LAWLESS LAW ENFORCEMENT: I was remiss last week in failing to discuss the brutal killing of Stephon Clark, the young man who was killed in the backyard of his grandparents’ home by police officers who, supposedly, mistook his cell phone for a gun. The only reasons they had to suspect he had a gun appears to be that he was black and it was nighttime. At most, he was accused of breaking some car windows — a misdemeanor that is (it should go without saying) not a capital crime. The police immediately put out false statements about the circumstances of the incident — in which they shot Clark 20 times — that were belied by bodycam footage and, later, an independent autopsy that showed 6 of the 8 bullets that hit Clark hit him in the back. After the shooting, the officers muted their body cams so they could discuss the shooting (and get their stories straight). At the same time, last week the Louisiana Attorney General announced that no charges would be filed in relation to the 2016 police killing of Alton Sterling, executed for the crime of selling CDs outside a 7-11 while black. The office simultaneously released the bodycam footage of the incident, which shows one officer immediately escalating the situation, holding his gun to Sterling’s temple and screaming that he would shoot him in the head. And then on Wednesday, police in Brooklyn shot and killed a black man because he was holding a metal pipe — and we all know that it’s illegal for people to hold metal pipes.
These awful incidents were capped by a Supreme Court opinion on Monday holding that cops who, responding to a “welfare check,” shot a woman standing in her own driveway could not be sued because they did not violate any clearly established constitutional right. This is yet another in a long line of court cases that immunize police killings, as Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent: “[The majority’s] decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”
On this topic, I highly recommend this piece by conservative David French, who argues, “the least we can ask is that cops show as much discipline as soldiers at war.”
MUELLER UPDATE: The Washington Post broke some major news in the Mueller investigation this week. The top headline was that Mueller has apparently told Trump’s lawyers that Trump is a “subject” of the investigation but not a “target.” And Trump’s team is claiming victory over this and breathing a huge sigh of relief. Which is just weird, since I thought Trump’s entire focus when he fired Comey was to prove that he was not himself personally being investigated. Now we know for sure that he is being investigated; it’s just that Mueller’s team either hasn’t found “substantial evidence linking [Trump] to the commission of a crime,” or (more likely) Mueller believes a sitting president cannot be criminally indicted — so what would be the point of making him a target of a criminal investigation? There’s some speculation that Mueller may be trying to bait Trump into an interview by making him think that the investigation isn’t focused on him — which is exactly the sort of obvious and stupid pseudo-flattery move that Trump would fall for. (That said, I absolutely hate this idea that it should even be an option that Trump not answer questions from Mueller’s team. I don’t know how many ways there is to say that no person is above the law. It’s insane to me how mainstream the idea is of Trump just refusing to cooperate.) The other major news in this story is that Mueller is planning to release two reports, with the first one — about Trump’s possible obstruction of justice — to be released in June or July. This strongly suggests that Mueller has found something worth reporting; if his investigation had found no evidence of obstruction, I don’t see why he’d be writing up a report. A note on process: “Mueller must privately share his findings with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who will then decide whether they should be made public.”
There was more Mueller news this week. In a filing in the Manafort case, Mueller’s team attached a 2017 memo from Rosenstein outlining the scope of Mueller’s investigation, and it specifically authorized an examination of whether Manafort “committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian officials.” Jeffrey Toobin points out that this puts to bed the (ridiculous) Republican argument that, even if collusion happened, it wasn’t a crime. “That statement could not be clearer that Mueller can examine whether a member of the Trump campaign and the Russians were ‘colluding,’ and thus working together ‘in violation of United States law.’ In other words, according to Rosenstein, collusion would be a crime.” There was still more news: Another court filing this week revealed that Mueller had obtained a new search warrant for Manafort last month, “relating to ongoing investigations that are not the subject of either of the current prosecutions involving Manafort.” In other words, the searches are looking for evidence about other people and other crimes, not the (many, many) crimes Mueller has already been charged with.
PRUITT’S REALLY GREAT WEEK: Yep, that headline is real. That’s because this man saw 2-3 new stories about his penny ante corruption come out each day of the week and yet, as of writing, he still has a job. And not only that — he got a Trump tweet of confidence on Friday and a sit-down with Trump at the White House. So let’s review what Pruitt’s been up to:
- We already knew that he rented a condo from the wife of an energy lobbyist with business before the EPA and paid $50 per night. When asked about it this week, he lied and said the lobbyist did not have business before the EPA. The EPA ethics advisor who supposedly signed off on the arrangement (post hoc, just this year) now says he didn’t have all the facts needed to make his determination. We also learned that, even with this sweetheart deal, he got behind on his payments. But here’s the best part: Pruitt was only supposed to be staying in the condo temporarily, but repeatedly asked to extend his “lease.” The lobbyist and his wife “became so frustrated by their lingering tenant that they eventually pushed him out and changed their locks. After trying to nudge Pruitt out of their home over the course of several months, the Harts finally told Pruitt in July that they had plans to rent his room to another tenant.” Changed the locks!! You literally cannot make this shit up.
- We already knew he (bizarrely) insisted on round-the-clock security. This week we learned that that security and travel has cost the taxpayers millions of dollars. And while he says that he has to fly first class because of security concerns, reporters revealed that when he’s paying his own way, he suddenly feels safe enough to travel coach. We also learned that he frequently asked his security detail to put on its sirens so he could speed through DC traffic to get to important government funct–er, wait, I mean, private dinner engagements.
