Beyond the Bosses’ Constitution: Toward a Democratic First Amendment by Jedediah Purdy

Columbia Law Review, Forthcoming

18 Pages Posted:  

Jedediah S. Purdy

Duke University School of Law

Date Written: July 23

Abstract

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment (as Justice Kagan recently called it in her Janus v. AFSCME dissent) has been its strongest anti-regulatory weapon in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this essay, part of a forthcoming Columbia Law Review symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the anti-regulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market efficiency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is anti-statist fear of entrenchment by elected officials, interest groups, and bureaucrats. These opinions limit the power of government to implement distributional judgments in key areas of policy, and, by thus tying the government’s hands, constrain opportunities for entrenchment. This anti-distributive deployment of market-protecting policy is the signature of neoliberal jurisprudence.

But this jurisprudence has deep problems in an order of capitalist democracy such as ours. Wherever the state cannot implement distributional judgments, markets will do so instead. Market distributions are, empirically speaking, highly unequal, and these inequalities produce their own kind of entrenchment--class entrenchment for the wealthy. A jurisprudence that aims at government neutrality by tying the distributional hands of the state cannot achieve neutrality, but instead implicitly sides with market inequality over distinctively democratic forms of equality. Once we see that any constitutional vision involves some relationship between the “democratic” and the “capitalist” parts of capitalist democracy, it becomes possible not just to criticize the Court’s siding with market winners, but also to ask what kinds of equality-pursuing policies the Constitution must permit to reset that balance in favor of democracy.

Keywords: First Amendment, constitutional law, Supreme Court, equality, democracy

This Wheel’s On Fire by Josh Marshall

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

I haven’t written much in recent days because my family suffered an unexpected loss last week. I was in one day and kept up on the toplines of the news. But I was generally too insensible to write, even as the new revelations piled up. Everything I’ve seen at a distance over recent days brings me back to this post I wrote on Thursday. Helsinki seems like an inflection point. On a long drive yesterday I listened to cable news chatter and I noticed a difference: the default assumption was that President Trump is compromised in some way. Or perhaps it’s better to say that there was a common assumption that the most logical explanation of Helsinki and what we’ve seen before and since is that Vladimir Putin has some leverage over the President. One former diplomat who said something like this pointed out that it’s not the only possible answer, just the most likely one. He’d really like to find another answer. But he hasn’t.

I continue to be struck by how resistant the system is to this now elementary conclusion. In this case, I don’t mean the formal constitutional framework or “the system” in some 60s Marcusean sense. I just mean a more general function or consensus of elite opinion, what is an acceptable premise of discussion and what is not. But this resistance is hardly a surprise. It is an almost fantastical proposition, something out of cheap finish-it-in-90 minutes TV movie fiction. And yet here we are. It is hardly unimaginable if we set the context with everything we’ve seen over the last two years. And just in recent days the pace of revelations, always matched by new flare-ups as rage covering for feelings of threat.

It was two years ago to the yesterday, July 23rd, 2016, that I wrote this post: Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing. That was a day after Wikileaks’ first release of DNC emails. But I didn’t mention that in the post because I’d started writing the post two days earlier, before that happened. The hacked emails didn’t figure at all in my thinking. The connection to Russia seemed too unclear to me to add to what I thought and still believe was abundant evidence of a connection between Trump and Putin that was largely visible in plain sight.

There’s actually an additional backstory to my interest. On June 14th, 2016, The Washington Post first broke the story of the Russian government hacking into the DNC computer network. At the time, the focus was on their allegedly stealing opposition research on Donald Trump. The source for the claim that Russia was behind the intrusion was Crowdstrike, the cyber security firm the DNC had hired to investigate the hack and secure their networks. The next day a friend of mine emailed me and said he was suspicious of Crowdstrike’s account and their certainty it was a Russian hack. This friend has no particular expertise in this field, just a general knowledge of the business and tech world. He thought that this was Crowdstrike going to the press with an unproven theory to drum up corporate business with a burst of free media.

An interesting theory. We assigned a reporter to the story, specifically to see what we could glean about what independent network security experts made of Crowdstrike’s theory and evidence. The piece never got written. Like many reporting topics it simply stalled for a handful of reasons. But a key one was that a broad range of security types seemed to agree with Crowdstrike or at least find their work and their analysis in this case credible.

