Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

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Pray Tell, What Do Nancy Pelosi & Barack Obama Have Against Polar Bears?

STEVEN KOSLOWSKI / ALAMY 

I have no regrets about anything. Regrets is not what I do. 

~ House Speaker NANCY PELOSI

The catalogue of the horrors that Donald Trump has inflicted on man, woman, child and beast -- ranging from migrant families separated in border concentration camp cages to polar bears threatened by oil drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- is so horrifying and so vast that it barely can be comprehended.  But as the third year of the Trump nightmare slouches to a close, we need to remember that beyond that traitorous Republican congressional choir, there have been other enablers, chief among them Nancy Pelosi. 

This assessment is unfair to Madam Speaker only to the extent that she and Democrats in general have been constrained by the limits of their legislative powers.  All that changed when the Blue Wave midterm election victories bestowed the party a substantial House majority and the mandate and some of the tools they needed to take down the demigod in the Oval Office. 

Alas, it has been nearly a year since that Blue Wave broke on the shore of a Trump-besieged America and nearly eight months since Pelosi was handed those tools, but all she has done in that time is shoot sparks out her ass and mumbled about stopping Trump while pretty much standing in the way of efforts to do just that. 

This assessment also is unfair to Madam Speaker, but only to the extent that Trump has been overwhelming in his vileness as only a malignant narcissist with immense powers can be.  But the president has outplayed Pelosi at virtually every turn and rather than embolden her to fight back harder, she has retreated and pouted when called out on her egregious leadership lapses. 

The deadly serious business of impeaching a president who has been rubbing his high crimes and misdemeanors in Pelosi's face finally if belatedly would get underway last week as House Judiciary Committee took the unbold step of voting on Thursday to formally establish the rules of an impeachment investigation, but Pelosi shat on that by pointedly refusing to use the word "impeachment" in reference to a vote that was all about impeachment.  

"I support what is happening in the Judiciary Committee that enables them to do their process of interrogation and their investigation, and I salute them for that work," Pelosi said in saying nothing much in the manner that Sarah Palin, who after all softened up that infamous basket of deplorables for Trump, would say nothing. 

 When pressed by reporters on Thursday and again on Friday about whether she is uncomfortable with the term "impeachment inquiry," Pelosi bristled and then became visibly angry.  Not at Trump, mind you, but at being called out. 

"I'm not answering any more questions about a possible inquiry, investigation, and the rest," Pelosi barked before walking away from the podium and cutting short her weekly press conference after calling for the media to focus on Senate Republicans' refusal to take up a Democratic proposal to expand background checks for gun purchases. 

"Why is it that you are hung up with a word over here when lives are at stake over there?" she asked and then click-clacked out of the room on her power pumps, although a whole lot more lives are at stake -- not to mention American democracy itself -- beyond the innocents of the next mass murderer squeezing off shots from the 100-round clip in his assault rifle.  I don't for a moment believe Pelosi is a double agent secretly in Trump's pay, but why is she so intent on fighting a battle here and a battle there but not the war?  

Yet again this assessment is unfair to Madam Speaker because she has to balance the party's interests insofar as not alienating those crucial swing voters in advance of the 2020 election, as well as luring a few deplorables out of their basket.  But Trump is not just any president and the election is merely the most important since 1860, forget about 1932 or 2008.   

While I've got my hammer out, I'm going to take a whack at Barack Obama. 

Trump's predecessor is the most influential and beloved Democrat of the past decade, yet his otherwise commanding voice has been substantially absent since Trump began taking a wrecking ball to America.  We've heard more from Lock Her Up Hillary's soul mate than from the 44th president. 

That is a damned shame, but I suspect it is just as Pelosi wishes.  As do most of the Democratic presidential wannabes beyond Joe Biden.  Obama's hugely positive legacy is being marginalized if not argued over on the debate stage, and the feeling persists that Pelosi believes that Obama unbridled would trample on her own message, whatever the frick that is.  (I can, however, purchase Official Obama Merchandise at the Official Democratic Store, as I am reminded by email, although no presidential Sharpie pens.) 

Sorry, Nancy and Barack, but this is not a big game as politics so often is.  Have you given up without really trying?  Sure seems that way.   

It is a game that Trump is playing for keeps.  The time for circumspection, as well as relying on that hackneyed old game playbook, is over.  The crisis is well upon us, and Pelosi's stubborn inaction -- as well as Obama's silence -- looks more and more like dereliction of duty with every passing day and every opportunity lost.  

