Category: MikePompeo

Gordon Sondland sues government, Mike Pompeo for impeachment-related legal fees

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

Remember when it was conclusively proven that Donald Trump did a crime? No, not that one, the other one. No, between those two. We're talking about the confirmation, by multiple witnesses called before the House to testify on presidential acts, that Donald Trump slow-walked both military and diplomatic aid to Ukraine, which was fighting off a Russia-backed insurrection after Russian troops invaded and proclaimed ownership of Crimea, because Donald Trump was demanding the Ukrainian government do him specific favors to aid his upcoming campaign.

In a move eerily similar to the Trump campaign's 2016 dalliances with Russian espionage and propaganda campaigns, this time it was Rudy Giuliani, not Paul Manafort, who acted as courier looking to boost the effectiveness of Russian disinformation campaigns looking to damage Trump's most-feared Democratic election opponent. Pro-Russian Ukrainians laundered anti-Biden materials through Giuliani, who broadcast even the weirdest and most ridiculous ones (Secret servers! Russia was unfairly blamed for 2016 election hacking when actually it was Democrats hacking themselves the whole time!) into Donald Trump's own incomprehensibly hollow head; Donald Trump then insisted that Ukrainian government officials announce that they were investigating these very stupid claims, lending them official credence, in exchange for Trump (1) meeting with the Ukrainian president as show of support for the nation's battle against Russian occupation and (2) agreeing to release his hold on congressionally mandated military aid that Trump and his top officials had no legal authority to block in the first place.

During House impeachment investigations, Trump ally, donor, and ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified through only a little flopsweat that yes, there was a "quid pro quo" demand from the White House that the Ukrainian government promote the Trump-backed anti-Biden hoax before Trump would agree to meet with the Ukrainian president—a clear abuse of governmental powers to gain something of value to Trump personally. Sondland was one of the few pro-Trump witnesses to even agree to appear before Congress; other key witnesses to the events, including William Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, refused to testify or to produce subpoenaed documents.

Trump and his allies faced no repercussions, however. Senate Republicans near-unanimously refused to hear testimony or evidence in the resulting impeachment trial, because they are corrupt. Only days after those Republicans dismissed the impeachment trial against Trump, Trump fired Sondland and other witnesses who testified to his actions, beginning a large-scale purge of any government officials deemed to be unwilling to cover up future Trump corruption. It was a fascist act from a fascist administration backed, then and now, by a fascist party.

Trump once-ally Gordon Sondland is now suing both the U.S. government and Mike Pompeo. His claim? That Pompeo assured him that the U.S. State Department would cover the legal expenses he incurred in preparing for his congressional testimony, back when Pompeo (himself hiding from Congress) and other Trump allies still believed Sondland would refuse to acknowledge Trump's extortive would-be deal. When he came back from testifying, however, Pompeo demanded his immediate resignation, Trump fired him after he refused to give it, and Pompeo's State Department stiffed him, leaving him with $1.8 million in legal bills.

Or, in other words, the same thing happened to him that has happened to everyone else who ever tried to attach themselves to Trump. Who would have thunk it.

Pompeo, for his part, is scoffing at the lawsuit. Democrats have for some reason declined to enforce Pompeo's testimony now that Pompeo no longer has the whole of Trump's government stonewalling that testimony on his behalf, and Pompeo is currently preparing to jet off to Israel to attend a party honoring an Israeli intelligence official and, presumably, commit another crime or two while he has the chance. He remains of the belief that he is still a force to be reckoned with in Republican politics, despite being made to look like a chump throughout Trump's incompetent reign and despite newer-generation fascist blowhards like Ron DeSantis running circles around him when it comes to kissing Trump's ass and getting Americans pointlessly killed.

Will Sondland get his money back? Who knows. Not from Pompeo, that's for sure. We'll see whether the new Biden administration decides that a Pompeo promise ought to be honored even when Pompeo himself never intended to do so, or whether maybe all involved believe that if you staked nearly $2 million on a promise from Trump's crooked inner circle than maybe that's your problem and not ours.

Morning Digest: Expected delay in census data release could wreak havoc with redistricting timelines

Posted on by Daily Kos Elections

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● 2020 Census, Redistricting: On Wednesday, the Census Bureau revealed that the state-level population data from the 2020 census that is needed to determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state receives is not expected to be released until April 30, four months after the original deadline. This delay is the result of pandemic-related disruption to census operations last year and Donald Trump's so far unsuccessful attempt to manipulate census data for his own partisan ends.

Additionally, the census also announced that the more granular population data needed for states to actually draw new districts won't be released until at least after July 30, which is also a delay of at least four months from the original March 31 deadline. Consequently, these delays will create major disruptions for the upcoming 2020 round of congressional and legislative redistricting.

New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice released an in-depth report in 2020 looking at which states have deadlines that are in conflict with a potentially delayed data release schedule and what the impact of a delay may be. The most directly affected states are New Jersey and Virginia, which are the only two states that are set to hold legislative elections statewide in 2021 and would normally redraw all of their legislative districts this year.

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However, New Jersey Democrats passed a constitutional amendment in 2020 that will require legislative redistricting be delayed until the 2023 state elections if the census doesn't provide the necessary data by Feb. 15, 2021, which is now virtually guaranteed. In Virginia, primary elections are currently planned for June 8, but if redistricting data isn't released until August, it would be practically impossible to conduct redistricting, hold delayed candidate filing, and hold a delayed primary with enough time before November, meaning that the current legislative districts drawn in 2011 would likely remain in place for November's elections.

The situation isn't much better for several other states that have constitutionally mandated redistricting deadlines set to kick in this summer before they could feasibly draw new districts if data isn't released until late summer. Every state constitution requires a lengthy process for amendments that includes a required voter referendum, passage in multiple years, or both, and it's thus too late to amend these constitutions to alter those deadlines this year, increasing the likelihood of litigation over failure to meet key deadlines.

One major state in particular that could be thrown into turmoil due to a delayed release of census data is Illinois, whose constitution sets a deadline of June 30 for passing new legislative districts following a census year. If legislators fail to adopt new districts by the June 30 deadline, legislators would cede control over legislative redistricting to a bipartisan backup commission where the tiebreaking member is chosen in a 50-50 game of chance between the two parties. Democrats currently hold the legislature and have been expected to have total control over redistricting, but if the process reverts to the backup commission, Republicans would have even odds of controlling legislative redistricting in this blue state.

However in the case of Illinois, the situation pivotally would depend on which year would be categorized as the census year. Normally, that would be a year ending in zero—i.e. 2020—but the Brennan Center details how Illinois leaves open the possibility for 2021 to instead be considered the census year, which would give lawmakers until June 30, 2022 to draw new legislative districts (congressional redistricting does not use the same timeline or process as legislative redistricting). It's unclear how such a determination of the census year is made, and litigation over it is a strong possibility.

Meanwhile, nearly every state has different procedures and timelines for congressional redistricting than they do for legislative redistricting, and the delayed release of census data will be less disruptive nationally at the congressional level than it may be for state legislatures.

Senate

● FL-Sen: Oh, vom. Politico reports that former Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson is making calls about a possible challenge to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, and when asked about it, Grayson's only response was, "Repeal Rubio. That's all I have to say." Anyone but Grayson—that's all we have to say.

● KS-Sen: Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who last month did not rule out a bid for governor next year, just accepted a position at a conservative think tank in D.C., which is not the kind of gig you usually take if you're planning to run for office in your home state. It's certainly not impossible, though—we've seen politicians do brief stints as Washington lobbyists before staging comebacks—so don't count Pompeo out just yet.

● OH-Sen: Team Blue is hoping that Republican Sen. Rob Portman's surprise retirement will give them a better shot at prevailing in a state that has been trending the wrong way, and more Democrats are publicly and privately discussing running. One familiar name who told CNN he was considering the contest is Franklin County Recorder Danny O'Connor, who lost two close 2018 races in the conservative 12th Congressional District against Republican Troy Balderson.

State House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes, who would be the state's first Black senator, also said she was thinking about entering the Senate race. Sykes previously expressed interest last month in campaigning to succeed cabinet nominee Rep. Marcia Fudge, if there's a special election for the safely blue 11th District, and it's not clear if she's also considering running there.

Cleveland.com's Seth Richardson also relays that former state health director Amy Acton is considering running as a Democrat, though she hasn't said anything publicly. Acton attracted state and national attention during the opening months of the coronavirus crisis through her prominent place at Republican Gov. Mike DeWine's afternoon briefings, and Richardson writes that she impressed many through her "her frank discussion of the dangers of coronavirus and the need for mitigation." Acton, who was also the target of conservative attempts to undermine her, as well as antisemitic attacks, stepped down in June.

On the GOP side, 2018 nominee Jim Renacci said Tuesday he was interested in another Senate bid and would "be exploring my options to reenter public office over the next 60 days." Renacci, who previously served four terms in Congress, has spent the last several months talking about challenging DeWine for renomination in part over the governor's efforts to limit the spread of the pandemic. Republicans who remember his 53-47 loss to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, though, probably won't want him as their standard bearer for either race.

State GOP chair Jane Timken also confirmed Wednesday that she was "seriously considering" a Senate run. Timken, who won her post in early 2017 by unseating an incumbent with the Trump campaign's support, is also part of a prominent donor family in state party politics.

Two other Republicans who had shown some interest in getting in, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and former Rep. Pat Tiberi, each said Wednesday that they wouldn't enter the race. Several unnamed Republicans also suggested to Cleveland.com's Andrew Tobias that others could stay out should Rep. Jim Jordan, a key Trump sycophant, get in, including 2012 nominee Josh Mandel. However, some unnamed observers pointed out that Jordan has talked about running statewide but never done it, and they predict that 2022 will be no different.

● VT-Sen: Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who was hospitalized for a few hours on Tuesday after suffering what he described as muscle spasms, said on Wednesday that "of course" he'll continue to serve out the rest of his term but said he wouldn't make a decision about whether to seek a ninth term until the end of the year.

"You all know this, I never make up my mind until November or December the year before and I'm not going to now," said the 80-year-old Leahy. "Usually when we start skiing and snowshoeing then we talk about it." Leahy, who is currently the longest-serving member of the Senate, sounded ready to run again, saying "the latest polls show me winning easily."

● Retirement Watch: With Ohio Sen. Rob Portman's surprise announcement on Monday making him the third GOP senator to retire so far in this young election cycle, Republicans are nervously waiting to see how many more of their brethren might also call it quits. Among those on the watch list:

AL-Sen: Richard Shelby is 86 and has been in office since 1987. After last year's elections, Shelby promised a decision by January, but now he tells Roll Call's Bridget Bowman that he won't say anything more until after Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, which will not begin until Feb. 8. When asked about his plans this week by CNN, Shelby would only say, "I'll let you know." Bowman says the senator "is not expected to run for reelection."