In retrospect, I don’t know whether the outcome of that reporting made me give the whole Russia connection another look. My imperfect recollection is that the two storylines weren’t really connected in my mind. Like many others, over the course of late 2015 and early 2016 I’d watched the odd list of clues about Trump and Russia as they popped up. But, oddly enough in retrospect, I think it was this article about Carter Page that really got me thinking. It’s from Bloomberg. And it’s now mostly behind a paywall – something that wasn’t the case two years ago. But here’s the lede …

A globe-trotting American investment banker who’s built a career on deals with Russia and its state-run gas company, Carter Page says his business has suffered directly from the U.S. economic sanctions imposed after Russia’s escalating involvement in the Ukraine. When Donald Trump named him last week as one of his foreign-policy advisers, Page says his e-mail inbox filled up with positive notes from Russian contacts. “So many people who I know and have worked with have been so adversely affected by the sanctions policy,” Page said in a two-hour interview last week. “There’s a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation.”

Obviously, I didn’t know – I guess few if any people out of US law enforcement knew – that Page was already suspected of being an agent of Russian intelligence well before 2016. But how could these few sentences alone not tell you something was seriously wrong?

We already knew at the time about Manafort’s ties to Russia and Ukraine. But that seemed like a one-off oddity, just a random detail about Trump’s crowd of has-beens and desperados. But Trump’s Europe/Eurasia advisor griping about how the Crimean sanctions regime had walloped his bottom line. Business contacts from Russia expressing excitement about sanctions relief with Carter in a key role? This combined with Manafort was exceedingly odd, especially when combined with Trump’s aggressive courting of Putin on the campaign trail. I think at this point I started digging further into the Trump Soho story, which of course added an entirely new dimension to the story.

There was no way to know then that both Page and Manafort had already been the subjects of FISA surveillance as suspected foreign agents or that a third advisor, the nonsensical George Papadopoulos, a grown man who was still listing a Model UN assignment on his highly embroidered resume, had already established contact with a Russian intelligence asset in London. Only a month earlier, the now-president’s son, son-in-law, and Manafort had met with an emissary of the Russian government offering dirt on Hillary Clinton – something that would only become known a year later.

Here there is an interesting parallel in the arrest of Mariia Butina, the barely plausible Russian gun rights activist who had founded a gun rights organization in Russia – a country with very thin gun rights and little gun rights culture – which surprisingly enough seemed to be both supported by the Russian government and extremely interested in the US Republican party. Butina, her mentor/handler Aleksandr Torshin and the NRA have been an out in the open story for well over a year. The key initial reporting came from Tim Mak at The Daily Beast. But as The Washington Post notes here, the FBI had been surveilling Butina as more or less obviously a Russian agent at least since she permanently moved to the US in August 2016 and likely before.

This gets at a troubling and elusive issue hovering over this whole drama, a point I addressed in a number posts last year. I accept the FBI’s account that ‘Crossfire Hurricane’, the investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible ties to Russia began on July 31st, 2016, roughly a week after the first Wikileaks/DNC email dump and in response to reports from Australian intelligence about George Papadopoulos, which were conveyed to the US in response to the Wikileaks’ dump. But it has never been plausible to me that suspicions and fears about the Trump campaign within the intelligence community did not begin earlier.

Let’s consider some of the details we just discussed in the chronology of 2015 and 2016. As we know from the Butina indictment and other sources of information, the FBI was aware of Russian state efforts to build ties to the conservative movement and the GOP well before the 2016 campaign. FBI agents in New York and New Jersey had a still little explored relationship with Donald Trump stretching back decades. More recently, a man at the center of Trump’s river of money from the former Soviet Union, Felix Sater was an informant and FBI cooperating witness for the entirety of the decade he worked with Trump. As I noted last year, it’s clear that Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian money were well-known within the FBI, if not necessarily known broadly within the institution. In March 2016 Trump announced a first slate of five foreign policy advisors and a new top advisor, in charge of managing the GOP convention, Paul Manafort. Of these six men, two had already been the subject of FISA surveillance as suspected foreign agents of Russia or Russian interests in Ukraine.