House Democrats Wrap Up Another Week Of Dithering While America Burns

MANDEL NGAN / AFP-GETTY IMAGES

If you recall the headlines atop my blog posts on impeachment over the last several months -- among them Whatever Happened To That Democratic Blue Wave?, Fuggedabout Trump: The Democratic Circular Firing Squad Goes After Obama, and most recently The Long, Tragicomic Slog Toward Impeachment -- you probably are onto my view that if Donald Trump goes down it will have less to do with House Democrats, whose extraordinary dithering continues apace, than the unchained nutjob president himself. 

It should go without saying that this is an epic failure of the Democratic congressional leadership and a betrayal of 2018 midterm election voters. 

This was going to be the week, or so we were led to believe, that the serious business of impeaching a president who has been rubbing his high crimes and misdemeanors in Democratic faces with impunity would finally get underway.  Yes, the House Judiciary Committee took the extraordinarily unbold step of voting to formally establish the rules of an impeachment investigation on Thursday, but the party leadership couldn't even agree as to what that meant. 

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had preloaded the inevitable confusion by declaring before the vote that the vote was not tantamount to an impeachment inquiry. 

Then post-vote, House Democratic Caucus chairman Hakeem Jeffries seemed to state the obvious in explaining that "We're conducting an impeachment investigation into the culture of corruption, abuse of power and obstruction of justice." 

Fair enough, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promptly stepped on Jeffries' lines by pointedly refusing to use the word "impeachment" in reference to the vote. 

"I support what is happening in the Judiciary Committee that enables them to do their process of interrogation and their investigation, and I salute them for that work," she said in saying nothing.  When pressed by an uppity reporter about whether she is uncomfortable with the term "impeachment inquiry" and if people should be using a different term, Pelosi bristled. 

"We are on our path.  Where it takes us is where the -- we will follow the facts," quoth Madame Speaker. 

Former Obama White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer cut through the crap.

"The politics of impeachment are debatable," tweeted Pfeiffer.  "Maybe they are good. Maybe they aren't.  No one knows.  But I do know that the current Democratic strategy of telling the base they are impeaching Trump and telling the moderates the opposite is an absolute disaster."

That about sums it up. 

The Democrats can't even agree on what to call the damned thing because many are afraid of their own shadows, let alone Trump's small hands -- as they hang themselves out to dry and the clock ticks down to 2020, which happens to be a presidential election year.  This inevitably will suck even more oxygen out of the impeachment "initiative," such as it is, just as the Democratic president debate on Thursday night (during which it was acknowledged in passing that Trump is a really bad man) stole the day.  

To put things in an historic context, this depressing state of affairs owes much to the corruption of American politics, which long predates Trump.   

"Moscow Mitch" McConnell has been teaching a master class in that since he famously uttered upon the election of Barack Obama that his priority was to make sure the Islamofascist from Kenya was a one-term president.  He had to settle for the next best thing, making sure that Obama was unable to accomplish much of significance over two terms, the crowning achievement of which was refusing to join the then-president and Democrats in sounding the alarm once the extent of Russia interference in the 2016 campaign to grease the skids for Trump became known. 

But Democrats have, in their own way, been almost as corrupt, pretty much parking their vaunted principles at the door in talking the talk but not walking the walk.  The mess they have made of impeachment is a result.     

To return to where I started, only Trump -- incapable of changing his outrageous behavior and curbing his assault on decency and democracy -- may be able to end his awful presidency.   

Oh, and that noise you hear is Vladimir Putin laughing into his vodka.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

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Sharpiegate Isn't Just Another Trump Inanity, It's What Fascist Governments Do

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sharpiegate, the name that inevitably has attached itself to Donald Trump's hissy fit over being caught out misstating that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, has now outlived the ferocious storm that prompted the president's bloviations.  And while all of this may seem like just another silly distraction, it is far more ominous.   

The government scientists and weather forecasters tasked with warning us when meteorological dangers loom are being accused of being the president's enemies and their careers threatened because they were more concerned about conveying accurate information than covering the president's big ass.   

Make no mistake about it, this is what fascist governments do.   