AR-Sen: John Boozman, 70, said a year ago that he’s planning to run for a third term, and he repeated that intention this week to CNN. However, the senator has experienced some health problems that required heart surgery in 2014 and again in 2017, and he hasn’t yet announced a re-election bid.

IA-Sen: 87-year-old Chuck Grassley, who was first elected in 1980, said in February of last year that he'd come to a decision eight to 12 months before Election Day 2022, though now he seems to have moved his timetable up. In new remarks, he says he'll make an announcement in "several months." If Grassley were to run and win again, he'd be 95 years old at the end of what would be his eighth term.

ID-Sen: Mike Crapo, 69, also told CNN he plans to run for a fifth term but likewise hasn’t actually kicked off a campaign. He was treated for prostate cancer in 2000 and 2005.

MO-Sen: A spokesperson for Roy Blunt, 71, said in November that the senator would seek a third term, but now he's sounding less definitive. Blunt told Roll Call's Bowman that he's "planning on reelection, but I haven't made a final statement on that yet." In separate remarks about his plans to Politico, Blunt said, "I really have not been thinking much about it to tell you the truth. ... I keep thinking there will be a little breathing space, so far it’s not happening."

SD-Sen: John Thune, whose 60 years of age put him just below the senatorial average of 63, would only tell CNN that he'll make an announcement about a fourth term "at some point in the future." Trump exhorted Republicans to primary Thune late last year after the senator said that efforts to overturn the Electoral College "would go down like a shot dog."

WI-Sen: Ron Johnson, 65, pledged prior to his last election in 2016 that he would only serve one more term if he won, but now he's contemplating going back on his word. However, he still hasn't made up his mind about whether to break his promise and run for a third term, saying, "I don't think I have to for a while."

CNN also notes that Kansas’ Jerry Moran and South Dakota’s John Hoeven have not launched re-election bids yet, but both are in their mid-60s—relatively young by Senate standards—and joined the Senate in 2011.

Governors

● CA-Gov: Tech billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya has announced that he'll run to replace Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in the event a recall election moves forward, though he didn't specify which party banner, if any, he'd fly. Palihapitiya has given $1.3 million to Democratic candidates and causes over the last decade, along with one $5,000 donation to Ted Cruz in 2011.

● MD-Gov: Unnamed advisers to Baltimore County Executive John Olszewski, who previously did not rule out a run for governor, say Olszewski is now considering a bid for the Democratic nomination. Another Democrat, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball, is also not ruling out the race, according to Maryland Matters. Meanwhile, 2018 Democratic nominee Ben Jealous, who last year said he had not "closed the door on running for governor again," is staying involved in Maryland politics by taking the helm of a new marijuana reform initiative.

● SC-Gov: 2018 candidate John Warren recently refused to rule out a second GOP primary bid against incumbent Henry McMaster, and The State’s Maayan Schechter reports that he might not be the only Republican looking at this race.

Schechter writes that there’s “buzz” that state Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey could challenge the governor, and that he would not comment for her story. Massey has been a loud critic of McMaster’s response to the pandemic: Last month, Massey was one of several Republicans to prepare bills that would give legislators the final say over emergency orders.

Catherine Templeton, who also ran in 2018, said back in August that she was likely to run, though we haven’t heard anything from her since then. A runoff would take place if no one wins a majority in the first round of the primary, so McMaster couldn’t slip by with a plurality.

South Carolina has been a very tough state for Democrats especially in recent years, but a few local politicians have shown some interest in running. Former Rep. Joe Cunningham told Schechter he would consider his future "[o]ver the next few months.” Cunningham also expressed interest last year in seeking a rematch with Republican Nancy Mace, who narrowly unseated him in November, though redistricting could make that contest less attractive.

Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, who would be the state’s first Black governor, has also been mentioned as a prospective candidate for years, and he once again did not rule it out when asked. Benjamin and McMaster faced off in the open 2002 race for attorney general, a race McMaster won 55-44. Benjamin is up for re-election this year, and he hasn’t said if he’ll seek a fourth term.

State Sens. Marlon Kimpson and Mia McLeod also said they were thinking about a gubernatorial bid as did 2018 contender Marguerite Willis, an attorney who lost that year’s primary to James Smith 62-28. Schechter also lists former state Rep. Mandy Powers Norrell, who was Smith’s candidate for lieutenant governor, as considering, though there’s no quote from her.

● VA-Gov: A second rich dude, former private equity executive Glenn Youngkin, has entered Virginia's Republican primary for governor, just days after another finance guy, Pete Snyder, did the same. Snyder, by the way, has already released a TV ad, which the National Journal says is backed by a $250,000 buy, complaining about the slow pace of reopening schools and calling himself a "disruptor." It's not clear who he's trying to reach with this sort of advertisement, though, given that the GOP nomination will be decided by, at most, just a few thousand delegates at the party's May 1 convention.

House

● CA-21: Former Fresno City Councilman Chris Mathys, who was last seen taking a distant third in the GOP primary for New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District last year, has announced a challenge to Rep. David Valadao, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump earlier this month. Fresno isn't located in California's 21st Congressional District either, though it is closer than New Mexico.

● CA-39: Democrat Jay Chen, a Navy Reserve officer and local community college trustee, has announced a bid against freshman Republican Rep. Young Kim. Chen previously ran for California's 39th Congressional District in 2012, losing 58-42 to Republican Rep. Ed Royce, though the area was considerably redder back then: That same year, Mitt Romney carried the district 51-47, while in 2020, Joe Biden won it 54-44.

Chen also briefly ran here in 2018 after Royce retired, but to help avoid a disaster in the top-two primary, he took one for the team and dropped out in order to reduce the number of Democratic candidates and, thereby, the chance that a fractured voted would allow two Republicans to advance to the general election.

● PA-07: Republican Lisa Scheller, who lost to Democratic Rep. Susan Wild 52-48 last year in Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District, has filed paperwork with the FEC in anticipation of another congressional bid, though it's not clear exactly where she might run. Redistricting is set to scramble Pennsylvania's map, and mindful of that, Scheller changed the name of her campaign committee from "Scheller for PA-07" to "Scheller for Congress, Inc." (no, we don't know why she thinks she's running a corporation). She's promised "a more formal announcement" about her plans over the summer.

● PA-10: Politico reports that, according to an unnamed source, the DCCC is trying to recruit 2020 nominee Eugene DePasquale for another go at Republican Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania's 10th District. DePasquale, whose press list has understandably been largely dormant since November, recently put out a statement calling on his former opponent to resign after the New York Times reported that he played a central role in trying to overturn last year's presidential election.

Perry, the Times said, introduced Donald Trump to a Justice Department attorney who proposed ousting acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and directing the DOJ to pressure Georgia officials into altering their state's results. The congressman later confirmed the report. DePasquale wound up losing to Perry by a 53-47 margin last year but he insisted to Politico that the surge in Republican enthusiasm generated by Trump's presence on the ballot "will not be in play in 2022."

Legislatures

● Special Elections: Here's a recap of Tuesday's special election in Iowa:

IA-SD-41: Republican Adrian Dickey defeated Democrat Mary Stewart 55-45 to hold this seat for the GOP. An unusual complicating factor arose on Election Day when a major snowstorm hit southeastern Iowa, and Democrats were reportedly leading in mail ballots heading into Tuesday. This was enough to make Dickey himself nervous about the final outcome, but the red tilt of this district was enough for him to prevail.

While Stewart did worse than in her first bid for this seat, a 52-48 loss to Mariannette Miller-Meeks in 2018, she was able to once again improve upon Hillary Clinton's 57-38 loss here in 2016.  

This chamber moves to a 32-18 advantage for Republicans with no other vacancies.

Mayors

● Detroit, MI Mayor: Incumbent Mike Duggan got his first notable opponent for the August nonpartisan primary on Tuesday when Anthony Adams, who served as deputy mayor in former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's administration, launched his campaign.

Adams, who is also a former school board president, argued that “there is a dramatic need for mayoral change in the city of Detroit." Adams also played down his ties to Kilpatrick, who resigned in disgrace in 2008, saying, "I am my own man and I'm running on my own record." Kilpatrick, who was later sentenced to 28 years in prison for corruption, was in the news last week after Donald Trump commuted his punishment, a decision that Duggan praised.    

Meanwhile, school board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo said this week that she planned to sit the contest out. The former state representative didn't quite rule out a bid, though, saying instead that she wouldn't run "[u]nless there is a massive cry for me to reconsider." The candidate filing deadline is April 20.

● New York City, NY Mayor: Businessman and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang has released a survey of the June Democratic primary from Slingshot Strategies that gives him a 25-17 lead over Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, with City Comptroller Scott Stringer in third with 12%, though a hefty 32% of respondents are initially undecided. The survey then simulates the instant runoff process and shows Yang defeating Adams 61-39 on the 11th and final round of voting. This poll, which was in the field Jan. 15-19 and sampled 800 people, is the first survey we've seen since Yang joined the race earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Marine veteran Zach Iscol announced this week that he was dropping out of the race and would instead run to succeed Stringer as controller. Around that same time, though, businesswoman Barbara Kavovit, who was a regular on the "Real Housewives of New York City," kicked off her own campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination.

● Seattle, WA Mayor: Colleen Echohawk, who leads the nonprofit Chief Seattle Club, announced Monday that she would run to succeed retiring Mayor Jenny Durkin this year. Echohawk, who is a member of both the Kithehaki Band of the Pawnee Nation and the Upper Athabascan people of Mentasta Lake, would be the first woman of color to lead Washington's largest city.

Echohawk has not run for office before, but she has been prominent in local government. In addition to serving on the Community Police Commission, she also founded the Coalition to End Urban Indigenous Homelessness and previously served on the Downtown Seattle Association's board.

Echohawk joins Lance Randall, the director of economic development of the nonprofit SEED, and architect Andrew Grant Houston in the August nonpartisan primary, though it remains to be seen if either of them have the connections to run a serious bid. The candidate filing deadline is in May.

Other Races

● New York City, NY Comptroller: The City's Rachel Holliday Smith takes a look at the June Democratic primary to succeed Scott Stringer, who is running for mayor, as New York City comptroller, a post that has plenty of influence over the nation's largest city. Democrats have controlled this office since 1946, and Team Blue's nominee should have no trouble holding it.

