Category: 2020 Election

Justice Dept. Never Fully Examined Trump’s Ties to Russia, Ex-Officials Say

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The former deputy attorney general maneuvered to keep investigators from completing an inquiry into whether the president’s personal and financial links to Russia posed a national security threat.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia.

The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry.

But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere. Continue reading.

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips says Minnetonka campaign office burglarized

A Minnesota congressman says his Minnetonka campaign office was burglarized overnight.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips tweeted the news of the break-in on Sunday, along with a photo of a shattered glass door.

“To the thieves stealing campaign signs from my supporters’ lawns across the district and the criminals who broke into our Minnetonka campaign office overnight, the irony isn’t lost on me,” Phillips wrote. “Your disregard for law and stoking of fear and disorder, only increases my resolve.” Continue reading.

Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly says telling the president that things he wanted to do were illegal was like ‘French kissing a chainsaw’

The former White House chief of staff John Kelly has said that having to refuse President Donald Trump’s requests “was like ‘French kissing a chainsaw,'” according to a new book.

“Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President” by the New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt is due to be released on Tuesday. The book’s synopsis describes it as the story of Trump “and the officials of his own government who tried to stop him.”

The chainsaw simile was included in an Axios report on the book. Continue reading.

Kitchen Table Conversation with Sen. Harris, Sen. Smith, & Lieutenant Governor Flanagan

On Sept 2nd, Sen. Harris joins Sen. Tina Smith and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan for a conversation with Senator Bobby Joe Champion, Rep. Rena Moran, and Minnesotans from the Twin Cities about the challenges they are facing with the return to school during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More information and RSVP here.

Biden condemns violence on all sides after deadly Portland shooting

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Democratic nominee Joe Biden issued a statement unequivocally condemning violence on all sides after a man was fatally shotSaturday night during a clash between supporters of President Trump and anti-racism protesters.

Why it matters: As Biden prepares to address civil unrest this week, he is looking to set a marker for Trump and put the burden on him to speak to all sides on an issue that is roiling America and the presidential campaign.

  • The Trump campaign has sought to paint Biden as unwilling to condemn the violent protests that have unfolded in places like Portland and Kenosha, despite the former vice president having done so several times.
  • In the wake of a flood of tweets and retweets by Trump that defended aggressive actions by his supporters in Portland, Biden demanded that the president help “lower the temperature.” Continue reading.

Anatomy of a man-made disaster: Here are 595 hard facts about Trump’s abysmal COVID-19 response

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Crises have a way of sorting the good presidents from the bad.

Historians rank Abe Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt among the top three presidents for their handling of the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II.

By contrast, the string of catastrophes that trailed George W. Bush, from 9/11 to Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to his obliviousness to warning signs in the housing market before the 2008 crash guarantee that he will have a permanent place in the bottom tier of presidents.

Also certain to be at or near the bottom of that list is Donald Trump. Continue reading.

The five dumbest Republican arguments for Trump

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None of Republicans’ commonly deployed arguments for reelecting President Trump are tethered to reality. The paucity of logic and factual support for their rationales suggests many on the right, even “respectable” columnists and elected officials, actually support him for reasons they’re loath to admit, whether it’s because they share his apocalyptic view of crime encroaching on the suburbs or are eager to see a country purged of immigrants.

He will give us law and order: If public safety is the concern, the unnecessary deaths from covid-19, which might exceed 200,000 by Election Day, and the anxiety over leaving our homes for fear of joining 6 million infected Americans surely make Trump’s tenure the most dangerous for ordinary Americans. Each week, we have been losing twice the number of Americans killed on Sept. 11.

No wonder Trump loves to highlight any domestic scene of disorder, mayhem and looting he can to frighten White Americans, arguing that if law enforcement “dominates the streets,” we will have public order. This is preposterous. We cannot go to war with millions of demonstrators. That’s simply impossible, not to mention morally objectionable. The demands of the protesters, among them police reform and voting rights legislation are entirely legitimate. But so long as Trump denies the legitimacy of these concerns and the presence of systemic racism, we will not have domestic tranquility. Continue reading.

One shot dead as caravan of ‘concealed carry’ Trump supporters descend on Portland

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Late Saturday night, armed Trump supporters descended on Portland to confront anti-racist protesters in an incident that resulted in at least one fatal shooting.

According to The Daily Beast:

Portland Police confirmed on Twitter that the shooting is being investigated as a homicide. “On Saturday, August 29, 2020 at 8:46p.m., Portland Police officers heard sounds of gunfire from the area of Southeast 3rd Avenue and Southwest Alder Street. They responded and located a victim with a gunshot wound to the chest. Medical responded and determined that the victim was deceased,” a statement says. “No suspect information is being released at his time.”

Continue reading.

Inside Trump’s pressure campaign on federal scientists over a covid-19 treatment

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President Trump’s accusatory tweet barreled in at 7:49 a.m. a week ago Saturday: The “deep state” at the Food and Drug Administration was trying to sandbag his election prospects by slowing progress on coronavirus treatments and vaccines until after Nov. 3.

Shocked and upset, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who was tagged in the tweet, immediately began calling his contacts at the White House to find out why the president was angry. During his conversations, he mentioned the FDA was on the verge of granting emergency authorization to convalescent plasma as a treatment for covid-19. The agency planned to issue a news release.

The White House would upend those plans, turning a preliminary finding of modest efficacy into something much bigger — a presidential announcement of a “major therapeutic breakthrough on the China Virus,” as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany previewed in a tweet late that Saturday night. Continue reading.

Ukraine language in GOP platform underscores Trump tensions

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The absence of an updated Republican party platform for the 2020 election is allowing President Trump to avoid hard commitments on the sensitive foreign policy issue of Ukraine, where his withholding of $400 million in military assistance was at the heart of his impeachment by the House. 

The GOP’s decision to preserve the 2016 platform keeps in place toned down language related to Ukraine that was negotiated at the time by Trump’s then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is serving a seven and a half year prison sentence on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections.

Manafort, who was found by the Senate Intelligence Committee to have had direct contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign, successfully removed any commitments to lethal military assistance to Kyiv as part of efforts to soften language towards Moscow. Continue reading.