In this case, the apolitical National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was pressured to release a statement -- notable because it was unsigned -- backing Trump's false claim that NOAA's National Weather Service had warned Alabamians that they were at risk.  He had backed up his contention by altering a NOAA map at an Oval Office press availability as Dorian bore down on the Carolina coast showing its projected path with a Sharpie pen in a crudely amateurish effort to reinforce his lie.   

Lest anyone in government still not get the message, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Mills, easily the most corrupt yes man in Trump's Cabinet, reinforced it. 

Ross, whose department oversees NOAA, threatened to fire the agency's top political appointees because in contradicting the president about Dorian's path, the NWS's Birmingham office staff was, in the words of an administration official quoted by The New York Times, "motivated by a desire to embarrass the president more than concern for the safety of people in Alabama." 

There you have it.  And astonishing until you consider that this was just the latest instance in which an administration heavy did a pretty good imitation of being a henchman for Adolph Hitler or Josef Stalin in accusing government employees merely trying to do their jobs of being the big, bad autocrat's enemies because they didn't toe his line. 

Other instances included Justice Department lawyers who dared contradict the president, environmental scientists who happened to believe that climate change is a very real threat and not a Chinese government hoax, and Postal Service administrators who were loath to punish Trump arch-enemy Jeff Bezos and Amazon by obeying Trump and raising the online giant's shipping rates. 

Pardoning the analogy, but Trump has turned Dorian into the perfect storm, justifying with yet another racist swipe at people of color the U.S.'s refusal to allow refugees fleeing devastation in the Bahamas into the U.S. if they don't already have visas.  This although Bahamians have long been allowed to enter the U.S. without visa if they have a passport. 

"I don't want to allow people that weren't supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States," as Trump callously put it, because they include "some very bad people and very bad gang members." 

As I am now weary of repeatedly writing, as Trump loses his shit with each passing outrage, he further weaponizes his pathologies.  And this folks, is how democracies die. 

Are you paying attention, Nancy Pelosi?

BYE-BYE BOLTON  

Scandals in the Age of Trump tend to be short lived because there always is another one waiting in the wings.  But Trump's firing of John Bolton (who claims he resigned) on Tuesday kind of breaks the mold even as it reinforces the West Wing as being one big revolving door. 

This is because of all the war-mongering neoconservatives to emerge in the run-up to the Iraq war, a fool's errand resulting from the need for the Dubya administration to take down Saddam Hussein even though he didn't have squat to do with the 9/11 attacks, Bolton was the worst of the American Exceptionalism clique.     

As well as the latest big shot who thought he could bend Trump to his will and ended up losing his dignity, a frangible concept in this case. 

Trump had repeatedly mocked Bolton as a warmonger, which is rich, sometimes ticking off the names of countries and joking that Bolton would want to invade them, and said he had axed his third national security adviser because he "disagreed strongly with many of my suggestions." 

Read the president's failed North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela and ISIS containment policies, and most recently his insistence that Russia be allowed to rejoin the G7.  (Have I missed any?)  One of the areas in which Trump and Bolton did agree was pissing on America's staunchest allies. 

There always is the chance that Trump will replace Bolton with someone even more willing to spill the blood of young Americans.   But for the moment, at least, a very dangerous man is out of circulation while an even more dangerous man clings to power.        

Slowly We Turn, Step By Step: The Long, Tragicomic Slog Toward Impeachment

JABIN BOTSFORD / THE WASHINGTON POST

The long, tragicomic slog toward impeaching Donald Trump finally is picking up speed -- which is not to be confused with gaining momentum because the political clock is fast running down -- as the House returns from its summer recess this week and the Judiciary Committee ponders what the parameters of its long-incubating investigation should be. 

Not a day too soon.  

Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors make Richard Nixon's ill deeds of 45 years ago seem almost quaint by comparison, a paranoid piker who tried to cover up a third-rate burglary compared to a narcissist whose malignancy visits destruction on everything he touches, in this case a quaint institution known as American democracy. 

By any reasonable measure, Trump already should have been ridden out of the Oval Office on a rail for his massive corruption, but these are not reasonable times.  And while 21 members of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's own party have bolted in allegiance to Queen and Country over his amateurish attempts to emulate his counterpart in Washington as he strangles on the Gordian knot of Brexit, it is unimaginable that 21 Senate Republicans would do the same over Trump's relentless attack on the values we once held dear.    

God knows Judiciary Chairman Jerrod Nadler and committee Democrats have plenty to choose from as they sketch out a projected four months of hearings to gather evidence to prove Trump is corrupt against a backdrop of lukewarm public support for impeachment. 