First, though, Smith discusses what the comptroller actually does. Among other things, the office is responsible for reviewing contracts, auditing and overseeing city agencies, and "[e]nsuring transparency and accountability in setting prevailing wage and vigorously enforcing prevailing wage and living wage laws." The comptroller is also one of only a trio of citywide elected offices: The other is public advocate, where Democratic incumbent Jumaane Williams doesn't face any serious opposition for re-election this year.

What the comptroller's post hasn't been, though, is a good springboard to the mayor's office. The last person to successfully make the jump was Democrat Abe Beame, who was elected mayor in 1973 on his second try and lost renomination four years later. Since then four other comptrollers have unsuccessfully campaigned for the city's top job, a streak Stringer will try to break this year.

Six notable Democrats are competing in the June primary, which will be decided through instant runoff voting. The two with the most cash by far are City Councilman Brad Lander and state Sen. Brian Benjamin, who have both brought in enough to qualify for matching funds (a system we explain here).

Benjamin, though, earned some unwelcome headlines earlier this month when The City reported that multiple donors said that they had not actually contributed any money to his campaign, and some even volunteered that they had never even heard of Benjamin. One of his unwilling donors said that he didn't blame Benjamin for what happened and instead said the problem rested with his former employer. Benjamin's team soon announced that they would give the New York City Election Campaign Finance Fund $5,750, which represented 23 donations of $250 each.

Assemblyman David Weprin, who unsuccessfully ran to succeed the disgraced Anthony Weiner in the 2011 special election for what was numbered the 9th Congressional District at the time, and state Sen. Kevin Parker have also been campaigning for a while. Neither of them have the resources that Lander or Benjamin do at the moment, though they could receive a big boost if they qualify for matching funds: The New York Times reports that Weprin has likely brought in enough, though the campaign finance board needs to confirm this before it dispenses any public money.

Two other Democrats also joined the race this week. Marine veteran Zach Iscol, a moderate who is close to Hillary Clinton, abandoned his mayoral bid to run here. Iscol will be able to transfer the cash he raised for his previous campaign to his new race, which could matter quite a bit: While he fell about $20,000 short of the minimum needed to qualify for public money for mayor, the Times reports that he's likely already hit the lower threshold needed for the comptroller contest.

The other new contender is Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC anchor who challenged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in last year's Democratic primary. Caruso-Cabrera, who ran well to the congresswoman's right, raised millions from AOC haters nationwide and self-funded over $1 million, but she lost by a lopsided 74-18 margin.

Data

● Pres-by-CD: Our project to calculate the 2020 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide hits Kentucky. You can find our detailed calculations here, a large-size map of the results here, and our permanent, bookmarkable link for all 435 districts here.

Donald Trump won the Bluegrass State 62-36, which was pretty similar to his 63-33 performance in 2016, and he once again carried five of Kentucky's six congressional districts. The one exception was, as before, Rep. John Yarmuth's 3rd District in Louisville, which is also the only Democratic-held seat in the commonwealth: Joe Biden took the seat 60-38, compared to 55-40 for Hillary Clinton four years earlier, a shift due in part to the decline in third-party voting.

The closest constituency was again the 6th District in the Lexington area, where Trump's margin shrunk a bit from 55-39 in 2016 to 54-44 in 2020. Republican Rep. Andy Barr won re-election in 2018 by beating Democrat Amy McGrath just 51-48 in a very expensive race, but Barr had a much easier time last year and prevailed 57-41.

Trump took at least 65% of the vote in the remaining four GOP-held seats. His strongest performance in the state was his 80-19 romp in veteran Rep. Hal Rogers' 5th District in rural eastern Kentucky, which makes this the Trumpiest of the 345 seats we've released numbers for so far. (The seat that got displaced for that title, though only just, was Texas' 13th District, which backed the top of the ticket 79-19.) Believe it or not, though, Trump's 2016 margin in this coal country constituency was slightly larger at 80-17.

The 83-year-old Rogers has decisively won re-election 20 times, but this area was extremely divided when he was first elected in 1980. The current version of the 5th District contains several ancestrally Democratic areas that favored Team Blue even in tough years, including Elliott County, which famously never supported a Republican presidential nominee from the time of its formation in 1869 through 2012—the longest streak of Democratic support in any county in the country. Those days are long gone, however, as Trump carried Elliott County with 70% in 2016 and 75% last year.

The 5th is also home to areas that were deep red even when Democrats were the dominant party statewide, as they were at the time Rogers was first elected. This includes Jackson and Leslie Counties, which have not once backed a Democrat for president since they were created in the 19th century. They're not likely to start anytime soon, either, as Trump won close to 90% in both.

Kentucky Democrats, thanks in large part to their downballot dominance in parts of the eastern part of the state, ran the state House nonstop from the early 1920s through the 2016 elections, which always gave them at least a seat at the table for redistricting. The GOP took firm control of the legislature for the first time ever when Trump first won the state, though, and they have more than enough votes to override any possible veto by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and pass their own maps for the first time.

Morning Digest: Another suburban surge saw Biden flip key Michigan district that Romney won in 2012

Posted on by Daily Kos Elections

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, and David Beard.

Leading Off

● Pres-by-CD: Our project to calculate the 2020 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide heads to Michigan, which returned to the Democratic column after another competitive race. You can find our complete data set here, which we're updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available.

After supporting Donald Trump 47.6-47.4 four years ago, Michigan went for Joe Biden by a wider 51-48 margin, and he improved on Hillary Clinton's performance in 12 of 14 districts, with the only exceptions coming in the two bluest seats. Biden carried the same five districts that had supported Clinton plus Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens' 11th District in the northwestern Detroit suburbs. Trump, meanwhile, carried the other eight constituencies he'd taken in 2016. You can find a larger version of our map here.

Since it's the lone flip, we'll start with the 11th District, which shifted from 50-45 Trump to 52-47 Biden. This seat also went for Mitt Romney 52-47 back in 2012, which makes it the first Romney/Trump/Biden district we've found anywhere in the country. Major outside groups on both sides spent a serious amount of money late in the campaign in the race between Stevens and Republican Eric Esshaki, but Biden's victory helped Stevens prevail 50-48.

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While Democrats had no trouble holding the other five Biden seats, Rep. Dan Kildee's 5th District was once again competitive at the presidential level. This constituency, which is home to Flint, Saginaw, and Bay City, shrunk from 61-38 Obama to 49.8 to 45.5 Clinton, but while Democrats hoped that it would snap back in 2020, Biden won by an almost identical 4.3-point margin (51.4 to 47.1) this time. Congressional Republicans, though, were unable to take advantage of the area's drift to the right. Former state Rep. Tim Kelly raised very little, and Kildee handily beat him 54-42.

A different district that had trended the wrong way for Democrats between 2012 and 2016, however, did return to form this year. The 9th District in the northern Detroit suburbs had narrowed from 57-42 Obama to 51-44 Clinton, but Biden carried it by an Obama-esque 56-43 margin; Rep. Andy Levin, meanwhile, won his second term 58-38. Biden also won Rep. Debbie Dingell's 12th District in the Ann Arbor area 64-34, while he took close to 80% of the vote in both the 13th and 14th Districts in the Detroit area, which are respectively held by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Brenda Lawrence.

We'll move on to the eight Trump seats, starting with the only one to elect a Democrat to the House this year. The 8th District in the Lansing region did support Trump again, but his tight 50-49 win was a considerable drop from his 51-44 showing in 2016. Democrat Elissa Slotkin flipped this seat two years ago 51-47 after a very expensive race, and she won by that very same margin this year, albeit in a contest that attracted far less outside money.

Biden narrowed the gap in a few other districts, but his improved performance wasn't enough to cost Team Red control of any of their seats. The 3rd District in the Grand Rapids area went for Trump 51-47 after backing him by a stronger 52-42 margin; Republican Peter Meijer, though, won the race to succeed retiring Republican-turned-Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash by beating Democrat Hillary Scholten 53-47 after a costly race.

The 6th District in southwestern Michigan, meanwhile, supported Trump 51-47, which was also a drop from his 51-43 victory in 2016. Veteran Republican Rep. Fred Upton, however, again ran well ahead of the ticket and won his 18th term 56-40.

Trump carried the remaining five GOP-held seats by double digits, though notably, his margin of victory was weaker in all of them than it was in 2016. Rep. Jack Bergman's 1st District in the northern part of the state went for Trump 58-41 four years after backing him 58-37. Meanwhile, Rep. Bill Huizenga's 2nd District along the western Michigan coast backed the top of the ticket 55-43 compared to Trump's 56-38 spread last time. Things were more stable in the 4th, 7th, and 10th Districts, but Biden's improved share of the vote across the board was key to his victory.

Republicans have enjoyed complete control over the redistricting process in Michigan the last three rounds, but this time will be different. In 2018, voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that creates an independent commission to craft new congressional and legislative boundaries.

Georgia Runoffs

● GA-Sen-A, GA-Sen-B: The New York Times' Shane Goldmacher has shared some new data that vividly illustrates just how big the gap can be in the prices paid for advertising by federal campaigns versus outside groups.

While the specifics are a bit technical, federal law guarantees something called the "lowest unit charge" to candidates, ensuring that they pay the lowest possible rates to air ads on TV and radio. These rules do not apply to third parties, however, so super PACs and the like have to pay full freight.

Goldmacher's data shows Jon Ossoff's campaign paying just $6,000 to run a spot on Jeopardy! on the Atlanta-based station WXIA. For the same program during the same time period, however, a Democratic super PAC called Georgia Honor (run by the Senate Majority PAC) has to shell out $25,000 per ad. As Goldmacher notes, a 4-to-1 gulf like this isn't necessarily the norm, but this example starkly shows how all ad dollars are not equal.

For this reason, advertising professionals instead prefer to look at a metric known as "gross ratings points," which again are technical but, in broad terms, describe how often an advertiser can expect a particular ad to be seen by its intended audience. Another useful concept is "share of voice," which refers to the proportion of total advertising run by one side or the other.

