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Thursday, 08/24/17Watch the full episode of Thursday night's The Rachel Maddow Show.
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Friday's Mini-Report, 8.25.17
Today's edition of quick hits:
* Quite a storm: "Thousands of people fled parts of coastal Texas on Friday as Hurricane Harvey strengthened to a major Category 3 storm and hurtled toward the state."
* Hmm: "Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton's emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter."
* Venezuela: "President Trump moved Friday to restrict the Venezuelan government's access to the U.S. financial system and squeeze the oil-based economy that sustains President Nicolás Maduro but stopped short of imposing a full oil embargo."
* Stay tuned: "President Donald Trump appears likely to pull the plug on DACA, the Obama-era program allowing young people who came to the U.S. illegally as children to remain here, several government officials said Friday."
* An increasingly bizarre story: "At least 16 Americans working at the U.S. Embassy in Havana became ill last year in a mysterious health attack, the State Department disclosed on Thursday."
* Gary Cohn, the head of Donald Trump's economic council, explained yesterday why he didn't resign in the wake of Charlottesville. His rationalization really doesn't make any sense.
* This is an excellent point: "In the federal government and in most states, there are consequences when governments deprive Americans of their constitutional right to liberty -- through, say, wrongful imprisonment. So why aren't there more meaningful consequences when states deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote?"
CIA's Brennan: Some in Congress overlooked 'gravity' of Russia attack
About a year ago, as U.S. intelligence officials recognized the scope of the Russian attack on the American election, then-CIA Director John Brennan warned Alexander Bortnikov, the director of Russia's Federal Security Service, that Moscow was doing major harm to the countries' relationship.
But just as importantly, Brennan told his Russian counterpart that the espionage operation would fail. "I said that all Americans, regardless of political affiliation or whom they might support in the election, cherish their ability to elect their own leaders without outside interference or disruption," Brennan explained. "I said American voters would be outraged by any Russian attempt to interfere in election."
Regrettably, the former CIA director's assumptions about basic American patriotism were mistaken. Not only did many voters fall for the Russian attack, but as BuzzFeed reported, some leading members of Congress didn't much care about the foreign intervention in our democracy.
In an internal memo to CIA employees last December, CIA Director John Brennan complained that some members of Congress he had briefed about the agency's assessment that Russia interfered in the US presidential election did not "understand and appreciate the importance and gravity of the issue."
Brennan's Dec. 16, 2016, memo did not identify the lawmakers who expressed skepticism about the CIA's judgment that Russia helped Donald Trump win the election. But three intelligence sources told BuzzFeed News that Brennan's criticism was directed at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. John Cornyn, the majority whip. At the time, the two Republican lawmakers downplayed the importance of the CIA's intelligence. Cornyn said it was "hardly news."
In other words, when the CIA told these lawmakers about the most important attack on the United States since 9/11, they just didn't much care.
Trump finding new ways to bungle the tax-reform fight
Not long after taking office, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin assured Americans that tax reform would pass by August. That obviously didn't happen. Later, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short said the administration's tax plan wouldn't pass by August, but before September, the blueprint would be "locked in place." That obviously didn't happen, either.
The White House's plan then changed a bit more: Donald Trump would spend August selling the public on the virtues of his tax reform plan, before unveiling the "full blown" presidential blueprint after Labor Day. We can add this to the list of things that were supposed to happen but didn't.
The punch-line, however, was delivered yesterday. Bloomberg Politics reported that the plan Team Trump vowed to unveil does not and will not exist.
Republican congressional leaders don't expect to release a joint tax plan with the White House next month, and they'll rely instead on House and Senate tax-writing committees to solve the big tax questions that remain unanswered, according to two people familiar with the matter.
A CNBC reporter confirmed with a White House official that the Trump administration, despite its previous vows, will not release a tax proposal of its own, leaving it to congressional Republicans to work out the details.
