnesses and reasoning for why agents need a search warrant to go through someone’s private stuff. The private home of a former president has a particularly high bar, so this affidavit was likely extremely thorough and detailed.

Attorney General Merrick Garland signed off on it, and FBI agents presented this sworn document to a magistrate judge. The judge agreed that agents convincingly laid out there was probable cause that a crime was committed at Mar-a-Lago by Trump keeping classified documents there, or at least that there was strong potential of evidence of a crime. The search warrant and affidavit mention potential crimes that don’t require information to be classified, though. So simply just taking the material out of the White House and refusing to give it back could be enough for prosecution.

These affidavits are usually kept sealed, because they are a road map for any potential prosecution after the search. But citing the overwhelming public interest, Reinhart ordered the Justice Department to release as much as it could without revealing secrets of its ongoing investigation.

“It’s highly unusual that this is even happening, period,” Sharman said.

Today's Holy Fuck

It turns out Trump had taken hundreds of classified documents on his way out of the White House.

The 'why' question has not yet been fully satisfied, except in the "L'tat c'est moi" sense as articulated by Maggie Haberman last week.

And maybe it's just that simple - "Try to resist attributing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence" - but this is Trump, so there's always a few nefarious angles to consider.

• Maybe he had to grab those documents to satisfy demands from - oh, I don't know, Putin?
• Maybe he decided he might be able to use them against someone else?
• Maybe he thought he could use them as leverage against being brought up on charges
• Maybe it's strictly commercial - he thought the documents would make for some good auction material?

Who knows?

 

"No documentation has come to light confirming that Mr. Trump declassified the material, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago would not hinge on the classification status of the documents."

NYT: (pay wall)

Trump Had More Than 300 Classified Documents at Mar-a-Lago

The National Archives found more than 150 sensitive documents when it got a first batch of material from the former president in January, helping to explain the Justice Department’s urgent response.

The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.

And the extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.

The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

The highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the Justice Department, which within months had convened a grand jury investigation.

Aides to Mr. Trump turned over a few dozen additional sensitive documents during a visit to Mar-a-Lago by Justice Department officials in early June. At the conclusion of the search this month, officials left with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

The Justice Department investigation is continuing, suggesting that officials are not certain whether they have recovered all the presidential records that Mr. Trump took with him from the White House.

Even after the extraordinary decision by the F.B.I. to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, investigators have sought additional surveillance footage from the club, people familiar with the matter said.

More Coverage of the F.B.I. Search of Trump’s Home

• A Chaotic Exit: Former President Donald J. Trump’s unwillingness to let go of power helped lead to the failure to turn over government documents in his final days in office.
• Trump-F.B.I. Conflict: The Mar-a-Lago search was a dramatic moment after years of tumult between Mr. Trump and the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
• Shifting Explanations: Mr. Trump and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents without addressing why he had kept them.
• Trump’s Reaction: In the wake of the search, Mr. Trump has accused the nation’s justice system of being exactly what he tried to turn it into: a political weapon for a president.

It was the second such demand for the club’s security tapes, said the people familiar with the matter, and underscored that authorities are still scrutinizing how the classified documents were handled by Mr. Trump and his staff before the search.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s allies insist that the president had a “standing order” to declassify material that left the Oval Office for the White House residence, and have claimed that the General Services Administration, not Mr. Trump’s staff, packed the boxes with the documents.

No documentation has come to light confirming that Mr. Trump declassified the material, and the potential crimes cited by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago would not hinge on the classification status of the documents.

National Archives officials spent much of 2021 trying to get back material from Mr. Trump, after learning that roughly two dozen boxes of presidential records material had been lingering in the White House residence for several months. Under the Presidential Records Act, all official material remains government property and has to be provided to the archives at the end of a president’s term.

Among the items they knew were missing were Mr. Trump’s original letters from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and the note that President Barack Obama had left Mr. Trump before he left office.

Two former White House officials, who had been designated as among Mr. Trump’s representatives with the archives, received calls and tried to facilitate the documents’ return.

Mr. Trump resisted those calls, describing the boxes of documents as “mine,” according to three advisers familiar with his comments.