Of course, all of this is a prelude to … even more ads! Here are the latest:

  • An NRSC spot says that a victory for Ossoff and Raphael Warnock would empower "Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and Bernie Sanders." The focus on both candidates is a bit unusual, as most attack ads so far from both sides have devoted themselves to hitting just one target.
  • Warnock features a man who lost his wife to COVID. Heartbreakingly, he says, "It shoulda been me, instead of her. That's just how much I cared about her." He blasts Sen. Kelly Loeffler: "Kelly Loeffler sold her stock and told us not to worry."
  • A woman praises Loeffler for helping her make sure her unemployment benefits got extended. Loeffler has opposed legislation in Congress to extend unemployment benefits for all Americans during the pandemic.
  • A different woman, identified as a small business owner, thanks Loeffler for offering unspecified help to keep her business open.
  • A Spanish-language ad from Ossoff attacks Sen. David Perdue for supporting Trump's policies to separate migrant children from their parents.
  • A Spanish ad from Warnock emphasizes his religious faith, including the fact that he's now pastor at the same church MLK once presided over.

senate

● AZ-Sen: If you had an enormous high school filled with warring cliques that all hated each other, only instead of students it was filled with GOP politicians, and instead of lunchroom supremacy actual lives were at stake, that would go a long way toward explaining the embarrassing explosion of infighting among Arizona Republicans. Beyond that, we don't dare summarize the Arizona Republic's masterful explication of this absurd food fight, but there are a couple of tidbits about prospective 2022 candidates who could take on Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly that we can yank out of the mess.

Most notably, reporters Ronald Hansen and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez say that state GOP chair Kelli Ward, an extreme lunatic who has already lost two Senate bids, could potentially run once more. Ward, a former state senator who achieved infamy in 2014 for hosting a town hall to air conspiracy theories about so-called "chemtrails," ran against Sen. John McCain in the Republican primary in 2016 and held him to a surprisingly soft 51-40 margin.

Soon thereafter, she issued a challenge to Arizona's other senator at the time, Jeff Flake, ahead of the 2018 midterms. But Flake, under constant assault from Donald Trump, opted to retire after just a single term, and Republicans rallied around then-Rep. Martha McSally, who beat Ward 55-28 (Ward may have split the crazytown vote with the notorious Joe Arpaio, who took 18%).

It turns out, though, that losing two Senate races is not the end of the line for an Arizona Republican (McSally, take heart!). The following year, Ward was selected to run the state Republican Party and quickly brought the organization into disrepute. Fundraising nosedived while Ward made headlines for fomenting resistance to pandemic safety measures, even encouraging protesters to pretend to be frontline healthcare workers by donning medical scrubs. 2020 ended, of course, with Arizona going blue at the presidential level for the first time since 1996—and sending two Democrats to the Senate for the first time since 1953.

Hansen and Wingett Sanchez also mention another, more recent Senate loser as a potential GOP candidate, businessman Daniel McCarthy, who was treated to a 75-25 thumpin' by McSally in this year's primary. McCarthy, at the time 34 years old, compared himself to Jesus on the campaign trail ("I am qualified for the job. Jesus was 33 when he saved the world") and called Maricopa County's mask mandate "a communist insurrection." Like Ward, McCarthy's also been involved in the recent cafeteria antics of the Arizona GOP—but again, for that, you'll need to read the Republic.

● FL-Sen, FL-Gov: Former Rep. David Jolly, a Republican-turned-independent who's been a vocal Trump critic for years, says he's considering a bid for Senate or governor as an independent. Jolly seems at least somewhat realistic about his chances, saying, "I do think we could mount a viable campaign. But viable and winning look very different and require a lot of money."

At the same time, he seems to think that the one recent Florida election that featured a strong third-party candidate somehow bolsters his case. The Tampa Bay Times' Steve Contorno reports that as "evidence of his path, Jolly points to the 2010 U.S. Senate race," an open-seat contest in which Republican Marco Rubio defeated another Republican-cum-independent, then-Gov. Charlie Crist, 49-30, with Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek taking just 20%. With Democrats certain to run a credible challenger of their own in 2022, it's hard to understand why Jolly believes he could do any better against Rubio than Crist did.

● GA-Sen-A, GA-Sen-B: The Republican pollster Trafalgar Group has released a new survey of Georgia's runoffs, but after much deliberation, we've decided that we aren't going to write about it or include it in our database due to its founder's public embrace of conspiracy theories. Barring further developments, we will maintain this policy for all future Trafalgar polling.

Trafalgar has earned headlines over the past few years for its unorthodox methodology, which seeks to compensate for what the firm's principal, Robert Cahaly, has referred to as "social desirability bias"—the alleged propensity of so-called "shy Trump voters" to tell pollsters whom they really support. While Trafalgar's approach made it one of the few firms to forecast a Trump win in 2016, it performed poorly in 2018, and its final polls also predicted a Trump victory this year (by carrying Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona).

Other pollsters have sharply questioned Trafalgar's methods, with one political science professor telling the New York Times, "If somebody's not transparent you can generally assume they're crap." That same article reported that Trafalgar is "considered far too shadowy by other pollsters to be taken seriously" and noted that Cahaly's bare-bones methodology page "reads like a vague advertisement of its services and explains that its polls actively confront social desirability bias, without giving specifics as to how."

These issues have concerned us for some time, but ultimately, our decision is motivated by Cahaly's acceptance and amplification of election conspiracy theories. Cahaly baselessly claimed to Sean Hannity before the election that Trump would have to win Pennsylvania "by 4 or 5 to overtake the voter fraud that will happen there."

More recently, he tweeted that his new Georgia poll is "based on All votes we anticipate to be counted in GA Senate Runoff (both above and below the table)." That's a reference to a soundly debunked conspiracy theory that election workers in Fulton County somehow rigged the election by counting fake ballots taken out of "suitcases" they'd placed under a table—one that Republican officials with the secretary of state's office blasted as "ridiculous."

We take a heterodox approach to polling—there are many ways to get it right, and no one has a monopoly on the truth. But the truth is what we all must seek. Excluding polls is not something we do lightly, but when a pollster espouses beliefs about elections that are demonstrably false, we are unable to conclude that such a person does in fact believe in seeking the truth.

● IL-Sen, IL-Gov: Regarding possible bids against either of the two top Illinois Democrats up for election in 2022, Sen. Tammy Duckworth and Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger tells Politico, "I never rule anything out." Not only would Kinzinger be an underdog in either race, however, given the state's heavily Democratic lean, he'd also likely face a difficult primary, on account of his outspoken criticism of Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the election—criticism that already has fellow Republicans gunning for him.

Gubernatorial

● GA-Gov: At a Saturday rally for the Georgia runoffs in which he predictably focused almost entirely on his grievances about his own election, Donald Trump managed to cram in another unrelated race when he touted outgoing Rep. Doug Collins as a candidate for governor in 2022. "Doug, you want to run for governor in two years?" Trump asked after noting Collins was in attendance. "He'd be a good-looking governor."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently floated Collins as a potential primary challenger to Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump has excoriated for not seeking to overturn the results of Georgia's presidential contest. That line of attack continued on Saturday, with Trump repeatedly attacking Kemp during a meandering 100-minute speech. "Your governor should be ashamed of himself," said Trump at one point, and at another claiming Kemp is "afraid of Stacey Abrams.”

● IL-Gov: Politico's Shia Kapos reports that ultra-wealthy Chicago Cubs co-owner Todd Ricketts is not "ruling out a run" for governor, per a "source close to" Ricketts. It's not clear exactly how rich Ricketts himself is, but Forbes estimates the Ricketts family's net worth at $3 billion. That fortune was built by patriarch Joe Ricketts, Todd's father, who built the online trading powerhouse now known as TD Ameritrade.

Most of the family has been heavily involved in Republican politics. The elder Ricketts has long been a major GOP donor and conservative activist, in particular through his super PAC, the anti-earmarks Ending Spending Fund. Todd Ricketts became the RNC's finance chair in 2018 and his oldest brother, Pete, is governor of Nebraska. His sister, Laura, however, is an LGBTQ rights activist and a top giver to Democratic campaigns.

● KS-Gov: Soon-to-be former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is refusing to rule out a bid against Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly in 2022, telling the Wall Street Journal, "I haven't given half a second's thought to the political races in the state of Kansas." Last cycle, Pompeo played a long, drawn-out game of "will he or won't he?" when Mitch McConnell tried to recruit him to run for the Senate, a race Pompeo now claims he "was never seriously considering."

Pompeo's unparalleled stature in Kansas GOP politics would probably lead the field to clear for him should he choose to run: State party chair Mike Kuckelman said to the Journal, "From the perspective of what I'm hearing within the party, he can do whatever he wants." But that cuts both ways. As in in 2020, a lengthy but unconsummated dalliance could undermine other potential candidates. Ultimately, Pompeo's dithering didn't prevent Republicans from holding the state's open Senate seat last month, but they'd probably rather not go through the same rigmarole again.

● MA-Gov: Joe Battenfeld of the conservative Boston Herald reports that Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone is considering seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2022. Curtatone has roundly criticized Republican Gov. Charlie Baker for not taking enough action to combat the coronavirus pandemic in Massachusetts, and while the mayor has been tightlipped when talking about his own electoral plans, he very much hasn't ruled anything out. "That has not crossed my mind at all," Curtatone told Battenfeld about a potential gubernatorial run, adding, "This isn't the time to take political shots at anyone."

Curtatone was first elected mayor of Somerville, which is located just north of Boston and includes part of Tufts University, in 2003, and he's been mentioned as a prospective candidate for higher office for years. Curtatone himself notably spent months in 2013 thinking about a gubernatorial run but decided to stay put, while Baker ended up winning the office the following year. Curtatone is up for re-election next year, and while he could run for governor afterwards, Battenfeld writes that the mayor probably wouldn't seek a sixth term if he decides to take on Baker.

Baker himself has not yet announced if he'll run for a third term, though he began making preparations all the way back in 2019. A recent MassInc poll for the nonprofit The Barr Foundation found Baker with a strong 68-22 favorable rating in what is usually a very blue state, but there was one potential warning sign for the governor just below the surface: While Baker received an 81-13 score from Democrats, Republicans only gave Baker the thumbs up by a 54-40 margin.

● NM-Gov: New Mexico GOP chair Steve Pearce is reportedly considering a 2022 rematch against Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who crushed him by a 57-43 margin in their first face-off two years ago.

Pearce represented southern New Mexico's conservative 2nd Congressional District for many years, but his two stints were bookended by statewide failures: He lost a Senate primary in 2000 after serving four years in the legislature, won a seat in Congress in 2002, then got destroyed in a 2008 Senate bid before returning to the House in the 2010 GOP wave, only to give it all up for his hopeless gubernatorial run in 2018.

As for Grisham, she'd reportedly been under consideration for a post in Joe Biden's cabinet, but both she and the Biden transition team announced on Sunday that she would not be joining the next administration.

● PA-Gov: Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who has soared to prominence of late thanks to his bellicose support for Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of Pennsylvania's presidential election, gets mentioned as a possible candidate for governor in 2022 in a new profile from the Philadelphia Inquirer's Andrew Seidman.

