My take on Kavanaugh at the moment by Josh Marshall

By Josh Marshall

Let me try to bring you up to date on a genuinely bizarre turn of events tonight which could end up being very damaging to Brett Kavanaugh’s nominatin to the Supreme Court.

As I noted below, around 6 pm this evening Ed Whelan, a key player in DC’s conservative judicial establishment, posted a lengthy twitter thread in which he made a highly conjectural argument that the accusation against Brett Kavanaugh is actually a case of mistaken identification and that Prof. Blasey Ford’s alleged attacker was actually a classmate of Kavanaugh’s named Chris Garrett.

Garrett is now a middle school teacher in Georgia and had actually signed a letter which a number of Kavanaugh’s classmates sent to the Senate in July attesting to Kavanaugh’s character. Blasey Ford put out a statement tonight stating categorically that she knew both Kavanaugh and Garrett at the time and that there is no way she could have mistaken one for the other.

It’s worth stepping back and contemplating just how wild and reckless an action this was. There’s really no way for me to capture the zaniness of Whelan’s argument. You can read it here. Suffice it to say it’s far-fetched an makes the most serious of accusations based on the flimsiest of conjectures.

There are two key pieces of context that are critical to understand. Whelan didn’t just spin out some hypotheticals. He clearly pointed the finger at a man who is not a public figure in any way and argued that he was likely the one who attempted to rape Blasey Ford. At the end of his thread he drew back and said he didn’t know specifically what had happened that night … but it was clear what he meant and what he was saying. This is almost certainly libelous.

The other point is that Whelan is not some random on Twitter or an eccentric but little known activist. He is close friends with Kavanaugh and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society, the group that chooses and then organizes the confirmation strategies for these nominees. Whelan is also close to Don McGahn, the White House Counsel who is formally in charge of shepherding Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate. Whelan is part of the very top handful of activists who play in this space.

On its face this was a crazy stunt. But there’s more here.

Over the last few days I had been noticing Whelan’s cryptic comments that he had big news coming that would definitively exonerate Kavanaugh. He made clear this new evidence would definitively exonerate Kavanaugh. He predicted that Sen. Feinstein would literally apologize to Kavanaugh’s family for the false accusation. A number of Republican staffers and conservative legal academics had chimed in on these tweets, telling people to watch out for what Whelan had coming and certainly implying that they knew some of the details. A lot of people who are deep into this judicial confirmation process – politicos, legal academics, conservative activists – were watching this closely.

But then tonight, in response to Whelan’s tweet thread, The Washington Post published a story that without quite saying it explicitly strongly suggested that Whelan had developed his libelous theory in conjunction with the advisors spearheading Kavanaugh’s nomination. I’m going to quote from a key passage at length with my emphases added …

Amid the maneuvering, the nomination was roiled further late Thursday by incendiary tweets from a prominent Kavanaugh friend and supporter who publicly identified another high school classmate of Kavanaugh’s as Ford’s possible attacker.

Ed Whelan, a former clerk to the late justice Antonin Scalia and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed to floor plans, online photographs and other information to suggest a location for the house party in suburban Maryland that Ford described. He also named and posted photographs of the classmate he suggested could be responsible.

Ford dismissed Whelan’s theory in a statement late Thursday: “I knew them both, and socialized with” the other classmate, Ford said, adding that she had once visited him in the hospital. “There is zero chance that I would confuse them.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill and White House officials immediately sought to distance themselves from Whelan’s claims and said they were not aware of his plans to identify the former classmate, now a middle school teacher, who could not be reached for comment and did not answer the door at his house Thursday night.

Whelan did not respond to requests for comment. He had told people around him that he had spent several days putting together the theory and thought it was more convincing than her story, according to two friends who had talked to him.

Whelan has been involved in helping to advise Kavanaugh’s confirmation effort and is close friends with both Kavanaugh and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society who has been helping to spearhead the nomination. Kavanaugh and Whelan also worked together in the Bush administration.