Soon after beginning their investigation early this year, Justice Department officials came to believe there were additional classified documents that they needed to collect. In May, after conducting a series of witness interviews, the department issued a subpoena for the return of remaining classified material, according to people familiar with the episode.

On June 3, Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division of the Justice Department, went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, and retrieve any remaining classified material to satisfy the subpoena. Mr. Corcoran went through the boxes himself to identify classified material beforehand, according to two people familiar with his efforts.

Mr. Corcoran showed Mr. Bratt the basement storage room where, he said, the remaining material had been kept.

Mr. Trump briefly came to see the investigators during the visit.

Mr. Bratt and the agents who joined him were given a sheaf of classified material, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Corcoran then drafted a statement, which Ms. Bobb, who is said to be the custodian of the documents, signed. It asserted that, to the best of her knowledge, all classified material that was there had been returned, according to two people familiar with the statement.

Mr. Corcoran did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Ms. Bobb did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Soon after that visit, investigators, who were interviewing several people in Mr. Trump’s circle about the documents, came to believe that there were other presidential records that had not been turned over, according to the people familiar with the matter.

On June 22, the Justice Department subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage, which included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area, the people said.

The club had surveillance footage going back 60 days for some areas of the property, stretching back to late April of this year.

While much of the footage showed hours of club employees walking through the busy corridor, some of it raised concerns for investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases, appearing to change the containers some documents were held in. The footage also showed other parts of the property.

In seeking a second round of security footage, the Justice Department wants to review tapes for the weeks leading up to the Aug. 8 search.

Federal officials have indicated that their initial goal has been to secure any classified documents Mr. Trump was holding at Mar-a-Lago, a pay-for-membership club where there is little control over who comes in as guests. It remains to be seen whether anyone will face criminal charges stemming from the investigation.

The combination of witness interviews and the initial security footage led Justice Department officials to begin drafting a request for a search warrant, the people familiar with the matter said.

The F.B.I. agents who conducted the search found the additional documents in the storage area in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, as well as in a container in a closet in Mr. Trump’s office, the people said.

Mr. Trump’s allies have attacked the law enforcement agencies, accusing the investigators of being partisan.

The intense public interest has now spurred a legal fight to see the search warrant’s underlying affidavit. On Monday, a federal magistrate issued a formal order directing the Justice Department to send him under seal proposed redactions to the affidavit underlying the warrant used to search Mar-a-Lago by Thursday, accompanied by a memo explaining its justifications.

In the order, the judge, Bruce E. Reinhart, said he was inclined to release portions of the sealed affidavit but wanted to wait until he saw the government’s redactions before making a decision.

That Stoopid Wall

Hadrian's Wall

The Great Wall of China

The Berlin Wall

Show me a 30-foot wall, and I'll show you a guy selling 35-foot ladders.

Shit don't work - it just makes a few people feel a little better (mostly because they scored some political points) while making things largely and measurably worse for practically everybody else.

WaPo: (pay wall)

The border wall Trump called unclimbable is taking a grim toll

The journal JAMA Surgery offers one of the first attempts to measure injuries and deaths resulting from falls along new sections of the wall

SAN DIEGO — In the trauma wards of this city’s major hospitals, patients from the border have arrived every day with gruesome injuries: skull fractures, broken vertebrae and shattered limbs, their lower extremities twisted into deranged angles.

The patients have fallen from new 30-foot segments of President Donald Trump’s border wall, a structure he touted as a “Rolls-Royce” that “can’t be climbed.” His administration built more formidable barriers in the San Diego area than anywhere else along the southern border, with miles of double-layer steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more migrants from trying to scale it.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not tally deaths and injuries resulting from such falls. But new statistics published Friday by University of California at San Diego physicians in the journal JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the toll.

Since 2019, when the barrier’s height was raised to 30 feet along much of the border in California, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’s trauma ward after falling off the structure has jumped fivefold, to 375, the physicians found. Falling deaths at the barrier went from zero to 16 during that time, according to the report, citing records maintained by the San Diego county medical examiner.

“I never expected we would have to climb the wall,” said Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old dentist from Cuba, recovering this week in the trauma ward at UC San Diego Health. He fractured his left leg in a fall Monday. Smugglers led his group to the wall with a ladder and told them to climb up and slide down the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw one woman fall and break both legs, and an older man with a severe head injury.

