Month: July 2019

By Monday DHS reported that the Clint facility had moved most of the migrants to other facilities. There is a decrease in migrants coming in, which this report by the New York Times attributes to Mexico cracking down on immigrants on their side of the border; and DHS has “scaled back a policy requiring fingerprints from family members who applied to sponsor children in its care, speeding up the children’s release from government facilities.” On child separation, in come cases this is still happening: “The infants there had either been separated from adult family members with whom they had crossed the border or were the children of teenage mothers who had also been detained there. Some of the minors had been held there for nearly a month.”

According to two lawyers who toured the Clint center: “Many, including children as young as 2 or 3, have been separated from adult caretakers without any provisions for their care besides the unrelated older children also being held in detention.”
“As we interviewed the two brothers, he fell asleep on two office chairs drawn together, probably the most comfortable bed he had used in weeks. They had been separated from an 18-year-old uncle and sent to the Clint Border Patrol Station. When we met them, they had been there three weeks and counting.”
“A second-grader we interviewed entered the room silently but burst into tears when we asked who she traveled with to the US. “My aunt,” she said, with a keening cry. A bracelet on her wrist had the words “US parent” and a phone number written in permanent marker. We called the number on the spot and found out that no one had informed her desperate parents where she was being held. Some of the most emotional moments of our visit came witnessing children speak for the first time with their parents on an attorney’s phone.”

A doctor reported out: “After assessing 39 children under the age of 18, she described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”

All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.”

The New York Times: “On Tuesday, the C.B.P. official said that those moves had alleviated overcrowding in Clint, and allowed for the return of more than 100 children there. The spokesman said that no additional resources had been provided to the children who were sent back.”
Also: “I personally don’t believe these allegations,” the Customs and Border Protection official.

According to Vox: The lone member of the team of legal investigators who visited the El Paso facility in which many children were sent from Clint — called “Border Patrol Station 1” — told Vox that conditions there were just as bad as they were in Clint, with the same problems of insufficient food, no toothbrushes, and aggressive guards.
Increasingly — as lawyers have been reporting, and as the investigators who interviewed children in detention last week confirmed — children are coming to the US with a relative who is not their parent, and being separated.

Here is a good explanation of what the government’s legal argument is behind the soap and toothbrush comments. Ken White doesn’t think it will work: The United States’s loathsome argument—that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine children without soap, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and on concrete under bright lights—is morally indefensible. It’s also a spectacularly foolish argument to raise in the famously liberal Ninth Circuit, where the United States should have expected exactly the reception that it got.

The House passed a $4.5 billion emergency border aid bill Tuesday.

A judge rules on Tuesday to reopen the Census question case, saying that new evidence suggests Republicans may have inserted the citizenship question to decrease the voting power of minorities: “It is becoming difficult to avoid seeing that which is increasingly clear,” he wrote. “As more puzzle pieces are placed on the mat, a disturbing picture of the decision makers’ motives takes shape.”

Trump continues to deny the Carroll allegation: “No. 1, she’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, O.K.?”

Russia News

Due to a subpoena, Mueller has agreed to testify before the House in two back to back session on July 17.

At the G20 Summit, Trump joked with Putin about election interference and agreed with Putin that it would be good to “get rid” of journalists (on the one year anniversary of the shooting in an American newsroom).

At the end of the G20 trip Trump flew to the DMZ and became the first sitting US president to step inside North Korea. He met with Kim there.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%

The Trump campaign fired two polling companies over leaked internal polling data that showed Trump losing to Biden is key states.

Trump gave a big rally in Florida which he said was his 2020 kickoff rally. He said his “radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage. They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”

Trump and ICE has announced there will be sweeping immigrant arrests and deportations next week.

Here is the New York Times story about the youngest child separated at the border, taken at four months, not reunited until he was nine months old

A legal team that helps enforce the Flores settlement was allowed to tour a detention center in Clint Texas. Here are some quotes from an AP article: “A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.”
“There were three infants in the station, all with their teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. There are dozens more under 12. Fifteen have the flu, and 10 more are quarantined.”
“Children told lawyers that they were fed oatmeal, a cookie and a sweetened drink in the morning, instant noodles for lunch and a burrito and cookie for dinner. There are no fruits or vegetables. They said they’d gone weeks without bathing or a clean change of clothes.”