If this pattern sounds vaguely familiar, it's because this isn't the first time the president and his team promised to unveil a detailed policy proposal on a key priority, only to fail miserably.
Friday's Campaign Round-Up, 8.25.17
Today's installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Another setback for Texas Republicans: "The state of Texas is on an impressive losing streak in court. On Thursday evening, a three-judge panel of a federal district court in San Antonio found that the state House district map purposefully undercut the voting power of African American and Latino voters -- the ninth racial discrimination case the state has lost since 2011 and the fourth in just over a week."
* Former President Barack Obama hasn't played much of a role in electoral politics this year, but he did throw this support this week behind St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman (D), whose election is on Tuesday in Florida.
* Eric Trump, who's ostensibly steering clear of politics while helping run his father's business, was a featured speaker last night at the RNC Summer Meeting in Nashville. [Correction: I thought he was speaking tonight, but it was last night.]
* On a related note, top officials from Trump's campaign committee will also be on hand in Nashville, talking about RNC members with the president's 2020 bid in mind.
* It's not exactly a secret that Sen. Susan Collins (R) is interested in Maine's gubernatorial race next year, and the senator said yesterday she'll announce her plans by the end of September.
* On a related note, Maine's current governor, the perpetually controversial Paul LePage (R), said yesterday he believes it's "highly unlikely" Collins could "win a Republican primary."
Tax-cut advocates stop pretending to care about the deficit
It was a political dynamic so absurd, it's still hard to believe Republicans pulled it off. During George W. Bush's presidency, GOP policymakers decided, as Dick Cheney once declared, that "deficits don't matter." Republicans put two wars, two tax cuts, Medicare expansion, and a Wall Street bailout on the national credit card -- and made no effort to pay for any of it.
Reflecting on the era, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who's been in Congress since the start of the Carter administration, told the Associated Press in 2009 that "it was standard practice not to pay for things" during Bush's presidency. A year later, the Utah Republican told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell "a lot of things weren't paid for" before Barack Obama became president.
And then GOP officials decided everything they'd said and done no longer mattered, and that any attempt to add so much as a penny to the debt was a crime against the American way of life. It was a transparent and ridiculous sham, which much of the political world accepted at face value. After all, voters were told, Republicans were the party of "deficit hawks."
Now GOP policymakers control the levers of power again, and right on cue, many of the folks who pretended to be concerned about the deficit in the Obama era have decided to drop the facade. Bloomberg Politics reported yesterday:
It was only about five years ago that powerful people in finance loved talking about the horrendous consequences for the U.S. if it didn't get its finances under control. They warned that the federal debt -- and the interest payments -- could eventually get high enough to drag down the economy, burden future generations, and even threaten national security. Chief executive officers of five of the biggest U.S. banks joined a campaign called Fix the Debt, signing on with hedge fund billionaires, asset managers, and private equity executives, as well as former lawmakers and others.
The conversation on Wall Street changed after November's election.
Imagine that. The "Fix the Debt" crowd adopted a "Forget the Debt" posture the moment Donald Trump started talking up tax breaks for the wealthy.
The White House challenge: limiting Trump's diet of wrong information
It's difficult to identify one overarching problem plaguing Donald Trump's presidency, but one of the key areas of difficulty is the amount of nonsense he's consumed on a nearly daily basis.
Politico reported a few months ago, "Aides sometimes slip him stories to press their advantage on policy; other times they do so to gain an edge in the seemingly endless Game of Thrones inside the West Wing. The consequences can be tremendous.... A news story tucked into Trump's hands at the right moment can torpedo an appointment or redirect the president's entire agenda." (Donald Trump Jr. has reportedly been "a huge problem" in this area.)
Ideally, Trump would have better critical-thinking skills, and it wouldn't be quite so easy for people in the president's orbit, eager to exploit his ignorance and gullibility, to manipulate him. But these are the circumstances we face now.