While the president's repeated and copiously documented attempts to obstruct justice in trying to shut down the Russia scandal, which revealed hundreds of contacts between Russians and Trump campaign associates, is likely to remain the committee's primary focus, there are the hush money payments Trump directed his then personal lawyer and fixer and now imprisoned Michael Cohen to make in the weeks before the 2016 election to women with whom he had extramarital affairs, and dangling pardons to officials willing to break the law to implement his inhumane immigration policies. 

As well as violations of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause. 

The merging of Trump's official duties and commercial interests is now so frequent that it has become as routine as his tweetstorms, witness the underwhelming response to the latest outrages -- that Vice President Pence stayed at Trump's Doonbeg resort hours away from his meetings in Dublin with Irish officials earlier this month and Air National Guard personnel stayed at the Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland in March when an Air Force plane stopped at a nearby airport to refuel at considerable expense on the way to Kuwait from the U.S. rather than at one of the military bases where it typically would lay over and taxpayer-funded fuel was cheaper. 

The New York Times further reports that since Trump became president, there have been thousands of visits to his properties, not only by Trump himself, but by foreign leaders, lobbyists, Republican candidates, members of Congress, cabinet members and others with ties to the president.  At least 90 members of Congress, 250 Trump administration officials and more than 110 foreign officials have been spotted at Trump properties since 2017, according to social media posts and counts by various watchdog groups. 

Meanwhile, five other congressional committees have been chipping away at other potentially impeachable acts, including getting Trump's tax returns, financial records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One, and his bizarrely secret interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who of course had much to do with him being president in the first place.  

In early August, with more than half of the 235 House Democrats on record as favoring impeachment, Nadler publicly declared that his committee had already launched impeachment proceedings although the full House has not voted to do so and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, fearful of a backlash from the sheep grazing in their home district pastures, has stopped short of endorsing impeachment because it would be disruptive.  As opposed to Trump being disruptive.  Or something 

Nadler's claim sparked confusion, even if it was made to convince judges presiding over the deluge of litigation filed by the White House in defiance of congressional summonses of the urgency of providing Democrats with the substantial evidence they have been seeking but on-the-run Trump has tried to block at every turn. 

There are precedents for launching impeachment proceedings without a formal vote. 

In 1973, the Democrat-led Judiciary Committee did just that, putting in place staff to prepare for the possibility of impeachment following the "Saturday Night Massacre" when Nixon axed several Justice Department officials for refusing to fire the special counsel investigating his administration in the wake of the Watergate burglary and cover-up.  In 1998, the Republican-led Judiciary Committee did much the same in its perjury and obstruction of justice inquiry involving Bill Clinton stemming from the sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Paula Jones. 

As I have written, Trump is one truly sick dude, and his deterioration has been accelerating, witness Sharpiegate, which is outlasting the hurricane that prompted his latest buffoonish effort to cover his big ass.  

It can be argued that the proverbial banana peel that will bring Trump down is lurking around the next corner.  Or perhaps the corner after that.  And it also can be argued that Trump has never stood on his own, suckling on his father's fortune as a young businessman, then relying on dirty tactics, laundered money from Russian oligarchs and mobsters and carpet bombs of lies to survive.  Indeed, he may already have gone down, but is being propped up by the likes of Mick Mulvaney, Mitch "Moscow Mitch" McConnell, the NRA and Fox News.  

What is especially disturbing about all this is that Trump keeps finding new ways to weaponize his psychoses while Nadler, Pelosi and the still-large field of Democratic presidential wannabes chase their tails instead of Trump's. 

Yes, Trump is likely to lose in 2020, but impeachment just may be the banana peel we've been hoping and praying for. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

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The Sharpie Pen Presidency. Or Why Donald Trump Cannot Win Reelection.

ERIN SCHAFF / THE NEW YRK TIMES

After an August during which Donald "Chosen One" Trump did nothing of positive consequence while taking his foul-mouthed Twitter rages and temper tantrums, trade warring, bizarre policy pronouncements and manifest craziness to dizzying new heights, a huge question looms that is inextricably linked to his reelection chances: Can Trump, already deeply unpopular, win a second term if he can't modify his behavior? 

Even with the election 14 months out, it is a hugely consequential question.  And the answer is that because Trump is pathologically incapable of modifying his behavior, which has grown even worse as his presidency lumbers through its third year, he cannot win reelection. 