The threshold for opening a counter-intelligence investigation into a major party nominee for President was and certainly should be very high. The Papadopoulos report was tangible evidence of a campaign advisor having advance knowledge of and possible complicity in a Russian intelligence operation aimed at turning the presidential election. It was specific. It was tied to the election campaign. It was tied to an overt act by Russian intelligence operatives. It makes sense that this would be the tripwire, the concrete and tangible lead that would meet that very high threshold. But to me it has always beggared belief that the entry of Page and Manafort into what appeared to be leading roles in the campaign did not put people in US counter-intelligence on alert.

This brings us to another point raised by the Butina indictment. Butina and Torshin were hardly operating under some kind of deep cover. Butina’s story was so preposterous as almost to amount to an affirmative defense. Indeed, the Russian government now seems to be suggesting as much. The NRA wasn’t duped into believing it was building ties to some dissident group in Putin’s Russia. The purported role of Butina’s gun rights group merely facilitated a bond based on rightist politics and authoritarianism, much as Russia has cultivated ties with rightist parties in other parts of Europe. President Trump operates in a similar fashion. It’s hard to say he’s some Russian asset deeply embedded in the US political system. He has openly sung the praises of Putin’s Russia and routinely presses his desire to build closer relations with Russia. This curious mix of deception and blatancy is what has allowed Trump and his followers to oscillate between calling the Trump/Russia controversy an absurd conspiracy theory and a run-of-the-mill nothing-burger. Don Jr. called reports of looking for dirt from the Russian government fantastical until, faced with irrefutable evidence, he called it awesome.

This leads me to my concluding thought. A few days ago Andrew Sullivan proposed that we are perhaps making the whole Trump/Putin thing too complicated, that Trump “simply believes what he says.” As I write above, much of the ties between the GOP and Russia isn’t about sleeper agents and cabals. It’s about ideological affinity, at least for Russia’s ruling oligarchy and the revanchist factions of the Republican party. The relationship has been greased by money and I suspect hard or soft blackmail. But it starts with common beliefs and common enemies. This is hardly surprising. The combination was a stock in trade for much of the 20th century when the Soviet Union was the vanguard of the totalitarian left.

Trump believes in and embodies a world of predation and power, of zero-sum calculations. Mutuality and rule-based regimes, as his alt-right supporters might say, are for cucks. The world is based on power and autocracy, with tests of strengths in which some win, others lose and the losers must follow and bow down to the winners. This fact about Trump’s worldview is all unquestionably true as far as it goes. You see it in Trump’s crude neo-mercantilism, his oligarchic vision of private business thriving through political subservient to him, his contempt for international organizations.

But none of this really explains what we see. Vladimir Putin is not even the most important or powerful autocrat in today’s global community. And while autocrats may have a respect and desire to emulate fellow autocrats, it is not in the nature of would-be autocrats to grow supine and submissive in the presence of autocrats, especially ones of second-tier powers. It is not in the nature of the animal. What we see in Donald Trump’s relationship to Vladimir Putin isn’t ideological affinity or peer admiration. It is most akin to those cases where a mob turncoat finally takes the stand in the trial against the boss and somehow, to the prosecutor’s shock and chagrin, has suddenly forgotten everything.

Or a more cinematic example …

Mr. PENTANGELI — Mr. PENTANGELI. Were you a member of the Corleone family? Did you serve under Caporegime Peter CLEMENZA — under VITO Corleone — also known as — “The Godfather”?

PENTANGELI

I — I — I never know no Godfather.I got my own family, SENATOR.

QUESTADT

Mr. PENTANGELI you are contradicting a sworn statement that you previously made to me and signed. I ask you again sir — you are now under oath — were you at any time a member of a crime organization — headed by MICHAEL Corleone.

PENTANGELI

I don’t know nothin’ about that.. Oh — I was in the Olive Oil business with his father but that was a long time ago that’s all.

CHAIRMAN

We have a sworn affidavit — we have it — your sworn affidavit that you murdered on the orders of MICHAEL Corleone. Do you deny that confession, and do you realize what will happen as a result of your denial.