The falling incidents are a subset of the soaring number of injuries, deaths and rescues occurring all across the southern border, where immigration arrests have reached an all-time high under President Biden. Migrants attempting to evade capture have drowned in the Rio Grande, died of exposure in South Texas and Arizona, and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean during smuggling attempts at sea.

What’s different is that the border wall is a man-made obstacle that poses a lethal danger and public health challenge where one did not exist previously.

Trump's border wall has been breached more than 3,000 times, CBP records show

Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, said injuries along the border wall occurred before its increase in height, but the older, shorter version of the barrier, ranging from nine to 17 feet, was not lethal.

“Once you go over 20 feet, and up to 30 feet, the chance of severe injury and death are higher,” he said. “We’re seeing injuries we didn’t see before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries and a lot of open fractures when the bone comes through the skin.”

At Scripps Mercy Hospital, the other major trauma center for the San Diego area, border wall fall victims accounted for 16 percent of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher share than gunshot and stabbing cases, according to Vishal Bansal, the director of trauma.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bansal said in an interview. “This is crazy.” His trauma ward treated 139 border wall patients injured by falls last year, up from 41 in 2020.

Those injured by falls often require complex intensive care and multiple, phased surgeries, according to San Diego physicians. Lacking health insurance, many are ineligible for physical therapy and rehabilitation programs, so they remain longer in hospitals, which absorb millions in unreimbursed costs.

When the Trump administration developed a series of wall prototypes in San Diego in 2017, the most difficult to climb featured a rounded, “barrel-shaped” top. But congressional appropriations for the barrier limited development to existing barrier designs, and Trump told aides he preferred the “spiky” look of the steel bollards, which he considered more intimidating.

Thirty feet was determined to be the optimal height for new barriers, because it balanced cost concerns with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s desire to give agents more time to respond by making it more difficult to climb, according to officials involved in the design.

Border crossings have increased sharply despite the completion of the 30-foot barrier, records show. San Diego border agents made 16,660 arrests in March, roughly four times as many as they averaged monthly before 2019.

The evidence for former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano’s quip — “show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder” — is plain to see along the dusty road that edges the barrier south of San Diego.

Improvised ladders litter the brush along the base of the wall between the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa crossings. Some are fashioned from segments of metal rebar, but the more sophisticated versions use lightweight aluminum with sections that fit together like tent poles.

Smugglers hook them to the top of the wall and hurry migrants 30 feet up into the air, often with little explanation for how to get down. Many of the injuries appear to occur as migrants attempt to descend.

Videos posted to social media have shown athletic young men breezily shimmying up and gripping the bollards like fire poles to zip down the other side. But that type of skilled maneuver is beyond the abilities of many migrants, who typically attempt to climb at night to avoid detection.

“One thing I have noticed is the people who are falling are not as athletic as you think they would be to go up ladder like that,” Doucet said. “They are middle-aged, and a fair number of women, even pregnant women.”

Those who fall backward while attempting to slide down can land on their heads and necks.

Some of the deceased are recent deportees, with homes, jobs and families on the U.S. side, like Efren Medina Villegas, 56, killed in a fall last year near the Otay Mesa crossing in San Diego. “He was trying to get back to his family,” said brother-in-law, Reynaldo Medina, reached by phone.

The Trump administration built 450 miles of new fencing along the Mexico border at a cost of about $11 billion, mostly replacing older, smaller barriers with three-story steel bollards anchored in concrete. Biden halted construction after taking office, but his administration has developed plans to close open gaps, mostly in Arizona.

Where Trump's border wall left deep scars and open gaps, Biden plans repair job

Republicans have hammered Biden’s decision to halt construction, campaigning ahead of November’s midterm elections with calls to complete the structure.

Ronald Vitiello, former chief of the Border Patrol, said the large number of migrant releases into the United States occurring under Biden has created an incentive and driven ever-riskier attempts to cross. “More traffic equals more misery and death, from all causes,” he said.

In locations where gaps remain in the barrier, injuries and deaths appear to be less frequent. But in border areas with new, continuous segments of 30-foot fencing, such as the deserts west of El Paso, across eastern Arizona, and along California’s Imperial Valley, falling incidents have soared.