While Mastriano wouldn't speak to Seidman, when asked recently by conservative radio host Charlie Kirk if he'd run, he said, "If we get the call from God, we're not gonna stand away from our Esther moment"—exploiting the biblical story of Queen Esther, who is credited with putting her life at risk to save the Jews of Persia from destruction, to describe his own interest in seeking a political promotion.

Mastriano's arrival as a latter-day Jewish heroine is a relatively recent thing: A veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, he first ran for Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District in 2018, shortly after retiring from the Army as a colonel. He badly lost the primary to now-Rep. David Joyce, but he fared better the following year when he won a special election to the legislature.

He also made news in bizarre fashion late last month when he had to bolt from an Oval Office meeting with Trump after learning he'd tested positive for the coronavirus. (There are so many things weird with this story.)

While his loving embrace of Trump ought to be a boon in a primary, Mastriano could spell danger for the GOP in the general election. "We had a super Trumpy older white guy state senator from central Pennsylvania as our 2018 gubernatorial nominee," said one local GOP operative to Seidman, referring to former state Sen. Scott Wagner, who ran against term-limited Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf two years ago. "And he got 40% of the vote." In total fairness, Wagner won 40.7%, which rounds up to 41.

● RI-Gov: WPRI's Ted Nesi reports that outgoing Cranston Mayor Alan Fung, who was the GOP's nominee for governor in both 2014 and 2018, is considering a third try, though there's no quote from Fung or anyone connected to him. Fung lost a three-way open-seat race to Democrat Gina Raimondo 41-36 in 2014 (a third-party candidate took 21%), then got smoked 53-37 in a more traditional rematch four years later. Raimondo is term-limited in 2022 (as Fung himself was this year), and a whole host of top-shelf Democrats could try to succeed her.

● SC-Gov: Outgoing Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham, who unexpectedly lost a difficult re-election bid for South Carolina's 1st Congressional District last month, declined to rule out a bid for governor in 2022, telling the Post & Courier of his future plans, "It's good to take some time and assess things. That's not a decision I can make right now." Republican Gov. Henry McMaster has said he will seek a second full term.

● VA-Gov: Despite the pandemic, Virginia Republicans opted over the weekend to choose nominees for statewide office via a convention rather than a state-run primary, prompting one GOP candidate to make good on a threat to bolt the party and announce a bid for governor as an independent.

State Sen. Amanda Chase, known for her far-right views, had long opposed a convention and attacked the "Republican establishment elite" for favoring one, apparently in the belief that it would benefit the only other declared contender, former state House Speaker Kirk Cox. If that sounds surprising, to an extent, it is: As the Virginia Mercury's Ned Oliver put it, the decision "turned conventional wisdom about the benefits of primaries versus conventions on its head," since GOP conventions typically favor the most extreme candidates.

But as Oliver alludes, Chase is so deeply on the outs with fellow Republicans that her ability to muster the necessary support among convention delegates, with whom personal relationships are often crucial, is extremely weak. Chase was booted by her county GOP organization last year after she supported an independent candidate for sheriff who ran against the Republican incumbent, and a couple of months later, she actually quit the GOP caucus in the Senate.

It's not clear whether Republicans will try to host an in-person gathering despite the massive danger—it's possible they could instead choose an "unassembled" convention, which might more closely resemble a so-called "firehouse" (or party-run) primary. But whatever unfolds, the electorate will be far smaller than had they chosen a traditional primary, where Chase could have won with a plurality, as opposed to the majority required at a convention.

The decision to forego a primary prompted some heated words from one potential candidate, outgoing Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman, who himself lost renomination at a convention earlier this year. The Virginia GOP "is a raging dumpster fire," tweeted Riggleman, who late last month said that his interest in a bid had "diminished." Presumably, his desire to seek the Republican nod is even lower now, though he's also held out the possibility of running as an independent.

House

● CA-08: Republican Rep. Paul Cook resigned Monday to take his spot on the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors. Cook's congressional seat will remain vacant until January, when fellow Republican Jay Obernolte is sworn in along with the rest of the new Congress.

And while it may seem strange that Cook decided to give up his seat in D.C. to run for local office, this isn't a step down for him. San Bernardino County supervisors earn a salary comparable to U.S. House members, and they also enjoy a much shorter commute. Supervisors are limited to four four-year terms, though that may not be a drawback for Cook, who is 77. And perhaps most importantly, while Obernolte will be in the minority, Cook and his fellow Republicans will hold a 4-1 edge on the Board of Supervisors even though San Bernardino County favored Joe Biden 54-44.

● CA-25: Outgoing Assemblywoman Christy Smith, who recently lost a very close rematch with Republican Rep. Mike Garcia, says she might run for California's 25th Congressional District a third time. In a new statement, Smith said, "This was such a close election, and having earned over 36,000 more votes than any prior Democrat in CA-25, I'm keeping all options open."

Last month, Smith filed paperwork with the FEC that would allow her to fundraise for another bid, though as we always caution, many candidates submit FEC paperwork but never run. And this cycle, the vagaries of redistricting add yet another element of uncertainty, so expect to see lots of folks float their names early on who wind up staying put once maps are finalized.

Mayoral

● Seattle, WA Mayor: Incumbent Jenny Durkan announced Monday that she would not seek a second term. Durkan, whose year was dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, widespread protests against police violence, and conflict with several members of the Seattle City Council, said she believed she needed to spend the rest of her term focusing on the city's challenges rather than running for re-election.

Durkan, whose 2017 win made her the first lesbian to be elected mayor, is the latest city leader to leave after one term. Greg Nickels' 2005 win marked the last time that a Seattle mayor was re-elected, though Nickels' quest for a third term four years later ended when he failed to advance past the top-two primary.

All the candidates in next year's contest will run on one nonpartisan ballot, and the top-two vote-getters will advance to the November general election. Durkan's successor in this very blue city will almost certainly be a fellow Democrat, though it's far too early to know who would be the frontrunner. We'll take a look at the potential field to succeed Durkan in a future Digest.

Other Races

● CA-AG: Joe Biden announced Monday that he was nominating California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Becerra, who is a former Democratic congressman from Los Angeles, would be the first Latino to hold this post.

If the Senate confirms Becerra, it would be up to Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fellow Democrat, to pick his replacement as the attorney general for the nation's largest state. Newsom is already tasked with filling Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' soon-to-be vacant Senate seat, and Becerra had been mentioned as a prospect. The new attorney general would need to be confirmed by both chambers of the state legislature, though it would be a surprise if the overwhelmingly Democratic body rejected Newsom's choice.

It was only four years ago that Becerra himself was appointed attorney general. In 2016, then-Gov. Jerry Brown shocked state and national politicos when he selected Becerra, who was the fourth-highest ranking Democrat in the House, to succeed Harris after she was elected to the Senate. One Democrat who wasn't chosen, state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, decided to challenge Becerra in 2018, but Jones ended up taking a distant third in the top-two primary; Becerra himself had no trouble turning back his Republican foe that November.

Called Races

● CO 18th District DA: Democrat Amy Padden conceded on Saturday after an automatic recount confirmed that Republican John Kellner had prevailed 50.1-49.9 in this open seat race. Kellner's win means that his party will hold this district attorney's office, which has jurisdiction over Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln Counties.

Election Results Recaps

● LA-05: Luke Letlow decisively beat state Rep. Lance Harris 62-38 in Saturday's all-GOP runoff to succeed his old boss, retiring Rep. Ralph Abraham, in this conservative northeast Louisiana seat. Letlow, who served as Abraham's chief of staff before entering the race, had the congressman's endorsement, as well as a big financial edge over Harris.

● East Baton Rouge Parish, LA Mayor-President: Democratic incumbent Sharon Weston Broome won a second term as leader of this populous parish, which is home to Baton Rouge and several of its suburbs, by beating former Republican state Rep. Steve Carter 57-43.

● Orleans Parish, LA District Attorney: Criminal justice reformers scored a big win in New Orleans on Saturday when City Councilman Jason Williams won a six-year term by defeating former judge Keva Landrum 57-43 in the all-Democratic runoff. (Orleans Parish is coterminous with the city of New Orleans). Williams will succeed retiring incumbent Leon Cannizzaro, who leaves office with a reputation as one of the most punitive prosecutors in the entire country.

Both Williams and Landrum, who served as interim district attorney in 2007 and 2008, promised never to seek the death penalty and pledged to bring other changes to the office, but Williams consistently adopted far more progressive stances than his opponent. Notably, Williams alone ruled out charging defendants as habitual offenders, a tactic that Louisiana prosecutors like Cannizzaro have frequently used to secure longer sentences. Williams notably also said he won't seek to try underage suspects—97% of whom are Black—in adult courts, and he's also pledged to drop all marijuana possession charges.

Williams, though, did look like at least the slight underdog going into Saturday's contest. Perhaps most seriously, he was indicted by federal prosecutors in June for tax fraud, charges he's argued resulted from "an old-school political tactic" to damage his chances. The councilman has pleaded not guilty, claiming his tax preparer had misrepresented his credentials and filed error-filled forms with the IRS without Williams' knowledge, and his trial is currently set for January.

Landrum, who led Williams 34-29 in the first round of voting last month, also had the support of Mayor Latoya Cantrell and Rep. Cedric Richmond, as well as five of Williams' six colleagues on the City Council. None of this was enough, though, to stop Williams from decisively winning this powerful post.

Grab Bag

● Deaths: Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes, who served in the House and the Senate, died Sunday at the age of 87. Sarbanes, who was the first Greek American elected to the upper chamber, was a generally low-key senator who is best known for co-sponsoring the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley act in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, a law that the New York Times writes "strengthened corporate governance and created a federal oversight board for the accounting industry." Sarbanes is also the father of Rep. John Sarbanes, who has represented part of the Baltimore region since 2007, the same year that the elder Sarbanes retired from the Senate.

Sarbanes got his start in politics in 1966 when he was elected to the state House, and he launched a primary challenge against Rep. George Fallon four years later. Fallon, who was chair of the powerful House Committee on Public Works, initially looked secure in this Baltimore-area seat.

However, as Theo Lippman would write in the Baltimore Sun in 1991, "Some of Paul's best arguments against the chairman were that he was too old (he was 68) and too ailing and too remote to represent the district anymore. And too close to big, rich campaign contributors who depended on pork from the committee chairman's big barrel." Sarbanes won 51-46, and he easily prevailed in the general. Sarbanes seemed to be in for another tough primary in 1972 when redistricting put him in the same seat as fellow Rep. Edward Garmatz, but Garmatz decided to retire.