These are the facts, such as they are:

Political nihilism in the form of the chaos for which Trump's vaunted "base" supports him may hold that 35 percent of the electorate together and was a dark force that did much to propel him to the White House in 2016.  But it is incapable of attracting new adherents in meaningful numbers in 2020. 

As poll after poll shows, the remaining 65 percent of the electorate is determinedly anti-Trump, a reflection of his historically low approval ratings.  A substantial majority of Democrats and Independents say that they will not vote for him no matter who the Democratic nominee is. 

Trump is on the wrong side of the issues that matter to that 65 percent.  These include gutting health-care reforms, environmental rollbacks, climate change denial, refusing to back gun control measures, bullying America's allies and fawning over autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. 

Not even a robust economy can save Trump, and virtually every economic indicator shows that the U.S. is sliding into a recession.  The biggest reason is that the manufacturing sector -- and his jobs-creation promises helped him carry key states in 2016 -- is contracting because of his trade war with China.    

Beyond Trump's own malignant narcissism, the biggest reason he is incapable of curbing his own destructive behavior -- which in turn has visited a nightmare upon America for which there is no precedent -- is that he has spent his first 1,000 days in office sacking anyone who would dare tell him the truth.   

Nearly 50 advisors, Cabinet officials and other key administration officials have departed as Trump spends less time working, with him an always malleable concept, and more time playing golf, a jaw-dropping 226 days in all.  Eight months after he named Mick Mulvaney as his third chief of staff, he has so little confidence in him that he has not removed the title of "acting."  

In the latest mindblower, Trump on Wednesday displayed a large map in the Oval Office of Hurricane Dorian's path modified with a line drawn with a black Sharpie pen (which he uses to sign bills and official decrees) to doctor the bubble and extend the storm's possible path into Alabama in a pathetically transparent effort to bolster his tweeted claim on Sunday that the state "will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated." 

Alabama had never been in jeopardy, and Trump's pathetically clumsy effort to yet again cover his capacious ass was countered by the Alabama office of the National Weather Service, which quickly responded to Trump's claim by insisting that "Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian." 

Asked about the marking on the map, Trump told reporters that he did not know how it got there. 

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know," he stammered while insisting that his assertion about the dangers that Alabama faced had been right all along.  "They actually gave that a 95 percent chance probability," he added, although neither the Weather Service or Federal Office of Emergency Preparedness reported any threat to the state.  On Thursday, Trump doubled down on his claim as Dorian lashed the Carolinas.   

While it is impressive that Trump was able to locate Alabama, it boggles what is left of our minds that he thought nobody would notice that the map had been altered to make him look right.   Even by Trump's standard of cheap lies, this one was a Category Five. 

If there is a mystery in all of this, it is why Democrats -- and the presidential wannabes in particular -- are remaining so quiet.   

It would be comforting to think that they don't want to interfere with Trump while he implodes on his own.  But that is giving them too much credit.  A better explanation is that they're more interested in beating up on each other. 

Big mistake.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

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Why Was Comey Rebuked For Revealing Trump's Russia Scandal Obstructions?

MARK PETERSON / THE NEW YORKER

What with Hurricane Dorian barreling toward the U.S., yet another mass shooting and the kickoff of the college football season, you probably missed the Department of Justice inspector general's new report on former FBI Director James Comey's leaked memos on his . . . uh, interactions with Donald Trump.  Or like many people, you have reached your Russia scandal exhaustion limit. 

Too bad, because as impartial as IG Michael Horowitz has been in general regarding Comey's sometimes problematic conduct, hidden in the report is a bombshell conclusion fitting for these tortured times in an Orwellian sort of way -- that a witness, in this instance a federal law enforcement officer, to gross misconduct by the president of the United States has a duty to keep his mouth shut. 

This is the second time Comey has been in Horowitz's crosshairs.   

The triggers in both instances were, lest we need reminding, a vengeful president and compliant Republican congressional helpmates who have gone to extraodinary lengths to try to curtail investigations into Russia's interference in the 2016 election and Trump's complicity in that assault on the bedrock of American democracy.  

The first was a 500-page report released in June 2018 on Comey's handling -- or mishandling, if you will -- of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, including Comey's outrageous announcement 11 days before the election that the FBI had reopened its investigation into the emails after having more or less exonerated Clinton months earlier. 