PENTANGELI

Look the FBI guys promised me a deal. So I made up a lot of stuff about MICHAEL Corleone ’cause that’s what they wanted — but it was all lies — uh — everything. And I kept saying — MICHAEL Corleone did this and MICHAEL Corleone did that — .uh — so I said yea sure, why not.

Trump’s behavior tells us the story. I’m an agnostic on just what the source of leverage or control is. I’m as versed on the details of this story, at least as reported to date, as anyone. And I genuinely do not know what it is. But we don’t need to know the details of the leverage to know it exists. We know the black hole exists because we see the star caught in its orbit.

Congress, contain Trump: We cannot let him continue to bend to Vladimir Putin

By Garry Kasparov

Jul 22, 2018 | 5:00 AM

On Thursday, the news broke that President Trump has invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the White House, proving once more that Trump has an unparalleled ability to surprise. It’s like inviting the man who burglarized your house, just in case he forgot to swipe any of the fine silver.

It also illustrates the scandal-driven dynamic of the Trump administration: No outrage is so bad that it cannot be driven from the headlines by an even worse one.

Still, it is important not to lose track of what is causing this desperation. The investigation into the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election continues to heat up, with a dozen new indictments of Russian military intelligence operatives by special counsel Robert Mueller. An alleged Russian undercover agent has been charged with attempting to influence U.S. politics, including extensive connections with the National Rifle Association.

These are acts of foreign aggression, direct attacks on the integrity of the American political system. Call it hybrid war or whatever you like, but a war is what it is. Putin understood this many years ago and has been investing heavily in the weapons with which this new type of war is fought: propaganda, cyberwarfare, supporting extremists on all sides, and dividing allies.

That his targets are still arguing about what to call it instead of fighting back is why Putin has had such success.

So it’s an odd time for the U.S. to be rolling out the red carpet for Putin, who directs these actions and is surely plotting more. Perhaps like any good real-estate agent, Trump just wants to give Putin a personal tour of the house he purchased online. It’s hard to imagine any legitimate reason for such a scandalous invitation, especially after the debacle of their summit last week in Helsinki.

As has already been written in the annals of ignominy, Monday, Trump had a private meeting with Putin and then joined him in the most disturbing press conference spectacle most of us have ever seen. Trump’s subservient display has been well-described already, so I won’t waste time detailing how the American President presented the Kremlin line better than Putin himself.

I’ve spent many years countering Kremlin propaganda that tries to put America and other free world nations on the same ethical plane as Putin’s murderous and repressive mafia state. “There is no good or evil,” it goes. “We all do bad things, so don’t judge. Let’s do business and forget about democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

Listening to the U.S. President make such moral equivalence arguments — standing next to a KGB-trained dictator, no less — was infuriating and heartbreaking.

The backlash was strong enough to force Trump to publicly “clarify” some of his Helsinki statements criticizing American intelligence services and defending Putin. While it suited Trump to pretend to apologize, and for his ardent supporters to pretend to believe him, Helsinki marked a turning point. The idea that the American President is somehow compromised by the Kremlin is no longer a far-fetched conspiracy theory touted only by his political opponents. It has become the most logical, if not the only, explanation for Trump’s devotion to an enemy of the United States.

Trump and his supporters apparently wouldn’t mind receiving more assistance in 2018 and 2020. Despite repeated warnings from top security officials, the Trump administration has declined to direct federal agencies to harden election systems. On Thursday, Republicans refused to include state funds for election security in an appropriations bill. This is what happens when national security is sacrificed to political partisanship.

Trump flattered Putin well before the election took place, and Trump continues to check off items on Putin’s wish list that have nothing to do with election interference, such as weakening NATO, attacking the European Union, and, especially, appearing together at a summit and inviting him to the White House. Putin craves such legitimacy desperately, and there are no good reasons why Trump should be so eager to satisfy him while getting nothing in return.

Trump also added that his appearance with Putin was loved by people at “higher ends of intelligence.” I’ll modestly refrain from throwing my IQ around, but the given rationales for these meetings only insult our intelligence.

First there’s the old strawman argument that anyone who isn’t in favor of capitulating to Putin’s aggression is a warmonger eager for World War III. As his track record demonstrates, standing up to Putin is far less likely to lead to further conflict than giving him what he wants. As with Trump and any bully, conceding to Putin only convinces him you are weak and that he can push further.