UC San Diego Health has converted a postpartum wing into a makeshift recovery ward for border wall patients, with many requiring multiple, phased surgeries and long-term rehabilitation, but lacking insurance.

Amy Liepert, the director of acute care surgery at UC San Diego Health, said the hospital is looking for help, having incurred at least $13 million in costs from border wall patients. “We need policies that fund the care that’s being delivered, in order to make sure we’re providing access for our other populations that need trauma care,” Liepert said.

Liepert said the volume of fall victims from the border wall is straining San Diego’s entire trauma system. “It means trauma surgeons, medical teams, the ICU, therapists and others all have grossly increased workloads,” she said.

Almeida, the dentist from Cuba who broke his leg, said he was knocked off the top of the wall when others in his group rushed to climb a single ladder as Mexican police approached from the south. He was able to partly grab the bollards and slow his fall, sparing a worse injury.

Some smugglers use ropes and harnesses to lower clients safely onto the U.S. side, but that technique has proved dangerous, as well. Earlier this month a Mexican woman wearing a harness got stuck descending the wall near Douglas, Ariz., and died from asphyxiation after hanging upside down for several hours.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they are amplifying their safety warnings and intensifying efforts to target smugglers. “There are not strong enough words to describe the actions of these smugglers, who are personally responsible for the deaths and injuries they cause to very vulnerable populations,” Patricia McGurk-Daniel, deputy chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, said in an interview.

She and other Border Patrol officials say the barrier remains an essential border security tool but not an unclimbable one. “Infrastructure alone was never intended to be a stopgap for everything,” McGurk-Daniel said. “We need a multitiered approach that includes technology, boots on the ground and comprehensive immigration reform.”

In trauma medicine, a fall from a height of 40 feet is considered 50 percent lethal, meaning only half of patients survive their injuries, according to Doucet. Bansal described it as “akin to being hit by a car at a moderate rate of speed.”

The San Diego medical examiner reports describe unspeakable injuries. Amet Garcia Mendez, a 31-year-old from Mexico, fell 35 feet to the ground last March, where he was found dead by agents. He died of cranial and chest fractures, with multiple perforated organs, an autopsy showed.

Marifer Jimon Rojas, a 19-year-old from Mexico, died in 2020 from a broken neck and multiple fractures to the skull and sternum. In 2019, an expectant mother fell from the wall, broke her pelvis and lost her unborn son, weeks before her due date.

“It’s absolutely tragic, and it’s not deterring anyone — it’s only harming people,” said Jules Kramer, co-director of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation, a nonprofit in San Diego that has cared for several migrants injured in falls.

Last year, Kramer and her colleague Mark Lane aided an 18-year-old girl who fell from the wall and suffered five broken vertebrae and a leg fracture. They raised nearly $10,000 to medevac the teen to a hospital close to her relatives in Northern California.

She survived and regained the ability to walk, according to her attorney, Priscilla Higuera. “You couple this bigger, taller wall with Title 42 and ‘Remain in Mexico,’ and it’s a recipe for disaster,” said Higuera, referring to pandemic-era border restrictions and the Trump-era program, reinstated by federal courts, that returns some asylum seekers to Mexico.

Higuera said she has multiple clients who suffered injuries after falling, some of whom are discharged from trauma wards and deported or sent to immigration detention.

Smugglers saw through Trump’s border wall using ordinary power tools when they aren’t climbing it. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has tallied more than 3,000 breaches since 2019, records show, and along the barrier Thursday a welding crew was busy fixing a badly damaged span. Nearly every steel bollard had been sawed through and patched with a metal sleeve. Some had been cut through four times.

Eric Thayer - WaPo

About Last November

Bloomberg:

Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.

In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database. Details of the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the matter. In all, the Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states, one of them said.

39 states - most controlled by Repubs, where state government officials balked at the prospect of taking action to prevent Russia from fucking up the elections because (I think) the results of that fuckery would accrue to the GOP's benefit.

But the really bad news right now is that it worked.  Whether it worked or not, it worked. That's the best kind of political maneuver.

The point of the exercise was to disrupt the American election. And there's a good probability that many will feel somehow vindicated for their decision not to vote in this particular election, and to avoid the whole thing altogether from here on out. 

So it worked.