Kavanaugh and his allies have been privately discussing a defense that would not question whether an incident involving Ford happened, but instead would raise doubts that the attacker was Kavanaugh, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

The Post doesn’t say it in so many words. But there are several key pieces of information which tell a story. Whelan is close friends with Kavanaugh and Leo. Whelan is part of the team advising and assisting Kavanaugh through the confirmation process. We also learn that “Kavanaugh and his allies” have been working on a defense that sounds very much like the one Whelan rolled out on Twitter tonight: an explanation that both exonerates Kavanaugh but does so without attacking Blasey Ford’s good faith. ‘She was a victim. She deserves our sympathy. But it wasn’t Brett Kavanaugh. That part was a misunderstanding.’

Put these facts together and it is very, very hard to believe that Kavanaugh and his top advisors did not at least know the outlines of Whelan’s theory. If that’s true, it’s big, big trouble and shows a level of recklessness and irresponsibility that shouldn’t have Kavanaugh sitting as a judge on any court let alone the Supreme Court. Whether Kavanaugh and Leo knew just what Whelan was going to do tonight is much less clear. But again, put those facts above together and it’s a real stretch to think Whelan hadn’t at least discussed his theory with Kavanaugh’s team.

Again, put the facts together. Whelan is part of Kavanaugh’s confirmtion advisor team at the highest levels. Kavanaugh and his advisors have been working on a defense theory like the one Whelan tweeted about. Conservative political and legal circles have been buzzing about the goods Whelan was about to unload for the last couple days. Are we really supposed to believe Whelan never mentioned any of this to Kavanaugh or Leo? That this was the first they ever heard of it?

There are more details too.

I mentioned above that a number of Whelan’s ideological comrades had been playing up his hints of what was coming. So was Senator Hatch’s Communications Director, Matt Whitlock. Yesterday he tweeted to his followers to “Keep an eye on Ed’s tweets the next few days” and flagged one of Whelan’s hints that he had information that would exonerate Kavanaugh. As I explain here, as soon as it was clear that Whelan’s gambit was a debacle – without about 2 hours of the tweets going out – Whitlock deleted that tweet from the day before.

Now what does this all mean? At a bare minimum we know that one of Kavanaugh’s top advisors constructed a bizarre conspiracy theory which accused a presumably innocent middle school teacher in Georgia of an attempted rape more than thirty years ago. But there’s a mix of direct and circumstantial evidence (which I’ve noted above) that strongly suggests that Kavanaugh’s top advisors and Kavanaugh himself were at least aware of this reckless scheme and likely played some part in developing it. Whether they knew Whalen was going to roll it out in the way he did tonight is less clear. But their hands are likely dirty with this. Kavanaugh’s knowledge and involvement is an obvious point to be examined in is his expected testimony on Monday.

Let me conclude by shifting gears to a bit of speculation. How did all this happen tonight? How did a respected lawyer take such a reckless step? My best guess is this.

It is highly likely that Whelan and his associates spent the last two or three days shopping this story to reporters. The Times Maggie Haberman first retweeted Whalen’s thread and then deleted those retweets. She then said that Whelan’s theory was “something Kavanaugh allies had privately said could be the case for days.” In other words, they were shopping it to reporters. The problem almost certainly was that no one would bite. How could they? Again, read the thread. It’s really nuts and wildly reckless. There’s no way any reputable publication could push this out into the public discussion. So Whelan and whoever else he was working with decided he needed to force the matter and publish it himself. Indeed, Haberman suggests something a similar. “Doing it this way, as an apparent reaction to Ford likely testifying, suggests a level of panic.”

As I noted last night, Senate Republicans had manage to reunify around the demand that Blasey Ford testimony Monday on their terms. She softened her stance somewhat today and that seemed to shift the balance somewhat, making their unified stance a bit more wobbly and possibly unsustainable. This new development, especially if Kavanaugh is tied to it in any way, both undermines his claims of innocence and much more clearly suggests a streak of recklessness and deception that could prove deeply, perhaps fatally damaging.