- We already knew that he spent $40,000 on a soundproof phone booth. This week we also learned that he tried to spend thousands of dollars on totally normal and necessary office furniture like bullet-proof desks.
- Scott Pruitt arranged for friends from Oklahoma to get jobs at the EPA and then gave them huge salary raises. And then, when he was asked about it (in a surprisingly tough Fox News interview), he lied and said he knew nothing about it. Yeah, that’s not true. The Intercept reports that last year, Pruitt hired a banker who had given him a sweetheart mortgage to a major post at the EPA — just weeks after the man had been banned for life from banking by the FDIC. Meanwhile, one of his top aides resigned this week after congressional Democrats asked the inspector general to investigate whether this person ever actually, you know, showed up for work. (She says she resigned so she could pursue work in the “private sector.”)
- At the same time that he was hiring his friends and showering them with money, he was firing anyone who questioned his spending. “At least five officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, four of them high-ranking, were reassigned or demoted, or requested new jobs in the past year after they raised concerns about the spending and management of the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt.”
Republicans are circling the wagons, urging Trump to keep Pruitt on, and so far it seems to be working. Even though John Kelly told Trump to fire Pruitt, the EPA grifter remains in place (for now). The Right asserts that all of this ethics business is just a plot by the left to get a super effective guy out of the Trump administration. But Pruitt’s overzealousness can’t combat his sloppiness; the Times reports that he “has often been less than rigorous in following important procedures, leading to poorly crafted legal efforts that risk being struck down in court.” Indeed, Politico’s Michael Grunwald writes, “Pruitt has yet to create new regulations that would outlast his tenure or Trump’s, or to rescind any of the regulations Obama created. He’s only been able to delay a few that were already on hold before he took office because they were mired in litigation—most notably Obama’s rules protecting wetlands from development and limiting carbon emissions from power plants. He’s vowed to repeal and replace them both, but he’s barely begun those processes. . . . But the EPA rules that were in effect in 2016 are still the rules in 2018, despite Pruitt’s efforts to overturn them.” Still, on Saturday night, Trump posted an effusive defense of Pruitt, ticking through–and dismissing–each scandal and concluding that he’s “doing a great job!” So…guess he’s staying put!) One last thing: The EPA has justified Pruitt’s lavish spending by pointing to the danger he’s in; this weekend, a spokesperson told Fox News that he has received an “unprecedented number of death threats.” But a Buzzfeed reporter filed a FOIA request with the EPA for all death threats made against Pruitt, and the agency responded that it had none.
ONE MORE THING: Brian Beutler: “We are . . . plumbing the depths of public corruption (and perhaps criminality) the right is willing to tolerate as the price of not capitulating to ‘the left.’ It’s a kind of trial run for the not-altogehter-hypothetical moment when Special Counsel Robert Mueller concludes the president has committed federal crimes, and everyone who holds out hope Republicans will reach their breaking point with Trump should pay close attention.”
ENDLESS, CONSTANT GRIFT: “Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s appointee to oversee the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has given big pay raises to the deputies he has hired to help him run the bureau, according to salary records obtained by The Associated Press. Mulvaney has hired at least eight political appointees since he took over the bureau in late November. Four of them are making $259,500 a year and one is making $239,595. That is more than the salaries of members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and nearly all federal judges apart from those who sit on the Supreme Court.”
Endorsements:
- First, another political candidate: Lindy Miller, running for Georgia Public Service Commission, endorsed by Michael Chanin. Michael writes: “Lindy’s needed campaign for Georgia Public Service Commission represents the progress we can make in these critically important races.” The PSC is a 6-member body that regulates GA’s utlities, “guiding both the cost of energy and the type of consumption. Tellingly, Georgia boasts the largest coal-fired power plant in the country and produces less than 6% of its energy from renewable sources (5% of which are from hydro power built during the Coolidge administration).” Michael continues: For those uninitiated with the impact the Public Service Commission has on the life of all citizens in the state, I want to give brief context on an important example of Institutional Corruption costing people billions of dollars for which they have no control, while the Southern Company has a legislatively mandated return on invested capital, per 2009 legislation passed by a Republican controlled house, senate and governor [I know a lot of hyperlinks but this last article is crazy!]. A meaningful portion of the Atlanta population pays more than 10% of their income in energy costs. That’s shameful. Lindy’s running for PSC to fight for jobs, because jobs will not come from burning more coal. She’s running for the infrastructure our state deserves to lower the cost of power. And she’s running because climate change is a scientific fact, and despite the financial opposition the managers of a publicly traded energy company might have, the best interest for all of us is to sprint as fast as we can to figure out how to stop the unmitigated damage we cause the planet.” Find out more about Lindy and support her campaign here.
- Fun video of the week: Seth Meyers’ gleeful shock at Trump’s Easter pronouncements.
- Read this short thread on the newest right-wing grift operation.
- Here’s a great campaign ad against a New York Republican that should provide a blueprint for other Democrats.
- On that note, Jonathan Chait argues that the Democrats’ singular campaign theme should be Trump’s corruption. His column shows how that theme can tie all the rest of the Democrats’ agenda into a package that tends to resonate a lot with voters.
- You have to see this assemblage of all of Trump’s self-annointed superlatives in one place. It is horrifying? Hilarious? Almost unbelievably pathetic Insanely dispiriting? All of the above!
- Molly Ringwald’s essay reexamining her most famous movies in the wake of #MeToo is a real must-read.
This Week in Political News 