Ain't No Drip Drip Drip

NYT:

An intelligence contractor was charged with sending a classified report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to the news media, the Justice Department announced Monday, the first criminal leak case under President Trump.

The case showed the department’s willingness to crack down on leaks, as Mr. Trump has called for in complaining that they are undermining his administration. His grievances have contributed to a sometimes tense relationship with the intelligence agencies he now oversees.

The Justice Department announced the case against the contractor, Reality Leigh Winner, 25, about an hour after the national-security news outlet The Intercept published the apparent document, a May 5 intelligence reportfrom the National Security Agency.

The report described two cyberattacks by Russia’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U. — one in August against a company that sells voter registration-related software and another, a few days before the election, against 122 local election officials.

These leaks lately are not bad things. And (like the most recent one from NSA) they're coming from patriots not criminals.

Of course, I don't know anything about Ms Winner, but I think I can draw a line between her and (eg) Ed Snowden, and make a pretty good case to the effect that Ms Winner did it trying to help us, while Snowden and Assange did it trying to help Vlad Putin, and to line their own pockets.

People like Ms Winner are putting themselves at great personal risk to get info out to us that we need to see.

They can't push that info up thru channels because they know the White House gang will do anything to keep us from knowing what kinda shit they (and their Russian buddies) were up to during the election process last year. 

And since there's practically no one in Congress who isn't scrambling to cash in on Trump's trouble in one way or another (or just to cover his own ass), about the only way they can get the truth out to us is to break the law.

This looks to be in the finest American traditions of civil disobedience. These people are fucking heroes.

Wanna know how I'm more or less sure of what I just said?  I feel pretty confident believing the leakers are heroes because 45* and his gang are adamant about calling them traitors.

Daddy State Basics:

1. Every Accusation is a Confession.
2. Every boast is an Admission of Inadequacy and/or an attempt to take credit for someone else's work.
3. Every warning of some tragic event that's coming our way is a Statement of Intent - either they're currently, actively, and directly causing the tragedy, or they're planning to cause it in order to punish us if we don't go along with whatever shitty policy they're proposing.
4. Every day is upside-down-n-backwards day in the Daddy State.

Back To The Gilded Age

A little reminder of the damage a bad president can do.

Vox:

Since the election of Donald Trump, there’s been a lot of discussion in medical circles about bringing a Silicon Valley ethos to drug innovation in America.

This idea is embodied in Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, who has reportedly been helping the president vet a pool of candidates to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

Thiel, a libertarian iconoclast, has repeatedly made the case that the FDA gets in the way of drug innovation by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to the market. Some of the FDA candidates he’s identified — including Silicon Valley’s Jim O’Neill and Balaji Srinivasan — have similarly argued that the agency should dump its requirement that drugs be proven effective before reaching the market, and that we’d be better off if the FDA operated more like a “Yelp for drugs.” In other words, bringing the same speedy and disruptive approach to medical regulation that Silicon Valley brought to the taxi and hotel industries, for example, will unlock cures — fast.

But Thiel and his pals miss a very important point about developing new drugs: Manipulating biology isn’t the same as manipulating computer code. It’s much, much harder. Speeding up medical innovation will take a lot more than just stripping down the FDA — it’ll take huge leaps forward in our understanding of biochemistry and the body. Health care is also different from taxis and hotels in another key way: Consumers can’t really judge the safety and quality of medical products by themselves.

Trump to remove USDA animal welfare protections from cruelty for dogs. A reminder from 9/16: he's never HAD a dog pic.twitter.com/NykVqnG6Nj

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 4, 2017

So, like, one of the things Da Gubmint is there trying to do for you is to keep some asshole from killing your dog.  If you can't quite work yourself up to giving a fuck about people, maybe you could think about finding a little compassion for their fucking house pets.

More from the Vox piece:

One of the key notions that undergirds the Peter Thiel view of the FDA is that if the agency just got rid of some of the pesky restrictions for drug approval, we’d usher in another golden age in drug development. (Thiel declined our interview request.)

To test this idea, I asked a longtime pharmaceutical scientist (and conservative), Derek Lowe, for his views. In his 28 years in the lab, Lowe has seen hundreds of thousands of compounds tested on a huge variety of drug targets, and never, not once, has he brought a drug to market.