ALPHA dialogue for Oct. 5 issue: Tochigi / Senjogahara marsh

 「栃木／戦場ヶ原」

マヤ：    ザック、私…話したいと思ってたのよ——
ザック：    まだだ、マヤ。頼むよ。あとちょっとだけ。
マヤ：    でも、もうずっとここに座ってるわ。ほかにもたくさん見どころはあるのに。巨大な滝や大きな湖。自然博物館にもう一つの滝もあるのよ。それに、他にもこの場所に座りたい人がいると思うわ。
ザック：    ここは本当に…なんていうか、うっとりするよ。雲の上から降りてきた誰かが杖の一振りで全てを黄色く詩的に変えてしまったみたいだ。瞑想にぴったりだよ。
マヤ：    分かったわ。あなたは…なんていうんでしたっけ？　自分の世界に入っちゃったのね。ザック、すぐ戻ってきて。本社からの新しいメールの件を話さなくちゃ。
ザック：    後でいいよ。心を落ち着ける時間をくれよ。この湿原の話をして！
マヤ：    戦場ヶ原よ。言った通り、見どころがたくさんあるわ。湿原や木々だけじゃなくてね。華厳の滝に竜頭ノ滝。離れたところには湯滝もあるわ。それに中禅寺湖。子どもの頃何度か来たことがあるわ。湖でボートに乗るのが大好きだったの。そして今度は…悪いけど仕事の話よ。あのメールね？
ザック：    そうだ！　メールだ。その通り。その話をしなくちゃな。絶対するよ、今夜ね。それか明日。たぶん。
マヤ：    OK。分かったわよ。でも見て回りましょう？そもそもそれが仕事なんだし。







Tochigi / Senjogohara marsh
栃木県にやって来たザックとマヤ。日光市の戦場ヶ原周辺の
観光スポットをめぐり景色を楽しんでいる。
Maya    Zack, I … was hoping to talk about —
Zack    Not yet, Maya. Please. I mean, just one more moment.
Maya    But you’ve been sitting here for ages. There’s so much more to this trail. There’s a great big waterfall. There’s a massive lake. There’s a nature museum. There’s another waterfall. Also, I’m pretty sure other people want to sit here, too.
Zack    It’s just so … well, magical. Like someone reached down from the clouds and waved a wand and now everything is yellow and poetry and perfect for meditation.
Maya    Okay, you’re off in … how do you say it? You’re off in la-la land. Zack, I need you to be here, now. We need to talk about the latest email from head office.
Zack    That can wait. Give me some time to get everything right in my mind. Tell me about this marsh!
Maya    Senjogahara. Well, there’s lots to see, never mind just the marsh itself and the trees. We passed Kegon and Ryuzu falls on the way in from the museum, and Lake Chuzenjiko, too. Yudaki falls is further ahead. I came here as a kid a few times. I loved taking the boat on the lake. And now ... it’s time to talk shop, I’m afraid. The email?
Zack    Yes! The email. You’re right. We need to talk about the email. And we will, tonight, definitely! Or tomorrow. Possibly.
Maya    OK. All right. But let’s check out the rest of the sights, shall we? After all, that’s what we’re paid for.

Better call Paul

Better Call Paul
1 Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2 hours ago

Yesterday, as the big news was breaking, I was mainly reading the headlines, reported updates and TV interviews. It was only last night when I read through the 40 or more pages of court documents. In order, they are 1) superseding indictment, 2) plea agreement, and 3) statement of offenses. So a few thoughts on those.

Most of the information is just what you’ve seen reported, the maximal agreement of cooperation, the details and nature of agreements about possible length of imprisonment, some of the details of the financial crimes. You’ve heard most of this.

One small and humorous thing was the almost juvenile ways Manafort tried to cover up his crimes. One particularly humorous example comes in the late ’16 and early ’17 period. Manafort is already under active and investigation and he and his firm get subpoenaed for certain emails and records. His firm responds that they have no such emails and lamely sends along an undated ’email retention policy’ which dictated that all emails must be deleted after 30 days. Obviously that was nonsense. Mueller’s investigators found everything they were looking for when they raided Manafort’s Virginia home last summer.

DMI is Manafort’s firm.

There was, however, one big thing that jumped out at me.