The New York Times reports that some children have been there for over a month: “Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.”
“children were being overseen by guards for Customs and Border Protection, which declined to comment for this story. She and her colleagues observed the guards wearing full uniforms — including weapons — as well as face masks to protect themselves from the unsanitary conditions.”
“Nearly every child I spoke with said that they were hungry,” Ms. Mukherjee said.

Government attorneys argued before the 9th Circuit that the Flores decree does not require detention centers to provide soap, toothpaste, blankets and sleeping conditions: “Fabian asked the Ninth Circuit to reverse Gee’s findings because they added new requirements – such as giving detainees soap and toothbrushes – that were not specifically included in Flores.

“One has to assume it was left that way and not enumerated by the parties because either the parties couldn’t reach agreement on how to enumerate that or it was left to the agencies to determine,” Fabian said.”

The acting Defense Secretary resigned due to a news about a messy divorce and family situation. It comes at a time when Trump has just sent 1,000 troops to the Middle East, and Iran has threatened to exceed limits on uranium enrichment:

Trump ordered and then called off an air strike of Iran targets after Iran shot down an American drone. Here is a good summary of the White House deliberations.

He claimed on Twitter that he called off the strike because the 150 deaths that would result would not be proportionate: “But an administration official informed about the discussions privately disputed that account. The 150-dead casualty estimate came not from a general but from a lawyer, according to the official. The estimate was developed by Pentagon lawyers drafting worst-case scenarios that, the official said, did not account for whether the strike was carried out during daytime, when more people might be present at the targets, or in the dark hours before sunrise, as the military planned.

That estimate was passed to the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, without being cleared with Mr. Shanahan or General Dunford. It was then conveyed to the president by the White House lawyers, at which point Mr. Trump changed his mind and called off the strike.”

“Meetings and memos aside, he trusts his instincts more than institutions, reaches out to unconventional sources of guidance and is willing to defy a roomful of advisers. He has not had a Senate-confirmed defense secretary for nearly six months, and the acting secretary resigned this week. And those advisers he does have were busy trying to outmaneuver each other.”

Trump is talking to people about replacing the Fed chair that he appointed, which would be an unprecedented power play to politicize monetary policy.

A writer, E Jean Carroll, has accused Trump of rape in an incident: during a chance encounter with the then-real estate developer at Bergdorf Goodman in late 1995 or early 1996, Trump attacked her in a dressing room. She said he knocked her head against a wall, pulled down her tights and briefly penetrated her before she pushed him off and ran out. Here is the Carroll book excerpt.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.6%

After being briefed on a devastating 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win, even though he is also trailing in public polls from key states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And when top-line details of the polling leaked, including numbers showing the president lagging in a cluster of critical Rust Belt states, Mr. Trump instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well.

After reporting that Kim Jon Un’s brother was a CIA asset, Trump said today that he “wouldn’t let that happen.”

Trump said in an interview with ABC News that he is open to accepting opposition research from foreign governments during the 2020 election, and that he would not consider this election interference. He half way walked it back in another interview on Fox News, saying he would “look at it” but also tell the FBI.

This caused a brief uproar among never Trumpers, but as David Grahm writes: Trump’s declaration, though, is neither especially surprising nor especially irrational…. It’s no surprise, then, that Trump would not foreswear a tactic that worked for him then. Rather, every indication is that the president’s electoral behavior will be worse in 2020, and there will be fewer constraints on him.

Pompeo accused Iran of attacking oil tankers in the Straight of Hermuz: Thursday’s attacks were especially brazen because one of the targeted ships is Japanese-owned, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran at the time carrying a message from President Trump. As Pompeo put it, Abe’s mission was “to ask the regime to de-escalate and enter into talks.” Abe was rebuffed in person by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and, symbolically, by the attack on the tanker.

TheNew York Times reported that the DOD’s Cyber Command has imbedded cyber weapons deep in Russia’s power grids. New laws and rules give Cyber Command autonomy to operate without presidential directive: “under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of ‘clandestine military activity’ in cyberspace, to ‘deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyber activities against the United States.’ Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.” The article made a point of noting that Trump “Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid…. and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials…”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%

NBC News reports that 37 children were held in vans overnight because the ICE facility was unprepared to process them.

