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BY BRIAN BEUTLER & CROOKED MEDIA Friday, March 8, 2019 |
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| —Resistance hero Michael Cohen’s International Women’s Day message to President Trump
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| MAINTAIN THE SWAMP |
| Political corruption is thriving in President Trump’s Washington, and Republicans are reveling in it.
On Friday, House Democrats took a stand by passing H.R. 1—comprehensive pro-democracy legislation that would enhance voting rights and restrict the power money and lobbyists have over politics. House Republicans voted against it unanimously, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to never allow the Senate to even debate it.
Their party-line position in favor of shadowy influence over politics came less than 24 hours after a federal judge in Virginia offered President Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort an extraordinarily lenient sentence for committing decades worth of white collar crime in the political influence business, which entailed defrauding the American people out of tens of millions of dollars.
Manafort, who colluded with several Russians during the 2016 campaign, is a Republican poster-child for the very kind of corruption Republicans just voted to preserve. The right, led by Trump, celebrated Manafort’s sweetheart, soft-on-crime sentence.
On the courthouse steps after the sentencing hearing ended, Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing made a coded plea to Trump for a pardon, so that Manafort might not serve any hard time at all. But it was also an admission that Manafort did indeed engage in bad acts during the election.
“There is absolutely no evidence that Paul Manafort was involved in any collusion with any government official or Russia,” Downing said. Trump, as intended, cited this comment as the basis for repeating lies about his campaign’s partnership with the Kremlin during the election, but the specificity of it is no accident. A different federal judge has found that Manafort lied about funneling private, sensitive, detailed campaign data during the campaign to a Russian intelligence agent—just one who happens not to be a current Russian government official.
And this is a way of doing things that Republicans, by their votes and their ongoing efforts to cover up Trump’s crimes, have shown they’re very satisfied with. |
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| Elizabeth Warren has introduced a plan to revamp and beef up antitrust enforcement so that it would apply to tech-platform giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Close Warren watchers won’t be surprised by her approach to big tech, and economic concentration in general, but it is a critically important issue, and one that will shape the Democratic primary debate in profound ways. Even centrist Democratic candidates like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar have said supportive things about taking on monopolies, and that's key because antitrust enforcement laws already exist. They are theoretically powerful tools in the right hands, and can be put to use even if Democrats decide to leave the filibuster in place. So, good for Warren. |
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| White House Communications Director/former Fox News sexual assault cover-up artist Bill Shine abruptly resigned on Friday, supposedly to go work for the Trump campaign, which is where every failure and crook in Trump world gets shuffled off to when they become problematic, so this definitely isn’t about anything weird.
Billionaire mercenary Trumpkin Erik Prince can’t keep his story straight about his involvement in the Trump campaign, and in foreign efforts to influence the election, which is too bad for him because he told an apparently false version of that story to Congress under oath. Watch.
Foreign nationals and entities gave at least tens of thousands of dollars, to President Trump’s scandal-plagued inaugural committee, which is under federal criminal investigation, through shell companies that masked the identities of the donors. Sounds bad.
Here’s a picture of Donald Trump having a grand old time at a Super Bowl party for rich people with the woman who founded the spa where Robert Kraft solicited sex from human-trafficking victims.
CNN will no longer allow Jeff Sessions’s former Justice Department spokeswoman, who pledged loyalty to Donald Trump, to edit the network’s 2020 campaign coverage. Sarah Isgur will instead join the network as an on-air political analyst, so she can tell viewers about how Trump’s immigration policy is great and not racist, and we can all marvel that CNN execs thought putting her in charge of real journalists was a good idea.
As if tech money and land-use restrictions hadn’t already made San Francisco unaffordable to middle-class people, now a bunch of IPO money from companies that have never turned a profit will allow a new class of lottery-winning millionaires to flood the city and drive more teachers, police officers, nurses, and firefighters out.
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| The White House refused to provide Congress with documents pertaining to President Trump’s nakedly corrupt interventions into the clearance process (to give his real estate-heir daughter and her real estate-heir husband access to the nation’s top secrets) so a whistleblower sent over the documents instead. Earlier this year, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) hired former Trump National Security Council staffers to work for his House intelligence committee as he investigates the extent of Trump's foreign conflicts of interest. By taking over the House, Democrats have given career staff, and Trump officials with axes to grind against their corrupt and cruel coworkers, an outlet to make sure there’s accountability for wrongdoing. |
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| The 28 members of the 2018 world champion U.S. women’s national soccer team filed a gender-pay discrimination lawsuit on International Women’s Day against the U.S. Soccer Federation. They allege that they play more games and win more of them than the men’s national team does, yet face a different pay structure and don’t receive equal training, transportation, or medical treatment. The current team wants its suit, which seeks backpay and damages, to be treated as a class action representing current and former players since 2015. |
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