When I was just starting out as a journalist in DC I used to troll through the filings at the FARA office looking for cool, or rather sleazy, stories to write about. FARA is frequently flouted by various means. I always saw it as a law as often honored in the breach as otherwise. I distinctly remember one time maybe twenty years ago when I’d found a case where I thought someone clearly had failed to file when the law clearly required that they do so. I talked to one of the FARA staffers, who I think was a staff lawyer. He was basically bending over backwards to make the non-filer’s case for him! It was like an agency bent on non-enforcement.

So when the FARA law became so central to Trump campaign corruption cases I thought it was sort of like getting Al Capone on taxes, zealous enforcement in one area to get at more amorphous wrongdoing that was harder to address in an indictment in another.

I got a very different impression from these documents. Manafort should have been indicted for this failure to register even if none of the other crimes or anything to do with Trump had ever happened. This was no case of some spill over into the United States of PR Manafort was doing in either Ukraine or Europe. The depth of the information operations – working the US Senate, working the administration and executive departments, involving himself in political campaigns and through furtive press work – was really staggering. This read less like conventional foreign lobbying and more like an influence operation.

Obviously, there’s no bright line separating those two things. Effective foreign lobbying is an influence operation. But there are matters of degree. There are also matters of secrecy. Lobbyists generally don’t want to file under FARA because there’s a taint involved. FARA is part of the Justice Department. You’re registering with the law enforcement authorities that you’re working for a foreign government. There is a certain implication of guilt or at least the implication that your activities should be surveilled. But the indictment makes pretty clear that Manafort didn’t file specifically because he needed his activities to remain secret, which to a great degree they did.

One thing this told me was that the FARA indictments were very legitimate. The prosecutors weren’t bootstrapping the law to get him on other things or pressure him to cooperate. Or if they were, they had him dead to rights.

The other implication is less concrete but still notable. Reading through the narrative of Manafort’s work on behalf of Ukraine in the United States, it was impossible not to see how valuable he would be to those same clients either within the US government or within a US political campaign. We still have no clear or complete explanation of how or why Paul Manafort ended up as the guy in charge of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The notional explanations have never added up. Reading this part left me even more curious to finally get an answer to that question. It seems we may.

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2018.09.15 和歌山県の動物園がパンダの赤ちゃんをみんなに見せる

和歌山県の動物園がパンダの赤ちゃんをみんなに見せる
和歌山県白浜町にある動物園「アドベンチャーワールド」で、先月１４日にパンダの雌の赤ちゃんが生まれました。動物園は１３日から、赤ちゃんをみんなに見せています。 赤ちゃんは、生まれたときの体の重さが７５ｇでした。普通のパンダの赤ちゃんより小さかったため、大きくなるか心配する人もいましたが、今は７３１ｇになりました。 １３日は、赤ちゃんを見るために１０００人以上の人が動物園に来て、かわいい赤ちゃんの写真を撮ったりして楽しんでいました。 動物園は、毎日午前１０時１５分からと、午後２時４０分から２０分赤ちゃんを見せます。赤ちゃんの名前は、みんなに考えてもらいます。動物園やウェブサイトで１１月１６日まで集めています。

Trump Is Turning the Enemies of Civil Liberties into Liberal Heroes by Trevor Timm

medium.com

Trevor Timm

7-8 minutes

The CIA’s approval rating among Democrats is sky-high. Former FBI and Justice Department officials are being showered with donations on GoFundMe. And now George W. Bush — the president who signed the Patriot Act, opened Guantanamo, started the Iraq War, and warrantlessly wiretapped Americans — is a viral sensation being portrayed as our country’s most lovable grandpa.

Everyone expected Trump to be a nightmare for Americans’ civil liberties. But very few could have guessed the strange way this nightmare would manifest itself over the past 18 months. Of course, Trump has used his executive power to implement countless cruel and rights-violating policies. But he has also, with an assist from a frenzied media, turned many of the individuals and agencies responsible for creating our unaccountable national security apparatus into folk heroes at the same time.

It’s an infuriating and depressing state of affairs for civil liberties advocates, many of whom have fought the CIA, FBI, and Justice Department in the past two presidential administrations as these agencies expanded executive power, restricted privacy rights, and shielded officials from accountability under the guise of “national security” — the same tools Trump now regularly uses for his benefit.