Sarbanes attracted national attention in 1974 when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, he introduced and defended the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon. Sarbanes then set his sights on a promotion in 1976 when he sought the nomination to take on Republican Sen. Glenn Beall. Sarbanes' main opponent in the primary was former Sen. Joseph Tydings, who had lost the seat to Beall in 1970, thanks to an effort by the NRA and its allies. The well-funded Sarbanes, who benefited from support from Greek American donors and labor groups, won the nomination 55-35.

Sarbanes then went after Beall for his connections to the disgraced Nixon, including the $250,000 in campaign funds he'd received six years ago from a White House-controlled account known as the "Townhouse Operation." Beall insisted that, while he'd made a "mistake" by accepting the donations, he was being unfairly judged by post-Watergate standards of morality. That argument didn’t go over well with voters, and Sarbanes unseated Beall 57-39 as Jimmy Carter was carrying the state by a smaller 53-47.

Sarbanes never came close to losing in any of his subsequent campaigns, though he did attract some notable GOP opponents. Sarbanes's foe in 1982 was Prince George's County Executive Lawrence Hogan, a former House colleague and the father of current Gov. Larry Hogan, while his 1988 adversary was Alan Keyes, who would go on to lose the 2004 Senate race in Illinois to Barack Obama. Sarbanes' smallest win was in 1994 against former U.S. Secretary of Labor Bill Brock, who had been elected to the Senate from Tennessee in 1970 and lost re-election six years later; Sarbanes prevailed 59-41.

Mike Pompeo is now brazenly campaigning for Trump using his federal post

Posted on by Hunter

Prior to ex-House Republican Mike Pompeo becoming Trump's secretary of state, it was generally understood that U.S. secretaries of state were not allowed to use the tools of their office for rank partisan politicking. Using government resources to campaign is illegal; turning the top diplomatic job in the country into a tool of partisanship damages U.S. credibility abroad by signaling, to world counterparts, that the U.S. diplomat is In This For Themselves.

All of that is gone now because Donald Trump simply chose to ignore those constraints, and Republicans—with the singular exception of one Mitt Romney, exactly once—wholeheartedly adopted the same merging of party and state as the new way things are done. This was helped along immensely by Trump's surrounding of himself with hard-right ex-House Republicans contemptuous of the rules from the outset. Mike Pompeo is a poster child for this. He continues to assist Trump in the cover-up of a criminal Ukrainian extortion scheme—one timed to allow Russian incursions into that country to proceed and be solidified while much needed U.S. aid was used to pressure for Trump reelection favors. He continues to abet Trump's incompetent dismantling of U.S. foreign policy infrastructure.

And, of course, Pompeo is using his State Department role to campaign aggressively for Trump and Republicans throughout the country. The premise is that key Trump-supporting demographics and swing states just happen to need conservative foreign policy priorities explained to them by, literally, the top U.S. diplomat—one who admittedly has little else to do since all such policy decisions have been stripped from him and his government agency in favor of the new policy, Whatever Trump Last Said. The reality is that Pompeo is touring the country giving campaign speeches to, as the AP reports, a white evangelical church in Plano, Texas; the hard-right Value Voters Summit; and other appearances in Wisconsin, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and of course his home state of Kansas. Pompeo has famously been eyeing higher office himself—a plan that briefly looked scuttled when Pompeo was implicated in impeachable crimes, but one Pompeo appears to be inching back to with hopes that voters no longer remember or resent him for that now that the Trump administration has delivered at least a half-dozen other scandals and death-dealing clusterfucks for them to chew on instead.

The important thing to remember here is that Pompeo is crooked. He is crooked in the William Barr way, and fairly precisely: He has been caught directly assisting in Trump's impeached-for acts; he has been caught in a campaign to cover up those acts and his involvement for Trump's benefit and his own; he has done each of these things in service of elevating Republican power regardless of legality or institutional norms; and he makes no particular effort to hide the use of his office as explicitly partisan, to be used for shoring up allies and punishing enemies.

While Barr pressures his underlings into producing documents meant to portray Trump's detractors and investigators as the "true" criminals of Russian election hacking while undermining further investigations into Trump and all allies, Pompeo weaves through the country on a heavy campaign schedule to tell conservative audiences that they should "go to the polling place and express your preference" for his hard-right claims and declarations, as AP quoted him telling his Texas audience.

Without dwelling on it: Again, Mike Pompeo using his government perch to address the Republican National Convention—from Israel, no less—was such a grotesque insult to supposed diplomatic nonpartisanship that it would have likely ended with Pompeo's removal from his post during any of the last half-century's worth of presidencies. Republican lawmakers, however, are embracing Pompeo's acts as they are Trump's, and Barr's. There is no Republican caucus demanding Trump adhere to the rule of law, or the Hatch Act, or basic expected decencies.

The whole point of immunizing Trump during impeachment was to enable further corruption. It was the expected outcome. It clearly worked, as Trump's rapid gutting of oversight offices and inspectors showed. We are now at a point where Trump and Barr are openly crafting plans to eliminate votes if the November elections do not go his way, and continue eliminating votes for as long as it takes until the Republican Party can claim a crooked victory.

The reasons are not just to retain power, though; Trump's team and Trump's allies need a victory for more personal reasons. There has been a mountain of criminal acts, cover-ups, ethical violations, and rank corruption from Barr, from Pompeo, from Trump himself, and other Trump cabinet members past and present. The moment they lose power, there is a danger that the remaining shards of true, neutral law enforcement will come for them—and those ex-officials will no longer have means to block those investigations.

Every investigation currently being blocked and corrupted can only be blocked or corrupted so long as the corrupters remain in power. Republicans like Pompeo, still identified as having played a role in international extortion whether his Republican Senate allies are supportive or are not, has no time to worry about laws or norms as he scurries around the country to protect himself from the consequences of his own corruption.

House announces contempt proceedings against Pompeo after he refuses to hand over documents

Posted on by Mark Sumner

For weeks, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has been asking Mike Pompeo to testify about his use of State Department resources for political purposes, and for weeks Pompeo has been ignoring those requests. Not only did Pompeo violate all past protocol—and the Hatch Act—by speaking this week at the RNC, he did so while on a supposedly official trip to Israel. But long before that grievous violation, Pompeo provided a 1,600 page “portfolio” of information on Joe Biden to Republican senators, and only Republican senators. A subpoena for that information met with no response. Pompeo has been deeply involved in attempts to find some supporting evidence for Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories, both about Biden’s role in Ukraine and the origins of the investigation into the actions of Russia in the 2016 election. 

On Thursday, the State Department finally provided a response to the House subpoena—though Pompeo didn’t deign to write anything personally. Instead, he left it to an assistant to tell the Foreign Affairs Committee that Pompeo “categorically rejects your baseless assertion that the Department may have acted inappropriately or violated any law” in "what appears to be partisan misuse of resources." In addition to denying that the State Department had provided information to only Republican members, despite overwhelming evidence that this is the case, acting (and unconfirmed) assistant secretary Ryan Kaldahl made it clear that Pompeo wasn’t going to appear before the House and that the State Department was not going to hand over any documents it had produced for Senate Republicans—not unless Democrats announce that they are also starting a formal inquiry into Joe Biden and nonexistent crimes in Ukraine.

Committee chair Rep. Eliot Engel was just as clear in his response on Friday: The House is going forward with contempt proceedings against Pompeo.

Engel’s statement did not hold back: “From Mr. Pompeo’s refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, to his willingness to bolster a Senate Republican-led smear against the President’s political rivals, to his speech to the RNC which defied his own guidance and possibly the law, he has demonstrated alarming disregard for the laws and rules governing his own conduct and for the tools the constitution provides to prevent government corruption,” said Engel. “He seems to think the office he holds, the Department he runs, the personnel he oversees, and the taxpayer dollars that pay for all of it are there for his personal and political benefit.”

The letter from Kaldahl makes it clear that this is Pompeo’s “final response,” and the idea that the House should be required to pretend—as Pompeo is doing—that there is the least scrap of truth behind the conspiracy theories Trump is promoting is ridiculous. 

“Mr. Pompeo is demanding that the Committee do essentially the same thing Russia is doing,” writes Engel, “In other words, Pompeo will give the Committee what we were seeking if we join in a smear of the President’s political rival. Sound familiar?”

Engel is now drawing up a resolution holding Pompeo in contempt. There’s no doubt that Republican members will complain and attempt to delay the process. But Engel seems unlikely to be in a patient mood with only 67 days left until the election.

Republicans are planning a mass attack against Biden using information from pro-Russian agents

Posted on by Mark Sumner

In 2016, Donald Trump and his campaign team made more than 100 contacts with Russian agents in what turned out to be a successful effort to plunder information, disseminate propaganda, and ultimately steal an American election. Other Republican officials were certainly involved to some degree—particularly Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who did everything he could to block efforts to make the public aware of Russian interference and damaged election security.

In 2020, Republicans in both House and Senate—having given Trump a free pass to invite foreign interference and approving the whitewashing of Trump’s crimes by Attorney General William Barr—are all on board. That includes Barr, who has all but promised to provide America with a QAnon-sanctioned October surprise. It includes Republican lawmakers like Rep. Devin Nunes, who are sitting on a packet of documents prepared by a pro-Russian official from Ukraine. It includes Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been using the State Department to pile up a stack of unsubstantiated attacks on Joe Biden. Barr, Nunes, and Pompeo are not just sitting on this information: they’re deliberately hiding it, looking for the moment to strike when no one has a chance to see what a baseless conspiracy they’re really pushing.

Devin Nunes has always represented the ragged edge of support for Donald Trump. From the moment he jumped from an Uber and sneaked into the White House in an attempt to derail the Russia investigation, to his stint in front of the House Ethics Committee, Nunes made it clear that his loyalty to Trump exceeded any other responsibility. And when it came to questions about when Nunes would be truthful with his House colleagues, he could not have been more clear: “Never.”

So it should come as no surprise that as the 2020 election approaches, Devin Nunes has been working directly with a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker who previously passed along information through Rudy Giuliani. That lawmaker has been feeding information to Republicans in both the House and Senate. It comes in the form of a “packet” of supposed evidence that backs up Trump and Giuliani’s long-debunked claims about Joe Biden’s relationship to the Ukrainian government.

As CNN reports, Democrats have been aware that Republicans in the House and Senate—including Nunes—were sent a packet of information from pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach in January, in the midst of Donald Trump’s impeachment. But Republicans have refused to discuss what’s in the packet, or even admit that they have it. In closed-door Intelligence Committee hearings, Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York made multiple attempts to get Nunes to answer a simple question. "Is the ranking member prepared to even respond to the question?,” asked Maloney. ”How about it, Mr. Nunes? Did you receive a package from Andrii Derkach or not? And would you share with the committee or not?” Nunes did not respond. “Well,” said Maloney. “I guess this is a case where silence speaks volumes."