The reason? “We don’t know how to find drugs that work,” he said.

For every 5,000 compounds discovered at this "preclinical" phase of drug development, only about five are promising enough to be tried in humans. That’s a success rate of 0.1 percent.

Drug innovation comes from painstaking tinkering and a dash of luck. “It’s very tempting for someone who has come out of IT to say, ‘DNA is code, and cells are the hardware; go in and debug it’,” Lowe said. “But this is wrong.”

Let's just try to remember one or two itty-bitty things, OK?

You were supposed to have read that shit way back in high school, y'know.

Learn a little more about FDA

Security Details

I liked it a lot better when the only guys who had their own private armies were Bond villains.

Politico:

But Trump - who puts a premium on loyalty and has demonstrated great interest in having forceful security at his events - has opted to maintain an aggressive and unprecedented private security force, led by Keith Schiller, a retired New York City cop and Navy veteran who started working for Trump in 1999 as a part-time bodyguard, eventually rising to become his head of security.

Security officials warn that employing private security personnel heightens risks for the president-elect and his team, as well as for protesters, dozens of whom have alleged racial profiling, undue force or aggression at the hands Trump’s security, with at least 10 joining a trio of lawsuits now pending against Trump, his campaign or its security.

--and--

The Trump associates say Schiller is expected to become a personal White House aide who would serve as the incoming president’s full-time physical gatekeeper, though he might not be able to offer his boss the wide range of services he has in the past. For instance, federal law prohibits anyone other than law enforcement officers from bringing firearms into federal buildings, and there are even stricter rules about who can carry on the White House grounds or around Secret Service protectees. Schiller had been armed at times early in the campaign, but it’s unclear if he continued carrying a firearm after Trump was granted Secret Service protection in November 2015.

Even after the arrival of Trump’s Service detail, which typically marks the end of any pre-existing security arrangement, Schiller never strayed from his boss’s side.

The associates say Schiller provides more than just security. Trump has been known to ask Schiller’s opinion on all manner of subjects. When people want to reach Trump, they often call Schiller’s cell phone and he decides who gets through to the boss.

Trump just can't help but pick these fights - in his typical Passive Aggressive style - even to the point where he's saying he doesn't trust the professionalism of an agency sworn to serve - people who're trained to take a bullet if that's what's necessary to protect The President, no matter who that president is or what they do or don't have in common with that president.

Trump's overpowering paranoia and his self-obsession continue to make this whole mess more of a mess. 

Obama Roll

I used to call him President Lawnchair - mostly because I tho't he folded completely instead of really sticking it out on ACA (Public Option in particular).  And I continued that criticism for quite a while because it just looked like the guy wasn't all that willing to smack the Repubs around the way I tho't he should.

I can tell y'all now that I've changed my tune a bit lately, and while it'll take some study from an historical distance to see what all is what, I gotta say there might actually be something to the meme about how this guy plays a mean game of Fourple Dimension Chess; and we may be seeing a pretty good example of just how far into the future he's able to play.

I guess it's also possible he's been playing for this point in time all along, and he's about to kick over that one pawn that puts things in motion like a political Mouse Trap Game. (hey - let an old guy dream)

Obama wants to do something meaningful on Immigration, but he knows the Teabillies insist on forcing Baron von Boner and Mitchy-Mac to give guys like Chuckles Koch a loud sloppy blowjob in public, which makes it nigh-onto impossible for them to do anything else but stand in the way (or kneel if they're feeling particularly adept at multi-tasking), so Obama decides to use his authority as the boss of DHS to move ever so slightly forward.

Which means Boehner has only one tool, which is to threaten to withhold the funding for DHS, which means the "National Security Party" is saying "we're willing to drop all this pretentious chest-thumping bullshit about keeping America safe just so we can fuck over the Mexicans - and Obama".  Oops - Im betting they didn't mean to let it slip that DHS really is mostly pretentious chest-thumping bullshit, but for most of us, that cat's been outa the bag for quite a while - so maybe it's just time to let it go(?)  And as for "fuckin' over the Mexicans" - who doesn't know by now that that's what they wanna do?  Fuckin' somebody over is always what they wanna do, is it not?

Obama kinda has 'em by the nuts on that one.  