The revelation, combined with Russia's collaboration with WikiLeaks on hacked Democratic emails and the Kremlin's wickedly successful social media disinformation campaign in key swing states, handed Trump an Electoral College victory over Clinton, the onetime runaway favorite to clobber the billionaire reality TV star.   

The June 2018 report concluded that Comey was "insubordinate" in his handling of the Clinton email investigation but did not challenge Comey's decision to not prosecute Clinton and found that decision was not a result of political bias.  It was a somewhat hollow victory for the headstrong Comey and a loss for Trump, who had wanted the scalps of both Comey and Clinton.  

The long-anticipated second report, a mere 62 pages and released by Horowitz last Thursday, merely fleshes out what has been long known about seven memos Comey had written on his interactions with Trump, including Trump's unsuccessful efforts to strong arm him into going easy on Michael Flynn, Trump's short-lived national security advisor, and announce that Trump himself was not under investigation as the FBI was digging deeper into the Trump campaign's interactions with Russians. 

(For details of the memos, see the entries for January 6 and 27, February 8 and 14, March 30 and April 11, 2017 on my Russia scandal timeline.)  

Comey had leaked his notes on the memos to The New York Times through a third party after his May 2017 firing, infuriating Trump, who repeatedly claimed that they contained classified information, an allegation he had repeatedly if falsely made of the Clinton emails during his "Lock Her Up!" campaign rally rants.    

Horowitz concluded that Comey violated FBI policy by failing to turn over the memos after Trump fired him and later leaking details of them to The Times, although the Justice Department will not prosecute Comey for again doing things his way.  Most importantly, the report again put the lie to Trump and the Russia Hoax/Deep State Conspiracy mob that the memos contained classified information. 

The IG found "no evidence" that the memos contained classified information, which silenced neither the president or his sycophancy, who continue to scream with breathtaking dishonesty that they did. 

You have to dig down through several layers of Horowitz's report to find what is so jaw-dropping. 

Comey did not consider these memos to be FBI records but personal ones to aid his own memory.   So in addition to keeping copies at the bureau, where he shared them with close advisers, he stored them in his personal safe at home. 

Yet Horowitz determined that although Comey broke no laws in his whistleblowing, it is misconduct for a federal law enforcement officer to publicly disclose gross misconduct even if it is an effort by the president to shut down an investigation into his own conduct. 

It should be emphasized that Horowitz is that rarest of Justice Department officials in the Age of Trump who has not bowed completely to the president's above-the-law agenda as has the attorney general, Trump lawn ornament William Barr, whose signal achievement has been his whitewash of the Mueller report.  Then again, Horowitz was appointed by Barack Obama. 

Nevertheless, Horowitz views Comey's personal possession and leaking of his memos   with alarm although virtually everything in them already had been revealed through news media stories and they portrayed a president desperate to cover up his misconduct. Horowitz's alarm should, in turn, alarm anyone who values the right of a fed to blow the whistle on attempts to cover up illegal behavior, especially when it involves the chief executive. 

As Benjamin Wittes writes at Lawfare:

And there it is: the inspector general of the United States Department of Justice taking the position that a witness to gross misconduct by the president of the United States has a duty to keep his mouth shut about what he saw.  Remember, after all, that Comey was a witness here as well as the former FBI director. That's an extraordinary position for a law enforcement organization to take. 

The full outlines of the Russia scandal -- as the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller reveals -- are enormous.   

The report states that Trump and 18 of his associates had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, there are at least 10 instances when Trump tried to obstruct justice, most prominent his sacking of Comey, and that his unceasing scheming to end the investigation Mueller inherited from Comey was driven by his belief that the intelligence community's conclusive determination of Russian interference threatened the legitimacy of his election. 

To which we add, of course, that Mueller did not call for criminal charges against Trump because of a questionable Justice ruling that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

"James Comey is in the habit of departing from established rules and procedures when he believes unique circumstances and his own sense of his own rectitude require it," as Josh Marshall puts it at Talking Points Memo.  "We know from his actions at the end of October 2016 that this can lead to outcomes which are both substantively and procedurally catastrophic." 

Yet in the instance of his leaked memos, the ever complex Comey did us and the cause of justice a big favor.  The Horowitz report is a mere footnote to the Russia scandal, but its criticism of the former FBI director's actions are troubling.   

Comey did the right thing.  Horowitz did not. 