As Politico reported, that silence extends to the FBI. After Democratic staff members became aware of the existence of the document packet, they requested information on the contents from the FBI. Not only has there been no information provided, there hasn’t even been a response.

During his Tuesday hearing with the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr was just as silent in refusing to share any information collected in the investigation he’s conducted with the assistance of U. S. Attorney John “Bull” Durham. That investigation also includes sharing Ukraine with Guiliani, as well as attempts to arm-twist officials in London, Rome, and Australia into giving Barr additional leverage that can be used to support Trump.

On Friday, The Hill reported that Rep. Eliot Engel has issued a subpoena to another Republican known to have been stacking up information provided by Giuliani and his associates: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “Secretary Pompeo has turned the State Department into an arm of the Trump campaign and he’s not even trying to disguise it,” said Engel. Pompeo has shared information connected to Joe Biden with Senate Republicans, while hiding it from Democrats. However, it’s hard to call the information Pompeo has shared exclusively with Republicans a “packet” … because it’s over 16,000 pages long.

In the next 97 days, the attack on Joe Biden is going to come from William Barr, from Mike Pompeo, from Senate Republicans, and from Republican representatives like Nunes, all of them using information that has not been vetted, or even seen, by anyone outside the GOP. They’re not planning an October surprise: They’re planning a bullshit assault from every direction.

And, just like in 2016, they’re expected to get every single column of The New York Times and every single moment of network news airtime to repeat their claims, unchallenged, in the days right before the election.

How Trump’s willing Republican collaborators make excuses to justify their treachery

Posted on by Dartagnan

In Dante’s Inferno, the ninth, most terrible circle of hell is reserved for the worst type of traitors. Dante specifically includes Judas, who betrayed Christ, and Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed and slew Julius Caesar, as the only named persons who inhabit the fourth and final round of this circle. Each is condemned to be gnawed within the three mouths of Satan for all eternity. Judas is being chewed on head first, his legs forever dangling out of Satan’s mouth.

The revulsion felt towards treachery—and particularly treachery against one’s country—is well established. Children in the U.S. learn about Benedict Arnold’s treachery in middle school. Students of World War II learn about the treachery of Vidkun Quisling. Their names (along with that of Judas) have gained such notoriety that they have become epithets describing traitors in general. From a political standpoint, there is not much if any practical distinction between outright treachery and “collaboration.” The Petain government of Vichy France collaborated with the Nazis, as did Quisling’s Norwegian government. Both Petain and Quisling are now universally viewed as traitors, with each possessing a unique litany of justifications for his actions—justifications that are now viewed as shabby excuses for complicity with evil.

With an embattled and unstable Donald Trump making alarming noises about unleashing the military on American citizens and his attempts to delegitimize an election that looks increasingly likely to go against him, there seems to be no better time to examine the motivations of those in the Republican Party who have collaborated with him and are allowing him to be in a position to make these threats. As Anne Applebaum—a renowned historian of the Soviet Union and the former Communist bloc—demonstrates in a tour de force just published in The Atlantic, it’s not as if Republicans looked at their reflections in the bathroom mirror one morning and decided they would betray their country for the interests of Donald Trump. There was self-reflection involved, a weighing of self-interest, costs and benefits—all leading to the conclusion that fealty to Trump outweighed their sworn oaths to defend the Constitution.

The oh-so-telling title of Applebaum’s essay is “History Will Judge The Complicit.” In it, she cites several examples of collaborators throughout 20th Century history—most significantly those who supported totalitarian Soviet puppet regimes in Eastern Europe—and analogizes how the rationales and excuses each used to try to justify their actions mesh perfectly with the behavior of today’s Republican Party in their nearly-collective decision to pay meek obeisance to Donald Trump.

Applebaum explains just what a “collaborator” is.

In English, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.

Applebaum notes there can be two types of political collaborators: voluntary and involuntary. People forced at gunpoint to cooperate with a regime out of necessity or a duty to preserve other people’s lives are among the involuntary class of collaborator. Voluntary collaboration, on the other hand, implies either a willingness to collaborate for the sake of “ the national interest,” or an enthusiastic embrace of the enemy borne of outright admiration or alignment with one’s ideology. Describing the latter variety, Applebaum cites Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffman, who in 2007 “observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, ‘the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,’ people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments.”

But curiously, as she notes, just as “equally motivated” to willingly collaborate were the country’s “losers,” the “social misfits” and political deviants who also saw an opportunity to raise their own standards of living by joining forces with an occupying enemy.

If this is beginning to ring some bells, it should.

Applebaum also cites the work of Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel-prize winning poet who wrote about the mindset of collaboration based on his experiences in working for the Polish government after WWII. In The Captive Mind, Milosz uses a series of biographical portraits to depict the various justifications that collaborators use to justify the betrayal of their principles. As Applebaum points out, these are all transferable to the behavior of the modern Republican Party in selling out their principles, and even selling out their oath to serve the American people, to a demagogue like Donald Trump. In fact the near-total abdication of their souls to Trump—even in the face of his blatantly apparent cruelty, crudeness, self-interest, and lack of any commitment to democratic principles—is closer to the historical reality of collaboration than are those voices that dissent or object. That is because collaboration is a way of ensuring conformity, and conformity is more pleasurable, more rewarding, and ultimately safer than nonconformity.

Using Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney as examples, Applebaum illustrates how two men, both claiming to have some semblance of principles, behaved once they fell under the presidential orbit of Donald Trump. Noting that both had vehemently criticized Trump prior to his election, she shows how Graham ultimately showed his so-called principles about “patriotism, duty and honor” (which he had attributed to his military experience in the JAG corps) to be nonexistent, turning himself into one of Trump’s fiercest supporters beyond all logic, despite the amorality, corruption, and self-absorption of Trump himself:

It was Graham who made excuses for Trump’s abuse of power. It was Graham—a JAG Corps lawyer—who downplayed the evidence that the president had attempted to manipulate foreign courts and blackmail a foreign leader into launching a phony investigation into a political rival. It was Graham who abandoned his own stated support for bipartisanship and instead pushed for a hyperpartisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. It was Graham who played golf with Trump, who made excuses for him on television, who supported the president even as he slowly destroyed the American alliances—with Europeans, with the Kurds—that Graham had defended all his life. By contrast, it was Romney who, in February, became the only Republican senator to break ranks with his colleagues, voting to impeach the president.

Graham’s surrender to Trump was shocking, but Applebaum thinks she understands it. His behavior, and most importantly his rationale, mirrored the same justifications that officials in the Nazi-collaborating Vichy French government employed. The Republican Party is displaying exactly the same rationalizations for their behavior that collaborators in the Vichy regime—as well as collaborators in Sovietized Eastern Europe—exhibited. As Applebaum observes: “These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.”  

And that, according to Applebaum, is exactly what Trump has done from the outset to the Republican Party: He imposed an alien ideology, by claiming to possess different values from “traditional” Republicans. Examples cited by Applebaum include Trump’s campaigning as a “populist” and his phony promises to “drain the swamp,” and above all, attacking fact-based reality at every turn.

This began with his patent lying about size of his inauguration crowds, a seemingly trivial matter that gradually cascaded into a habitual and relentless refashioning of “reality” to be whatever he said it was. The number of absolute lies (over 19,000 at last count) delivered by Trump, the wholesale corruption of our federal agencies with political supporters lacking any experience in government or even their agency’s subject matter, and the insistence on his own infallibility were, according to Applebaum, not intended to convince thinking Americans of their truth but instead to convince his supporters in the Republican Party that he could simply lie and lie again with impunity and get away with it; that he could corrupt an entire branch of government and get away with it; and now, that he can grossly mishandle a national public health crisis and still get away with it. As Applebaum states: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.”

As Applebaum states, corruption to a large body of people does not happen suddenly—it happens gradually, like a “slippery slope,” as people (here, Republicans) “abandon their existing value systems” through a process where such corruption is normalized. Republicans have normalized Trump’s lies and learned to reflexively blink at his corruption. In doing so, and by allowing their own sense of competence and “patriotism” to be co-opted by Trump, they have abandoned whatever responsibility they once felt towards the American people.

Meanwhile, with this kind of sycophantic following Trump has done whatever he wants, which is to fulfill his own interests and create what is certainly the most corrupt administration in American history while using racism and xenophobia when necessary to achieve those ends. His antipathy towards any legal or Constitutional restraints on his power are established; his sneering dismissal of science, the military, and our intelligence services are all matters of record; his complete abandonment of our strategic alliances is probably irreparable. As Applebaum puts it: “He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not ‘America First,’ but rather ‘Trump First.’”

By now the disaster of the Trump presidency is laid bare. We are experiencing an economic calamity even as people are dying from a grossly mishandled public health crisis. Our streets are literally on fire with people protesting chronic racial injustice, and the rest of the world looks on, aghast at what this country has become. Why then do Republicans continue to act as collaborators with such a regime?

Applebaum says that the same justifications are those set forth in Milosz’ work, The Captive Mind, noted above. They are the same tortured excuses collaborators have told themselves throughout history to justify their betrayal of the people they are supposed to represent. Applebaum distills some of them for us.

 “We can use this moment to achieve great things.”

“We can protect the country from the president.“

“I, personally, will benefit.”

“I must remain close to power.”

“My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse.”

“I am afraid to speak out.”

Applebaum deftly shows how each one of these excuses/rationales has been trotted out or otherwise displayed by Republicans to justify their collaboration with this lawless and amoral regime. From the dubious “bravery” of Anonymous, who you may recall piqued the nation with their “inside account” of the administration’s foibles while claiming to be part of the Resistance, to unnamed officials who decide to ignore the massive onslaught of corruption as long as they get their own pet projects to work on. From people like John Kelly and Jim Mattis, who said they believed they could act as a “failsafe” to prevent the country from imploding but proceeded to quit and fade out of the public view, to cowards like John Bolton and Paul Ryan, who left the administration and their party, respectively, because of Trump and Trumpism yet were too afraid or too opportunistic, even afterwards, to call him out. Of course, there’s also the blatantly self-interested—the Sonny Perdues, the Scott Pruitts, and any of those who view a plum administration position as a mere stepping stone to lucrative careers on K Street. All of these collaborators have exhibited one classic excuse or another.

It is Applebaum’s analysis of the true sycophants—such as Mike Pompeo, William Barr, and Mike Pence, whose collaboration with Trump is not based on excuses but dogmatic religious fanaticism—that is most horrifying.  

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.”

