Month: June 2018

The dam of news reporting on what is going on on the Mexico boarder seemed to break on Sunday. The New York Times provides its first timeline of the family separation policy, with context from the Bush and Obama administrations. John Kelly floated the idea in March 2017 but it was dropped as too controversial. Under him the Department of Homeland Security “quietly tested the approach last summer in certain ares of Texas.”

Laura Bush wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post attaching the policy in strong terms: “These images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.”

There was also audio recordings of children crying in detention centers.

Trump and his Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielson both made public comments on Monday to defend the family separation program. Congress is beginning to make noises about doing something.

Sessions said on Monday: “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”

By Wednesday, with political pressure mounting, Trump tried to reverse course.  Trump signed an Executive Order that he claimed would end family separation at the boarder. What it really means is that families will be detained together, which is against the law after 20 days due to the Flores ruling. No telling what will happen at that point. Also, the order does nothing to reunite the 2000+ families already separated.

While there seems to be indications that families were no longer being separated, the question turned to how families already separated would be reunited.

While all of this was going down, there was much illuminating reporting on exactly what is happening on the boarder. We had the chance to learn this week about the history of the previous Central American immigration surge in 2014. Faced with this problem, and the fear that a larger surge would follow, the Obama administration tried to detain families together, which ran afoul of the Flores ruling. Trump is now facing a much smaller surge, but it is more than last summer, which was historically low.

Here is a good summary of facts about illegal crossings:

• .095% are gang members
• 50% are from Central America
• Most of those are coming from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) fleeing gang violence, and domestic violence particularly in Guatemala
• Central American families and unaccompanied children have constituted on average between 40-60% of the migrants from Central America arriving to the United States, “the families that the Trump administration has focused on separating make up an increasingly high proportion of the migrants who reach the U.S. border.”
• Before Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, 77% of these families were interviewed as “credible fear” cases, proved their case and were released until their asylum hearing–until June 20th they were being separated, and now they are being detained.

Some journalists (black ones, mostly) pointed out that race is a major factor in the family separation policy. Perry Bacon Jr. at 538 pointing out that 14% of Americans are now foreign born, which is a historical high: “According to Gallup, most Republicans want the number of immigrants to go down, while Democrats are both less concerned about immigration overall and increasingly opposed to reducing the number of immigrants.”

And Jamelle Bouie retweeted his article from February 6, 2017, which reads like reverse science-fiction, since is so clearly perceives what Trump is doing in June of 2018 with an article titled “Government by White Nationalism is Upon Us” written a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration. 

Stephen Miller gets a lot of attention in these race-related articles, probably because he is most honest about what he believes. He said to the New York Times that the family separation policy was good politics for Trump: “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border. And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border.”

In non-boarder news, It was reported that Commerce Secretary Wilber Ross used insider knowledge to short stock, which may be a legal issue for him down the road.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%

Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote a piece of about Trump’s foreign policy doctrine, which Trump’s own advisors summed up as “No friends, no enemies” and “We’re America, bitches.”

Trump met with Kim Jong Un on Tuesday for a few hours. They shook hands for a photo-op and signed a four point agreement. There was nothing new in the agreement and North Korea does not at this point have to make any concrete concessions. Conventional wisdom is that the world is safer because the summit makes war less likely in the short term, but that not much will change on the ground in North Korea.

By Wednesday Trump and the North Koreans were making contradictory claims about what they had just agreed to. And Trump was taking flack for saying the North Korea nuclear problem was as good as solved, and that Kim loved his people. Tellingly, Pompeo got prickly when he was asked with the process is for complete nuclear disarmament. “I find that question insulting and ridiculous and, frankly, ludicrous,” he said.

The DOD is working with South Korea to scale back or cancel the joint trainings this fall.

Primaries on Tuesday further cemented Trump’s hold on the GOP. Mark Sanford of North Carolina lost his primary due to some criticism of the president, even though he votes with Trump 89% of the time. Corey Stewart won the GOP primary for the Virginia senate race against Tim Kaine. He has supported one of organizers of the Charlottesville rally, an avowed White Nationalist, but has since withdrawn his support.

On Friday the New York Attorney General sued the Trump Foundation for illegal use of charity funds. Legal experts say people have gone to jail for less egregious misuse of funds.  The case was referred to the IRS, which may pursue penalties against Trump and his children.

In Russian News:

On Friday, a judge agreed to send Manafort to jail until his trial in September based on Mueller’s claims of witness tampering.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.1%

Sessions admits that the purpose of the child separation policy is to discourage people from coming to the boarder. He also is continuing the talking point that it is normal for all criminal to be separated from their child.

There are more and more stories about children separated from their parents at the boarder. Here is one about Jose, a 5-year old from Honduras placed with foster parents in Michigan. The foster parent angle is useful because they have been taking in migrant kids for years and can contrast how Trump’s separation policy is so much more traumatic than previous cases.

This story puts the lie to the Trump Admin talking point that the fact that the parents are criminals for crossing the boarder justifies separation. The mom was charged and jailed for only 27 days, then released to an immigration center. She was separated from her son another 8 months.