Now, add that to this:  The pentagon's latest assessment (QDR 2014) has concluded (again) that Climate Change (ie: congressional paralysis due to Climate Change Denial - hint hint) poses a significant threat to US National Security.  And that's across the board; from "Threat Multiplier" to just plain "making our job harder than it has to be".

Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.

CHAPTER I: FUTURE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT 8 

(quick little note - this kind of straight-up declarative statement doesn't make the final cut without the approval of a lotta people who wear some very heavy hats)

So what's a poor Boehner to do?  

Obama is saying he wants DHS to do something about immigration and the Repubs are saying they'd rather close DHS down altogether than take the risk of getting something done on one of the GOP's favorite issues. (say wut now?)

Obama and DoD want to do something about Climate Change (even if it's just some attempt to mitigate the negative effects), while the Repubs insist first on doing nothing about Climate Change, and oh by the way, then insist again on doing nothing while Sequestration strips away the tax dollars that get poured into Defense Contractors' pockets; then laundered thru PACs; and then eventually find their way back into the campaign war chests of Coin-Operated Politicians - like John Boehner.

So who's all about the security of the homeland, and who's not?
Who's all about supporting the mission of our exalted military, and who's not?

From where I sit, I'm just wondering if there's ever been a Speaker of the House who ended up switching parties.  That dude is fucked 9 ways from Sunday.

But wait - do we need to talk about how maybe Boehner's playing the role of Sacrificial Savior of the Party?  Maybe he's whipping this thing into a rich creamy lather on purpose, making all the bubble brains float to the top so they can be skimmed off into the shitter(?)

Yeah, OK.  We'll call that one Low Probability #37, but I purely do like to hedge my bets.

The Enormity Of It All

e·nor·mous  adj. 1. Very great in size, extent, number, or degree. 2. Archaic Very wicked; heinous.

This guy on Chris Hayes last nite used that word a buncha times, and I'm wondering if his usage was just supposed to indicate 'big', or if he meant to include the 'heinous' implication as well.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ed Note:
I realize I've been a little heavy on the MSNBC material lately, but y'know - when I test this stuff for fact-worthiness and reasonableness, and I filter out the partisanship, I notice that even while a lot of the 'lefties' are twisting sideways trying to defend Obama's administration, Rachel and Chris et al are reporting the shitty things that happen right beside the stuff that's OK and/or Pretty Decent and/or Wow-Ain't-That-Fuckin'-Awesome (there's really not a lot that falls into that last category - but still).

Anyway, I haven't gotten to many solid conclusions yet on what's been going on with National Security the last 20 years or so.  I can say there's something about anything called "The Department of Homeland Security" that feels creepy and sinister - it just goes against every impulse I think every American is practically born with - or at least should learn and understand as we grow up.

I don't know how much of The National Security Machinery needs to be dismantled and  discarded, but I think we have to understand that putting that kind of power in too few hands always gets us trouble, so we'd better figure it out.  Too Big To Fail is a major problem when it comes to business; when we're talking about Government, you're always in danger of creating something that becomes Too Big To Fuck With.

The View From Out There

(hat tip = JG via email)

Inside the United States

GlobalPost goes inside the United States to uncover the regime’s dramatic descent into authoritarian rule and how the opposition plans to fight back.

This is satire. Although the news is real, very little actual reporting was done for this story and the quotes are imagined. It is the first installment of an ongoing series that examines the language journalists use to cover foreign countries. What if we wrote that way about the United States?

BOSTON, Mass. — Human rights activists say revelations that the US regime has expanded its domestic surveillance program to private phone carriers is more evidence of the North American country’s pivot toward authoritarianism.

The Guardian, a British newspaper,reported this week that a wing of the country’s feared intelligence and security apparatus ordered major telecommunications companies to hand over data on phone calls made by private citizens.

“The US leadership in Washington continues to erode basic human rights,” said one activist, who asked to remain anonymous, fearing that speaking out publicly could endanger his organization. “If the US government is unwilling to change course, it’s time the international community considered economic sanctions.”

Over the last decade, the United States has passed a series of emergency laws that give security forces sweeping powers to combat “terrorism.” But foreign observers say the authorities abuse those laws, using them instead to monitor ordinary Americans.