The fact that collaborators in the Trump administration tell themselves comforting stories to justify their actions is bad enough, but when the collaborators are motivated solely by a desire to impose their religious nuttery on the American population and are given the power to do just that, we are in truly perilous territory. This is particularly the case with Barr, whose role as attorney general and head of the Justice Department gives him nearly limitless power to impose his delusional worldview on the most vulnerable in our society. Our country was specifically designed to prevent the imposition of an official “religion” for this very reason.

But the consequences of collaboration probably reached their apotheosis in the conduct of Republicans during the impeachment saga. The GOP-controlled Senate failed to muster a single vote, save that of Mitt Romney, to convict a patently guilty president on charges of obstruction of justice. Applebaum, probably correctly, attributes this appalling inaction to fear of speaking out. As she points out, we are living with the fatal consequences of that act of cowardice and collaboration today:

[I]in March, the consequences of that decision became suddenly clear. After the U.S. and the world were plunged into crisis by a coronavirus that had no cure, the damage done by the president’s self-focused, self-dealing narcissism—his one true “ideology”—was finally visible. He led a federal response to the virus that was historically chaotic. The disappearance of the federal government was not a carefully planned transfer of power to the states, as some tried to claim, or a thoughtful decision to use the talents of private companies. This was the inevitable result of a three-year assault on professionalism, loyalty, competence, and patriotism. Tens of thousands of people have died, and the economy has been ruined.

All of this, and all that waits for us in the coming months, are the consequences of a knowing Republican collaboration with an administration whose incompetence and malevolence is unmatched by any in U.S. history. And yet, Republicans still show no sign of opposition. No voice of objection is raised to decry the torrent of perpetual cruelty and inhuman disregard, even as a deadly virus sweeps through the population, even as the world turns its back on an America it no longer recognizes. Applebaum frankly asks of these Republicans: How low will you allow the country to go?

Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?

To these open questions Applebaum simply attaches a small piece of advice to those who have compromised whatever integrity they once possessed in the service of this one awful man. She quotes Władysław Bartoszewski, a survivor of Auschwitz and former prisoner of both the Nazis and the Soviets, who later rose to the position of foreign minister in his home country of Poland. Bartoszewski’s advice? Just try to be a decent human being, because that is the way you will be remembered.

Whether any Republicans will actually follow that advice remains to be seen.

Mike Pompeo ‘urged’ Trump firing of inspector general asked to investigate Mike Pompeo

Posted on by Hunter

On Saturday, The New York Times reported what we probably should have presumed all along: It was Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who "urged" Donald Trump to fire the State Department's inspector general, continuing the widespread purge of government officials responsible for oversight of the impeached president and his team of corrupt incompetents.

The official non-reason Trump gave for firing inspector general Steve Linick was that Trump had "lost confidence" in him, the same catch-all Trump has used to dispense with all other watchdogs who investigated, or merely raised questions about, illegal acts by Trump's team. While the White House seems uninterested in giving any more plausible rationale for the firing than Trump's ever-vocal gut, it does appear Mike Pompeo had a specific reason why he might have wanted his department's watchdog out: Linick had been asked to investigate charges that Pompeo had been corruptly using a State Department employee to run personal errands for himself and his wife.

Mike Pompeo has remained steadfastly loyal to Trump. He was identified as a key player in Trump's withholding of congressionally earmarked military funds to Ukraine in an attempt to force that nation's government into crafting materials to help him smear his presumed election opponent, and defied congressional demands for testimony. He is quite definitely the sort of person who would use government resources to have personal favors done, and would not be the first, second or sixth of Trump's cabinet appointees to be credibly identified as doing so. He is certainly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the sort to sabotage government investigations into such wrongdoing.

House Democrats are already vowing investigation into Linick's firing; there is no plausible rationale for Trump firing inspectors general across government, immediately after his impeachment, other than as a government-wide attempt to block all remaining oversight into his team's actions. Senate Republicans, as usual, are using Trump's action to either reaffirm their loyalty to Trump over the rule of law or to reaffirm their commitment to saying Trump probably oughtn't break laws while doing not a damn thing in response.

The eternally dumb Sen. Ron Johnson, proven a traitor to his own oath and nation during impeachment, as well as both before and after it, suggested that he was comfortable with the firing because Linick had not been sufficiently helpful in assisting Senate Republicans with an unidentified Senate investigation almost certainly pertaining to continued election-year efforts to smear Trump opponent Joe Biden.

The less dumb Sen. Chuck Grassley, also a traitor to his own oath and nation for the same multi-year patterns of behavior, issued the now bog-standard sternly worded statement noting that Congress requires explicit written reasons for such a firing, and that he will continue to be slightly huffy about that until the precise moment somebody asks him to take an actual action upon which he will fold like an origami swan.

Sen. Mitt Romney, alone in his impeachment opinion that perhaps if top administration officials are doing crimes it would behoove the Senate to at least momentary feign an interest in acting as check against such acts, gave a similar statement. Trump’s actions are a “threat to accountable democracy,” Romney warned, without suggesting he would engage in even the smallest of acts to combat that threat.

So the answer is no. No, it does not appear that the Republican Senate is willing to take any action as Trump continues his purge of those who have been investigating, or who have merely been charged with watching over, his team's continued pattern of grossly unethical and/or criminal acts.

It is likely that Grassley and other Republican concern-bearers will take no actions to support House efforts to call witnesses and probe the reasons for the firings, much less engage in such probes themselves. The party has made it absolutely clear that Trump and his allies are allowed to use government for their personal gain, and are allowed to sabotage any government effort or fire any government employee necessary in order to obtain that gain. They betrayed their country unforgivably in refusing to even conduct a trial or hear from direct witnesses, during impeachment; the play now will be to allow Trump to commit any number of further crimes, rather than conducting oversight between now and November. Trump's corrupt acts will not disappear then, whether or wins or loses, but for Johnson, Grassley and the others, putting off judgment day is paramount. Even if it is only temporary, it is now a party necessity.

Tapper to Senator Johnson: I find it hard to believe that if President Obama had gotten rid of four Inspectors General in six weeks that you would have the same attitude that you seem to have right now pic.twitter.com/7e9sBsVUT1

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) May 17, 2020

Mike Pompeo lied about NPR interview with Mary Louise Kelly—and there’s proof

Posted on by Hunter

It's hard to keep track of every detail of Republican corruption, but Trump-appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got himself into a new scandal when he cut an NPR interview short after journalist Mary Louise Kelly asked him about ousted ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, screamed at Kelly afterward, and dared her to find Ukraine on a "blank" map he keeps in his office, for some reason (which she did, as Kelly has a master's degree in European studies). He capped off this tour de force by sending out a crass official State Department statement claiming she was lying about all of it.

Among his claims: Kelly had agreed to limit questions only to Iran and was not supposed to ask about anything Ukraine-related. It turns out, because we've heard this song before, that Mike Pompeo was lying through his teeth on that one and The Washington Post was quickly given proof. Once again, Pompeo has used his State Department to lie to the American people.

The Washington Post obtained the email exchanges between NPR and Mike Pompeo's staff. They show that Kelly specifically did not agree to Pompeo's conditions, and specifically said she would also be asking questions about "Ukraine." "I never agree to take anything off the table," Kelly wrote in one email.

Pompeo's office pushed back, asking at least that Iran be the topic for "a healthy portion of the interview," once again signaling Pompeo's months-long aversion to answering any questions whatsoever about the impeachment-causing scandal he is buried in up to his ex-House Republican eyebrows. But Kelly gave only the assurance that her "plan" was to spend a "healthy portion" on Iran, with no promise that other subjects wouldn't come up.

So the secretary of state lied to the American people in an official State Department statement, which is many times worse than the Benghazi scandal House Republican Pompeo attempted to manufacture out of thin air. This is not surprising: He is crooked. He has repeatedly lied. He has been identified as a key figure in Trump's scheme to withhold military aid to Ukraine until a "Biden" investigation was announced.

Former national security adviser John Bolton's unreleased book manuscript alleges that Pompeo personally knew of the smear effort against Ambassador Yovanovitch, and knew that Rudolph Giuliani's claims about her were false, The book says Pompeo expressed a supposition that Giuliani was working to undermine Yovanovitch on behalf of other, unspecified clients. Pompeo is corrupt. He must be removed from office.

Pompeo responds to reports of rage-filled tirade against reporter with lie-filled statement

Posted on by Joan McCarter

The non-impeachment bombshell of the week was NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly's interview with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the interview in which he blustered and lied to the unflappable Kelly; the interview that so enraged him that he followed up with a rage- and expletive-filled rant at Kelly off tape. The State Department did not respond to NPR with a statement after the story broke Friday, but now has released a rage-filled statement from Pompeo on department letterhead, one in which he blusters and lies.

He says in that statement, "NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly lied to me, twice. First, last month in setting up our interview […]." Kelly, in the interview, refutes that. Pompeo tries to filibuster his way out of answering questions about Ukraine by saying "You know, I agreed to come on your show today to talk about Iran." Kelly interjects: "I confirmed with your staff [crosstalk] last night that I would talk about Iran and Ukraine." In discussion following the airing of the full interview, "All Things Considered" hosts Ari Shapiro and Audie Cornish confirm that Kelly has emails with Pompeo's staff confirming that she would discuss Iran and Ukraine (you can listen to the full show here). Not as well that the transcript the State Department posted does not have Pompeo or his aide who is in the room disputing that.

Continuing with the the second part of Pompeo's statement with the next lie: "[…] then again yesterday, in agreeing to have our post-interview conversation off the record." Kelly herself took that straight on Friday in explaining the interaction with ATC co-host Cornish. She said that the aide who was staffing Pompeo, and who escorted her to the room where Pompeo swore and yelled at her did not say that this meeting would be off the record, and said that she never would have agreed to it being off the record. In her words: "the same staffer who had stopped the interview reappeared, asked me to come with her—just me, no recorder, though she did not say we were off the record, nor would I have agreed." Yes, that's "he said, she said" but this is an experienced reporter for a respected national outlet. She's not going to flub something so basic.

Then, in his statement, Pompeo offers the usual Trumpian attack: "It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity." Then he really shows the full force of his ill-informed and vile misogyny: "It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine." That's his response to this, from Kelly: "He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map; I said yes. He called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked. I pointed to Ukraine."

Kelly NPR's bio says, was NPR's national security correspondent for NPR News and has had a distinguished reporting career since graduating from Harvard University as an undergrad and her master's degree. That degree is from Cambridge University in England. Her degree is in European studies.

Yes, she knows where Ukraine is on a map. That was just too big of a tell on Pompeo's part, coming up with something as farcical as this.

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