Then there is Trump’s refrain, “shouldn’t we want better relations with Russia?” Certainly, but not at any cost. It’s easy to make deals and have good relations with dictators if you concede everything they want and ask nothing of them. Better relations with Russia should depend on the national interests of the United States, not the personal interests of Donald Trump.

While it’s irresistible to theorize about what exactly Putin has on Trump to keep him on such a tight leash, it’s more important to accept the fact that it is happening. With the Mueller investigation indicting more Russian agents and a potential Democratic takeover in the midterm elections threatening to curtail Trump’s authority, Putin is rushing to squeeze everything he can from his prized Oval Office asset before it is devalued.

Aside from a few notable exceptions like Sens. John McCain, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, the Republicans in Congress have been far too quiet. They are afraid of losing in primaries to Trumpist extremists, and fear has made them swallow their tongues. Many of these quietly critical Republicans hope to outlast Trump by not confronting him and his voters.

This is a dangerous delusion. For 18 months, the damage Trump is doing has come at a faster and faster pace. There’s no time to lose.

His own administration has little clue what he’s going to say or do next; perhaps only Putin knows. The announcement of Trump’s invitation to Putin came as a complete shock to Dan Coats, Trump’s own director of national intelligence.

Many of the areas in which Trump is waging his assault on American democracy and the world order were never intended to be the domain of the President at all. Constitutionally, the President has no business starting trade wars or radically changing immigration policy.

But Congress has abdicated its role as co-equal branch of government over decades, steadily conceding power to the executive. This has been done in the name of expediency, to fight partisan gridlock, and has been pushed along by each side in tit-for-tat battles. Clinton did it, so Bush had to do it. Bush did it, so Obama had to do it.

With each turn, the balance of powers became more unbalanced. If the ship of state is to be righted before the Trumpian iceberg finishes the job, Congress must take back the power given to it by the Founders. Stop tweeting and start legislating.

As for those in Trump’s White House who are horrified by their boss’ actions, I’m not convinced that honorable resignations would achieve much benefit. Trump is happy to be rid of anyone who doesn’t provide the unconditional praise he demands. Foreign policy and security experts like Coats and National Security Adviser John Bolton know that they would surely be replaced by more sycophantic and less capable individuals should they leave in disgust.

They must all answer to their consciences, and they could draw public lines in the sand without enraging Trump, the way some GOP senators have invoked the possibility of a constitutional crisis if Mueller is fired.

We have an apt phrase in chess: “The threat is stronger than the execution.” But are any Republicans ready to execute if their threats are ignored?

The Cold War was won based on the policy of containment established by President Harry Truman in 1947. The U.S. would not attack the Soviet Union, but it would not allow the USSR and Communism to expand unchallenged. When the Cold War ended, the winning containment concept was discarded in exchange for engagement, which is a major reason why all but a handful of former Soviet republics are still dictatorships today, and why liberal democracy is under attack all over the globe.

This does not happen overnight. Putin dismantled Russia’s fragile new democracy in the full view of the leaders of the free world, who expressed the usual concerns as they made deals for Russian oil and gas and welcomed Putin’s oligarch buddies and the billions they were looting out of Russia.

President Obama spent many hopeless years trying to make friends with Russia — all while Putin was liquidating his political opposition, preparing to invade Ukraine, and building the disinformation Death Star he eventually unleashed on Europe and the United States.

From Obama’s naive appeasement, we arrived at Trump’s open collaboration. Putin isn’t just emboldened, he’s coming to Washington to take a victory lap.

What’s needed today is a Trump containment policy, to limit his reach and his ability to weaken the American institutions that hold him in check. The President will always have dominion over foreign policy, and that includes inviting the leaders of hostile dictatorships to the White House. But Congress can and must begin to work now to ensure that Putin leaves only with Trump’s loyalty, and not with the rest of the silver and the keys to the country.

Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. He is the author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.”

A Point on the Maria Butina Indictment and Don Jr. by Josh Marshall

A Point on the Maria Butina Indictment and Don Jr.