While the so-called Patriot Act passed in 2001 is perhaps the most dramatic legislation to date curbing freedoms here, numerous lesser-known laws have expanded monitoring of news outlets, email, social media platforms and even opposition groups — like the Occupy and Tea Party movements — that are critical of the regime.

US leader Barack Obama, a former liberal community organizer and the country's first black president who attracted a wave of support from young voters, rose to power in 2008 promising reform. He was greeted in the United States — a country of about 300 million people — with optimism. But he has since disappointed those supporters, ruling with a sometimes iron fist and continuing, if not expanding, the policies of the country’s former ruler, George W. Bush.

On a recent visit to the United States by GlobalPost, signs of the increased security apparatus could be found everywhere.

At all national airports, passengers are now forced to undergo full-body scans before boarding any flights. Small cameras are perched on many street corners, recording the movements and actions of the public. And incessant warnings on public transportation systems encourage citizens to report any “suspicious activity” to authorities.

Several American villagers interviewed for this story said the ubiquitous government marketing campaign called, “If you see something, say something,” does little to make them feel safer and, in fact, only contributes to a growing mistrust among the general population.

“I’ve deleted my Facebook account, stopped using email, or visiting websites that might be considered anti-regime,” a resident of the northern city of Boston, a tough-as-nails town synonymous with rebellion, told GlobalPost. It was in Boston that an American militia first rose up against the British empire. “But my phone? How can I stop using my phone? This has gone too far.”

American dissidents interviewed by GlobalPost inside the United States say surveillance by domestic intelligence agencies is just one part of a seemingly larger effort by the Obama administration to centralize power.

The American leader, for example, has in recent years personally approved the jailing — and in some cases execution — of American citizens suspected of involvement in what the regime calls “terrorist activity.”

“What exactly is terrorism? The term is used so loosely these days it could include just about anyone,” said one anti-government protester, who was tear-gassed and then arrested in 2011 for participating in a peaceful demonstration in New York, America’s largest city and its economic capital.

Obama has also overseen a crackdown on whistleblowers, most famously jailing Bradley Manning, a US soldier, for leaking documents that called into question US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The government quietly imprisoned Manning for three years before finally trying him in a military court this week. He spent the first nine months of that in solitary confinement, where prison officials forced him to sleep naked without pillows or sheets and prevented him from reading newspapers, watching television or even exercising.

Activists also criticize the US regime for imprisoning without trial foreigners it deems threatening to national security in an offshore prison camp called Guantanamo Bay. This week an investigation revealed that the US regime force-fed Guantanamo inmates participating in a hunger strike. Force-feeding is illegal under international law.

Meanwhile, whispering in the streets about what the regime might do next has reached a dull roar. But after a national uprising in 2011 by the leftist Occupy movement ended in evictions, arrests and tear gas, Americans appear hesitant to take their anger into the streets.

Most major media outlets, which in the United States are largely controlled by politically-connected corporations — many of them, in fact, financially supported Obama’s election — have been relatively quiet on such issues.

Foreign observers, however, say the recent news about domestic surveillance is spreading wildly in other ways — on Twitter and around the dinner table. They say the news has the potential to spark an uprising — at least among urban, educated elites in the country’s major cities — mirroring those happening now in Turkey and that earlier swept parts of the Arab world.

One foreign businessman who works closely with the US government on issues of security said he thought Obama was too well-established and had too strong a security force for any challenge to its authority to take hold.

“This isn’t Tunisia,” he said. “This is more like China, where a massive security presence could easily put down any organized opposition movement.”

The businessman added that Obama was democratically elected twice, which he believes gives the leader enough credibility to weather any serious opposition to his rule.

In a small, unassuming house near Boston’s bustling seaport, though, supporters of the opposition disagreed, saying the leader had lost “all credibility.” The group said the opposition continued to organize and grow, and that it was just a matter of time before the rest of the American population joined them.

Indeed, different political factions are beginning to unite over the issue of domestic surveillance, despite their strong differences.

“We meet in person these days to talk about strategy, phones and email are no longer safe for us,” one of them said. “Our goal now is to just get out the message to the world about what is going on here. That’s the first step. We need to educate not only Americans but the world about the extent the US regime is controlling the lives of its citizens.”