    Very few could have guessed the strange way this nightmare would manifest itself over the past 18 months.

The nauseating sight this weekend of George W. Bush being deified on social media because he passed a piece of candy to Michelle Obama was only the latest example. The combination of Trump’s relentless and inaccurate Twitter feed and the stampede of pundits who instinctively feel the need take the exact opposite view has created a nonstop cycle that has destroyed our ability to see the truth.

The examples come so fast that they are almost impossible to enumerate. In just the past couple weeks, Trump has gone after the FISA court, the Justice Department, and the FBI — all due to personal grievances or feuds he has because of their perceived role in the Mueller investigation.

Virtually all of Trump’s specific criticisms are baseless, but he has an uncanny ability to pick targets for his tweet tirades that should be harshly criticized for entirely different reasons. The FISA court has been radically reinterpreting Fourth Amendment law in complete secrecy since the Bush administration. The FBI, still headquartered in a building named after serial lawbreaker J. Edgar Hoover, has been a civil liberties disaster since its inception and was recently handed increased surveillance authorities under Trump’s watch. The Justice Department has repeatedly tipped the scales against the powerless while shielding the powerful.

Why, then, when Trump tweets something idiotic about the Justice Department, do so many pundits have to say something almost as ridiculous in response, like, “The statute of Justice is blindfolded for a reason, it applies to all without fear nor favor”? Try telling that to 500 children still separated from their immigrant parents because of Justice Department policies, or to the other countless victims of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ radical moves since he’s taken office.

When Trump criticizes law enforcement or intelligence officials by name, this phenomenon somehow gets worse. His targets are instantly turned into celebrities who must be morally pure, merely because Trump has decided to turn his fire on them on a particular day. The same people the Bush and Obama administration inoculated from accountability for similar transgressions Trump commits on a daily basis — like lying — are being turned into liberal icons.

Former CIA Director John Brennan sworn in before testifying during a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for a hearing on Russian actions during the 2016 election at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, May 23, 2017. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

Take former CIA director John Brennan, whose security clearance Trump revoked because he was upset that Brennan was criticizing him. After Trump’s announcement, Brennan was lionized by the media as a truth-telling luminary, instantly beloved by all Democrats. How quickly people (pretend to) forget that Brennan, just a few years ago, ordered the CIA to spy on Democratic Senate staffers who were investigating the agency’s torture program, and then blatantly lied about it to the public.

    It is indeed possible to condemn Trump’s vengeful actions against people like Brennan without showering these people with unadulterated praise.

Yes, Trump’s retaliation against Brennan for criticizing him is concerning, but why do so many pundits feel the need to declare Brennan a “hero”? It is indeed possible to condemn Trump’s vengeful actions against people like Brennan without showering these people with unadulterated praise.

Cable news is littered with similar cases. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, lied to Congress about the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans before the Snowden revelations. He’s now a regular anti-Trump commentator on CNN. Michael Hayden, the former Bush administration NSA and CIA chief who made so many false statements to Congress that they are featured in a stand-alone section in the Senate’s 2014 torture report, is regularly seen on television ripping Trump for constant falsehoods. Hayden even has a bestselling new book, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in the Age of Lies, lamenting the death of “truth.”

It is the height of irony that Trump constantly rants about the “deep state,” yet the most coordinated PR campaign involving ex-intelligence officials we’ve seen in his presidency was in support of one of his major agenda items. It was Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden — along with dozens of other former intelligence officials — who banded together and and used their newfound media platforms to lobby for Trump’s CIA nominee Gina Haspel, who was personally involved in the agency’s appalling torture program after 9/11.

The next time a Trump cabinet official is caught lying under oath but faces no retribution for it — or when Trump’s CIA is involved in its next human rights scandal — we should save part of the blame for those who paved the way for such an act to go unpunished. By uncritically glorifying law enforcement and intelligence officials who have tramped on civil liberties for decades in the name of fighting Trump, we may damage the cause of civil liberties long after Trump is gone.