By Wednesday, talks with Mexico had not produced an out from Trump’s tariff threat, and border crossings surged to a seven year high.

By Friday, Trump called the tariffs off, saying that Mexico had agreed to his demands. In fact, the details of the deal was worked out months before he ever threatened increasing tariffs by 5%: “It was unclear whether Mr. Trump believed that the agreement truly represented new and broader concessions, or whether the president understood the limits of the deal but accepted it as a face-saving way to escape from the political and economic consequences of imposing tariffs on Mexico.”

Trump was in England for most of the week on a state visit, and celebrating the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.6%

Russia Investigation

On Wednesday, Mueller gave a public statement at DOJ saying that his special counsel office is closed and he is resigning. Some key quotes:
“it is important that the office’s written work speak for itself.”
“When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.”
“if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime.”
“under long-standing Department policy, a President cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. “
“the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting President because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents are available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could now be charged.”
“the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”

“We appreciate that the Attorney General made the report largely public. I do not question the Attorney General’s good faith in that decision.”
“I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments—that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. That allegation deserves the attention of every American.”

While Mueller was measured and did not call for impeachment, many in the media interpret his statement (and report) as an impeachment referral to Congress. Dan Balz: Mueller’s appearance now leaves House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), with an unpalatable choice. She can authorize a politically explosive impeachment inquiry opposed by a majority of the American people — and one that surely would die in the Republican-controlled Senate — or appear to abdicate in the face of the evidence of obstruction contained in the Mueller report.

Wittes after Mueller spoke–he does not call for impeachment but he does think Congress needs to get a better strategy in how it is investigating Trump: “A big part of the story here is that key committees are just not pursuing a focused oversight agenda involving live testimony by the key witnesses in a fashion that is likely to prove effective. Congress has so far sought the testimony of relatively few people named in the report. It has not so far moved aggressively against anyone who has resisted.”

Frum makes a strong tactical case against impeachment: Right now Trump is fighting on many fronts to suppress many investigations of many different forms of alleged wrongdoing. He must plug more holes in the dike than he has fingers. But submerge all those many stories into one big question—“remove or don’t”—and the impeachers will have to focus their energy on the most salient allegations. The battlefront will narrow, and as it narrows, the unity of the executive branch will confer a tactical advantage… focus on the discovery of facts rather than arguments over consequences: “What wrongs did Trump do?” rather than “Is removal the right remedy for these wrongs?”

In Other News

New documents reveal that the Census Citizenship question was advocated by a Republican operative who said it would explicitly help the GOP create stronger gerrymandered districts.

News broke that during Trump’s visit to Japan over Memorial Day weekend, the White House had the USS John McCain cover the name of the ship with a tarp, and turned away sailors with the name of the ship on their uniforms from Trump’s speech.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.2%

The New York Times reports that Deutsche Bank investigators triggered several suspicious activity reports for Trump and Kushner finances, including payments to Russians during the summer of 2016, and that bank managers squashed the reports, taking no action.

GOP congressman Justin Amash became the first Republican congressperson to call for Trump’s impeachment

A series a legal blows to Trump attempting to fight congressional investigations came this week: The decision in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York could clear the way for Deutsche Bank and Capital One to hand over the president’s financial records to Democrats in the House. Trump’s attorneys could appeal the decision.

Trump gave Barr the power to declassify any intelligence he wishes about the origins of the Russia investigation. DNI director Coats issued a statement that basically warns Barr not to release any information that “would put our national security at risk.” According to the New York Times: “Though the ultimate power to declassify documents rests with the president, Mr. Trump’s delegation of that power to Mr. Barr effectively stripped Mr. Coats and the C.I.A. of control of their secrets. The move could endanger the agencies’ ability to keep the identities of their sources secret.

NBC News: “The Trump administration has identified at least 1,712 migrant children it may have separated from their parents in addition to those separated under the “zero tolerance” policy, according to court transcripts of a Friday hearing.”

A sixth child has died in CBP custody.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.2%