Here is a report about a DREAMer who has been here since he was 3 years old, was just sent back to Mexico. He was killed by gangs within weeks of his return.

A father separated from his daughter then committed suicide in his cell. And here is another report from the boarder by the Washington Post. 

Trump went to the G-7 summit this weekend. Macron said on Thursday they are considering excluding the US from the joint G-7 statement. Still all the members were very diplomatic during the summit and agreed to final language for the communique. 

Trump arrived to the G-7 Summit late and left early. On the flight from Canada to Singapore he tweeted that he would not sign the carefully crafted joint G-7 statement. He also called Trudeau weak and dishonest. He appears to have been upset by a press conference Trudeau gave and reversed his team’s decision to sign. 

In Russia news:

On Monday Mueller’s team released information saying that Manafort attempted to tamper with witnesses to the investigation using encrypted apps and emails. They are requesting a judge send him to jail until trial.

Muller then added a new indictment on Manafort for witness tampering, and also incited a new person, Kilimnik, who is an associate of Manaforts.

Ryan concurred with Gowdy and others that the FBI did not spy on the Trump campaign.

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Trump’s Job Approval:  41.60%

Trump is accelerating his trade war with allies Canada, Mexico and the EU. The tariffs he said earlier in the spring that he was going to waive for them are back on. 

And Trump also declared the North Korea summit is back on.

Trump pardoned Dinish D’Souza on Thursday, another pardon people suspect is a veiled message to DOJ and Mueller in particular. Here is a good history of D’Souza career from conservative up-and-coming intellectual to troll and crank.

By coincidence (or perhaps not) this is the same week that Roseanne Barr was fired from ABC and her hit show canceled because she tweeted Valerie Jarret was the love child of a Planet of the Apes character and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, McKay Coppins wrote this profile of Steven Miller for The Atlantic: “the journey from winking provocateur to racist ideologue might be shorter than many imagine. You start out with the goal of provoking the left—and, well, what’s more provocative than posting a racist meme on the internet? But with each new like and upvote, an incentive structure forms, a community coalesces, an identity hardens. Before long, the line between performance and principle is blurred beyond recognition, your “true” beliefs buried under so many layers of irony that they’ve been rendered irrelevant.”

In Russian News:

News came that McCabe wrote a memo about a conversation he had with Rosenstein shortly after Trump fired Comey that suggests Trump fired Comey because of Russia. He turned this over to Mueller, and also a draft of Trump’s reasoning for firing Comey that Trump gave to Rosenstein.

On Saturday a letter to Mueller from Trump’s legal team was released that claimed Trump cannot be indicted, cannot be charged with obstruction of justice, or forced to answer questions.

Here is Wittes trying to glean insight into Mueller’s thinking based on issues the Trump lawyers raised: “he may be investigating a series of overt acts in what he believes could be a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Under such a theory, each of the overt acts at issue might (or might not) be legal in and of itself, but may feed an unlawful objective: some kind of agreement to violate one or more obstruction statutes.”

Trump’s Approval Rating: 41.6%

On Sunday Trump tweeted a demand that the DOJ investigation spying on his campaign. Rosenstein responded by handing the question to the inspector general: “If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action.”

Here is Ben Wittes on the danger Trump’s threat’s pose to the rule of law and the DOJ in particular.

Trump, Wray and Rosenstein made some sort of agreement on Monday. Details are unclear early in the week, but the broad outline is that the DOJ/FBI will turn over more documents to Congress.

Some scholars are calling this a “direct assault” on the Justice Department’s independence.

Wray, Rosenstein and Coates met with members of Congress Thursday in an attempt to defuse the conflict with the White House. No one from Congress asked to see any documents, and Nunes said nothing at the meeting. Ryan and McConnell gave the impression that they heard nothing that changed their minds on the investigation. There is a sense of the adults in the room trying to manage a bad situation from getting out of hand by defusing the Nunes/Trump feud with the FBI–for now. 

Trump’s trade deal with China fell through after infighting within his negotiators. Mnunchin and Novaro broke out in a shouting match in front of the Chinese.

Broidy was in the news again: “After a year spent carefully cultivating two princes from the Arabian Peninsula, Elliott Broidy, a top fundraiser for President Donald Trump, thought he was finally close to nailing more than $1 billion in business.”

The Democrats are beginning to openly talk about what their winning narrative should be for the 2018 midterms. The consensus may be forming to talk about issues like jobs and healthcare, but as far as Trump goes focus on his corruption.

Pelosi at a CNN Town Hall on Wednesday night: “Impeachment is to me divisive. If the facts are there, the facts are there, then this would have to be bipartisan to go forward. But if it is viewed as partisan, it will divide the country. And I just don’t think that is what we should do.”

On Thursday Trump canceled his North Korea summit.

Here is a harrowing case of one father separated at the boarder from his 18 month old son for over four months. The details show what’s it is like for these parents, and how little they are told about their child’s location and how or when they might be reunited.

An associate of Cohen plead guilty, and will potentially provide information about him to law enforcement.

The BBC reported that Cohen was paid between $400,000 and $600,00 to arrange a meeting between the Ukrainian president and Trump. After the meeting happened, the Ukrainian internal investigation of Manafort was closed.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%