Or more to the point, these are the circumstances White House Chief of Staff John Kelly inherited and is desperate to change. Politico reported yesterday:
Confronted with a West Wing that treated policymaking as a free-for-all, President Donald Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, is instituting a system used by previous administrations to limit internal competition -- and to make himself the last word on the material that crosses the president's desk. [...]
In a conference call last week, Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide -- White House staff secretary Rob Porter, a little-known but highly regarded Rhodes scholar who overlapped with Jared Kushner as an undergraduate at Harvard -- will review all documents that cross the Resolute desk.
And while that sounds sensible -- indeed, these steps would bring this White House in line with every modern White House -- there's no reason to assume this will help address one of Trump's most glaring shortcomings.
Raising suspicions, Trump keeps intervening where he shouldn't
At this stage in the Trump-Russia scandal, we're aware of quite a few instances in which the president has intervened, to one degree or another, in the hopes of protecting himself from the controversy's fallout. It's hard not to wonder, though, about the instances we don't know about.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), for example, took steps several weeks ago to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from possible removal. The effort was well grounded -- Donald Trump had already publicly raised the prospect of trying to oust the former FBI director leading the investigation. Politico, however, shed new light on what transpired behind the scenes:
Trump dialed up Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Aug. 7, two days before a blunt call with the Senate majority leader that spilled over into a public feud. Tillis is working with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) on a bill designed to protect Robert Mueller, the independent counsel investigating the president's Russia connections, from any attempt by Trump to fire him.
The Mueller bill came up during the Tillis-Trump conversation, according to a source briefed on the call -- the latest signal of the president's impatience with GOP senators' increasing declarations of independence from his White House. Trump was unhappy with the legislation and didn't want it to pass, one person familiar with the call said.
In other words, after learning that Tillis was working in a bipartisan fashion to protect Mueller, the president thought it'd be a good idea to reach out to Tillis to complain about the proposal.
This is obviously the sort of thing we'd expect from a president panicking about the threat posed by a scandal, but the Washington Post published a helpful list yesterday noting each of the times Trump has quietly tried to call off the dogs pursuing the Russia scandal. It's not a short list, and it includes several well-known gems, including Trump seeking "loyalty" from then-FBI Director James Comey and asking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to help "protect him" from congressional inquiries into the Russia affair.
I'm still eager to know, however, about the attempts that haven't already been exposed.
Yet another Republican becomes a Trump target
At yesterday's White House press briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters "the relationships" between Donald Trump and congressional Republicans "are fine." Soon after, asked about Sen. Bob Corker's (R-Tenn.) concerns about the president, Trump's spokesperson added that the senator's rhetoric has been "ridiculous and outrageous," and "doesn't dignify a response from this podium."
The president kept this going this morning via Twitter:
"Strange statement by Bob Corker considering that he is constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in '18. Tennessee not happy!"
For those keeping score at home, the number of prominent Republican officials who've been publicly targeted over the last month now includes Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and now, Corker.
This morning's message, however, wasn't just a casual brush-back pitch: Trump suggested the Tennessee Republican should be concerned about his re-election prospects next year. By all appearances, Corker isn't especially vulnerable -- to a primary rival or a Democratic challenger -- but the point is, a GOP president isn't supposed to be going after an incumbent senator of his own party ahead of his re-election bid.
We discussed yesterday the deteriorating conditions surrounding Trump and his ostensible Republican allies, but as it turns out, they haven't yet hit rock bottom. The president seems to realize someone's going to be held responsible for his party's failures, and he's furiously taking steps to make sure it isn't him.
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About The Rachel Maddow Show
Launched in 2008, “The Rachel Maddow Show” follows the machinations of policy making in America, from local political activism to international diplomacy. Rachel Maddow looks past the distractions of political theater and stunts and focuses on the legislative proposals and policies that shape American life - as well as the people making and influencing those policies and their ultimate outcome, intended or otherwise.