Does America Merely Need A Return To Normalcy After 2020 Or Much More?

VANITY FAIR

You gotta say this about Joe Biden: Beyond the never ending cavalcade of gaffes ("poor kids" being just as smart as "white kids" was a masterpiece of tone deafness, even by his standards) and proclivity for not knowing when to shut up (his scrambled, oft-told and mostly false story of traveling to Afghanistan to award a Silver Star to a Navy captain), his greatest strength is that he was Barack Obama's vice president and those eight long-ago years seem like a golden era of normalcy compared to the nightmare that Donald Trump has visited on the Republic.   

Can Biden beat Trump in 2020 by promising a return to normalcy?  Perhaps, but shouldn't we expect more from the next president? 

Yes, we should. 

Still, there is undeniable appeal to putting bold policy initiatives on the back burner in trying to assure that Trump is thrashed.   

Trump's approval ratings are tanking badly in his must-win states, he trails Biden and other Democratic frontrunners in head-to-head polls, his intransigence at home and on the world stage has turned America from a global leader into a laughing stock, and he now faces a primary challenge from fellow head case and onetime Tea Party darling Joe Walsh, who similarly appeals to the worst instincts and ugliest sentiments in America.

Alas, Walsh is an ankle biter who will be dispatched in the primaries or paid off first, and anything less than an overwhelming Democratic victory next November guarantees that the president will claim that the election was stolen from him (and he still might do that anyway).  So a vote for normalcy is a blow to Trump's solar plexus, or something. 

Writes Frank Bruni in The New York Times:

I wouldn't be surprised if voters consciously or subconsciously conclude that they just can't continue to live like this and that four more years would be ruinous, if not to the country as a whole, then to our individual psyches.  By the time Election Day rolls around, they may crave nothing more electric than stability and serenity.  That wouldn't be a bad Democratic bumper sticker. It's essentially the message of Biden's campaign.

Then there is Esquire's Charles Pierce:

People just want things to get back to normal again.  They want a president who isn't manifestly unqualified and clearly half-mad.  They want their Twitter accounts to go back to featuring dogs and cute pictures of the grandkids.  They want a Congress that can work smoothly enough so that they can go back to ignoring it again. In fact, they'd like a government that can work smoothly enough so that they can go back to ignoring it again. 

It is a testament to how distorted politics have become in the Age of Trump that Obama's tenure, which at the time was left-liberal by almost any standard and included transformative policy initiatives on health-care, the environment and strong medicine for pulling the U.S. out of the Bush recession, is now being hailed as a model of normalcy. That is inaccurate, of course, although those eight years were an oasis of calm in comparison to Trump's daily gyrations amidst his ongoing mental deterioration. 

Meanwhile, people still fighting the last war, many of them Democrats with a white male fetish, cite Elizabeth Warren as being Hillary 2.0 -- over prepared with mountains of policy plans and too much liberal baggage -- in arguing that Joe Normal is the candidate most able to beat Trump.    

Possibly true, but Warren at this stage is the best nominee and Biden is a throwback who neither represents the future of the Democratic Party nor is the kind of leader America needs to not just begin to repair Trump's excesses but to boldly move beyond Obamacare toward a single-payer system, think really big on infrastructure and deal with the migrant crisis, not dither over it as did Obama-Biden, as well as other formidable challenges.

The Democrats' path to taking back the White House and possibly the Senate, as well, runs straight through the suburbs.   

When the election is viewed in that context, change handily wins out over normalcy and Warren becomes even more attractive because of her appeal to women and nonwhite voters, while Biden seems even more like that guy you might enjoy having a beer with but not a whole lot else. 

Biden, in fact, will be a president you can forget about, which is exactly what America does not need if it is to not merely replace Trump but move beyond him. 

VIOLENCE IN THE NAME OF TRUMP 

Dozens of attacks or threats involving Trump's supporters have been reported since he announced his candidacy in June 2015. 

The Guardian has compiled details of 52 of the incidents, which most recently include a Trump supporter putting a photojournalist in a chokehold and punching him in the face while shouting "Fake news!  Trump 2020!" and a Trump supporter threatening to kill Representative Rashida Tlaib and other Democratic members of the House.   

It makes for chilling reading. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

The Unrelenting March Of 'Coincidences' In Jeffrey Epstein's Mysterious Death

RICK FREIDMAN / CORBIS-GETTY IMAGES

Add unusable blurry images from at least one of the video surveillance cameras in the hallway outside of politically-connected sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein's prison cell to the march of "coincidences" surrounding his mysterious suicide. 