By Josh Marshall

Here’s what’s in the background of the Maria Butina indictment.

The Butina indictment refers to “others known and unknown, including an official of the Russian Federation” with whom she collaborated in her crimes. That official is clearly Alexander Torshin, a Russian central banker and senator. His courtship of the NRA is deeper and more longstanding than Butina’s. In fact, she appears to be a creature of Torshin, who is reputed to have deep ties to Russian intelligence and organized crime.

Torshin’s name has come up repeatedly in the broader Trump/Russia probe. He reached out to Kushner to set up a meeting at the NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky in May 2016. Kushner declined but also failed to reveal the contact to investigators. Torshin eventually did meet at the convention with Donald Trump Jr. That is about a month before Don Jr. had his notorious Trump Tower meeting in June 2016.

These were among many other contacts Torshin had had with other American political figures in recent years.

In May of this year, Michael Isikoff reported that the Special Counsel’s office had received from a top Spanish prosecutor copies of wiretaps of Torshin and a convicted Russian launderer. Asked whether he was concerned about meetings between Torshin and Donald Trump, Jr., the prosecutor Jose Grinda told Isikoff: “Mr. Trump’s son should be concerned.”

Each of the points I note above are old news. But they appear in a different light with Butina’s indictment.

Another point: this indictment isn’t from the Special Counsel’s office. It comes from the DOJ’s National Security Division, where you’d expect such a charge to come from if there were no Special Counsel. Why is this? A Russian national trying to infiltrate US conservative political groups on behalf of Russia during the 2016 election – it’s hard to see what could more clearly fall under Mueller’s purview.

So why isn’t this from him?

There are a few possibilities. One is simply that the investigation and indictment arose independently, though that seems unlikely. Another possibility is that Mueller decided to hand this prosecution off to regular DOJ prosecutors to spread the investigation out among a number of offices, making himself less of a conspicuous or at least sole target of political attack. Yet another possibility is more mundane: Mueller doesn’t want to be at this forever and he’s handing off peripheral cases so he can finish more quickly and maintain his focus on core matters. My best guess is some mix of options two and three. But this is a bit of a mystery.

All that seems clear from this indictment is that the US is saying that the NRA was infiltrated by at least one Russian agent and likely more.

Where do we go now? Some thoughts by Josh Marshall

Where do we go now? Some thoughts

By Josh Marshall

So what is the fall out from the press conference?

Let me share a few thoughts.

I expect no resignations from top administration officials. I also expect to see little real change from Capitol Hill Republicans, at least for now. I’ve mentioned a few critical statements. But mild, contingent criticisms don’t really mean anything unless they are combined with specific actions. The Senate especially can do a lot to slow down and hobble a President. Until we see something like that, none of it matters. We’ve seen nothing like that so far.

I want to direct our attention again to this column last night from David Ignatius. There are signals, in the indictments, to Vladimir Putin and to President Trump. Federal law enforcement and the US intelligence community know a huge amount of information about this Russian operation. What more do they know? What more Russian operations have been compromised? What more does the FBI, CIA, NSA know about the actions of top Trump associates. It creates a specter of menace hanging over both. The timing of these indictments is no accident, three days before this summit. This is an independent source of action, another driver that I think goes beyond Robert Mueller. Who’s driving this?

Within the hour, the FBI announced it had arrested a woman named Maria Butina. You’ve heard of her before, though you may not remember her name. She essentially infiltrated the NRA. She had a pro-gun group in Russia (where guns really aren’t an issue like in the US). She is tied to a former top official in the Russian Central Bank, Alexander Torshin, who appears to be listed as an unnamed conspirator with Butina. She has been charged with being a Russian spy (unregistered foreign agent) trying to influence US politics. The NRA is the key organization here. They’ve been deep in with various Russians, building ties with Russian political groups. The DOJ is now saying they were penetrated by a Russian agent. This is a major escalation, a big problem for the NRA.

The best I can tell is that we’re likely to see escalating pressure from the investigations, with congressional Republicans still trapped in their complicity with the President, some possibly tough criticisms but also signaling no intention to take any actions the President would need to respond to.

Where my mind is is whether there are other forces in the US government, folks I believe Ignatius was alluding to, escalating the pressure on the President.