That footage is too flawed for investigators from the Justice Department and FBI to use although other, clearer footage was captured by other cameras in the area, according to The Washington Post. 

The revelation is yet another "coincidence" that magnifies the many troubling questions swirling around Epstein and his coterie of rich, famous and powerful friends, and suggest that really important people wanted him dead because of the tales he might tell about them.    

Among the other "coincidences" flowing from Epstein's August 10 death -- or more likely an assisted suicide of a sort -- at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan are that:

He had been taken off a suicide watch despite a July 23 hanging attempt and returned to the prison's segregated housing unit. 

At least eight Bureau of Prisons officials knew there was an order that he was not be left alone in his cell and ignored it.  

He was indeed left alone after his cellmate was moved elsewhere on August 9. 

His guards slept while he apparently hanged himself with a bedsheet tied to a bunk bed early the following morning. 

His guards reportedly failed to make the required 30-minute check-ins on him. 

Prison logs were doctored to cover up the required checks. 

The big question, of course, is who conspired to pull the strings necessary to facilitate the 66-year-old Epstein taking his life. 

At this relatively early stage two and a half weeks after Epstein's death, we know of only some of the strings in the form of those "coincidences," but are likely to learn more because the conspiracy surrounding his death involves not a small handful of people who might keep the deepest of secrets, but a relatively large number of people inside and out of the prison.  

Epstein had been held without bail since his rearrest on July 6 and was awaiting what was going to be the latest trial of the century on sex trafficking charges that could have led to a prison sentence of as much as 45 years, as well as possibly implicate others in his serial schemes to lure women as young as 14 into sexual servitude. 

Meanwhile, some of Epstein's victims appeared before U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan on Tuesday to describe how they were coerced and abused -- and in the end were denied justice because of his death. 

Chauntae Davies was among the 16 women who testified, six of them anonymously as "Jane Does." 

Davies, who says she was recruited to be a masseuse for Epstein, graphically described being raped by him over a period of several years, and how, in his death, she felt a sense of loss. 

"It took me a long time to come forward," Davies said.  "Every public humiliation that I endured, I have suffered and he has won." 

But Davies later said she refused to let that sentiment linger. 

"I have found my voice now," she said.  "I will not stop fighting." 

The sex-trafficking charges are expected to be dropped by Berman at the request of prosecutors.  But instead of issuing a simple written order to that effect, in a somewhat unusual move the judge had asked prosecutors and defense lawyers to appear in court, saying that they and those who say Epstein abused them can "be heard, if they wish to be." 

Beyond the victims' moment of catharsis, charges still could be filed against Epstein's helpmates, notably British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who is widely considered to have been his procuress and was called out by several victims at the hearing.  Complicating matters is that the will Epstein signed just two days before his death puts more than $577 million in assets into a trust fund that could make it more difficult for his victims to collect damages.

In another development, The New York Times reported that in 1996, Marie Farmer, then 25, had contacted the New York Police Department and FBI to report that Epstein had had offered to help her painting career after she moved to New York, but that came to an abrupt end when she said Epstein and Maxwell began violently groping her. 

Marie Farmer described for Times' reporter Mike Baker Epstein's odd lifestyle, which she said included girls and young women coming through his Manhattan mansion for modeling auditions for Victoria’s Secret.   

Epstein is said to have long exerted a Svengali-like influence over Les Wexner, CEO of Victoria's Secret.  Wexner has belatedly accused him of misappropriating "vast sums of money" from he and his family.  

"The house at times bustled in anticipation of potential visits from Bill Clinton, although she never actually saw him there," wrote Baker.  "She said she met Donald J. Trump one day in Mr. Epstein's office, recalling Mr. Trump eyeing her before Mr. Epstein informed him that 'she’s not for you.' " 

Marie Farmer said she learned later that her 16-year-old sister, Annie Farmer, had been subjected to a troubling topless massage at Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, where he is said to have wanted to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women in an unrealized scheme. 

Although the bureau has never acknowledged Marie Farmer's complaint, she said the FBI must have had a record of it because agents came back to her -- years later -- with questions.  She said also went to leaders in the New York art world that Epstein and Maxwell frequented, and the sisters tried to tell their story to a national magazine.   

In each case, their reports went nowhere.