BY BRIAN BEUTLER, PRIYANKA ARIBINDI

& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, May 9, 2019

—Jeff Sessions on his wild ride with Rod Rosenstein

NOW LET THEM ENFORCE IT

President Trump and his administration face new legal demands that will test the limits of their determination to thwart all congressional oversight.

First, the Senate intelligence committee has subpoenaed Trump’s son, future Juul salesman Donald Trump, Jr. He’s expected to be asked about his false testimony to the Senate about his involvement in the Trump Tower Moscow project. Junior claimed under oath that he only had peripheral knowledge of the deal, but Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified that he briefed Don Jr. about it about 10 times. (In fairness, most things have to be explained to Don Jr. 10 times before he retains any of it.)

Second, the House intelligence committee has subpoenaed the intelligence and counterintelligence information investigators gathered during the Russia investigation.

The stakes of ignoring these subpoenas are very high for two reasons:

• Trump will alienate both Democrats and Republicans by obstructing these inquiries. Both committees issued the subpoenas on a bipartisan basis. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) controls the Senate intelligence committee; Democrats control the House intelligence committee, but the committee’s vice chairman, Devin Nunes, joined chairman Adam Schiff in demanding the Russia investigation intelligence.

• It would be flagrantly illegal to flout these subpoenas. Donald Trump, Jr., is a private citizen, who has no claim to the privileges that might allow administration officials to withhold certain information from Congress. He can plead the fifth, or start talking. And the congressional intelligence committees have an express legal right to the kind of information Schiff and Nunes have demanded, which means the executive branch theoretically can’t withhold it from Congress, unlike other materials.

But Trump seems to have learned something from House Democrats’ unwillingness to impeach him: that he and his allies can violate the law, and nobody will stop them. That’s why an anonymous source close to Don Jr. (who is definitely not Don Jr. and only sounds exactly like Don Jr. by coincidence) told reporters that he won’t honor the Senate subpoena. Trump loyalists in Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Burr’s North Carolina colleague Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), called on Burr to withdraw the Don Jr. subpoena, as well. And don’t forget: Attorney General William Barr has refused to cooperate with the House at all.

If the ultimate remedy to presidential misconduct is off the table from the jump, then compliance requires political pressure from his own party or a sudden discovery of respect for the Constitution and the obligations of the office. Seems like those are both unlikely to materialize. So onward and downward we go.

The Alabama state Senate has delayed a vote on legislation that would make performing abortions a felony punishable by up to 99 years in prison but is expected to pass the bill next week. It would become the country’s most restrictive and plainly unconstitutional abortion law, designed to force the Supreme Court to reconsider and overturn Roe v. Wade. This year alone, more than two dozen states have tried to impose restrictions on abortions that conflict with Roe, but this is the farthest reaching.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has called upon the government to break up his former company, acknowledging that it, and his former college roommate Mark Zuckerberg, have become too powerful and need to be held accountable for “sloppy privacy practices… the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric, and fake news.” If we know Facebook, they’ll take this criticism well and really learn from it.

The FBI is investigating 850 suspected domestic terrorists across the country. According to officials, cases against white supremacists and other racist terrorists have increased over the past six months.

President Trump will finally submit Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan’s nomination to the Senate, two weeks after the Pentagon’s inspector general concluded that Shanahan isn’t as corrupt as most Trump cabinet officials. Low bar though.

Students who owe money for paid, free, or reduced-fee lunch accounts at a Rhode Island school district will only be fed sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches until they can pay off their balances. The district recently refused a $4000 donation to help cover outstanding lunch payments from a local business owner. Very cool way to punish and embarrass children over a tiny amount of money to be punitive toward parents in a culture that rarely holds anyone (except those who are just getting by) accountable while asking literally nothing of its biggest corporations.

A former intelligence officer has been charged with illegally obtaining and disclosing classified information to The Intercept for its reporting on drone warfare—making him the second Intercept source nabbed by the feds in less than two years.

Denver decriminalized hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The “Soho scammer” Anna Delvey/Sorokin has been sentenced to at least four years in prison for multiple counts of fraud, grand larceny, and theft, and faces over $200,000 in fines and restitution charges. Netflix and HBO adaptations of her story are already in the works. So, happy ending?

The White House welcomed the Red Socks Sox today, but only the white ones showed up.

The Trump administration has tried to do some foreign policy this spring, and it isn’t going well.

• In North Korea: Chairman Kim Jong Un’s forces fired two short-range missiles on Thursday for the first time in a year and a half, prompting U.S. authorities to seize a North Korean ship approaching U.S. territorial waters in American Samoa for allegedly violating international sanctions by trying to sell coal.

• In Iran: President Hassan Rouhani said he will violate the terms of Iran's nuclear disarmament deal if European countries don’t promise to protect Iran’s oil and banking industries from newly imposed American sanctions within 60 days. President Trump responded that he wants to “sit down and work out a deal” with Iran because, “We just don't want them to have nuclear weapons, that's all we want,” which is what the deal he withdrew the United States from to impose the sanctions had accomplished.  

• In Venezuela: After a U.S. backed attempt to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro failed, Trump reportedly became frustrated with his advisors—namely John Bolton—for convincing him that they knew what they were doing and it would be easy.  

Also, the Trump administration has less than 24 hours to reach a trade deal with China before tariffs Trump threatened on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods go into effect. Sleep well!

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, will raise the purchase age for tobacco products in its stores to 21, and remove flavored e-cigarettes from its shelves. Last year the FDA declared youth vaping an epidemic across the U.S., and last month Rite Aid and Walgreens announced that they would raise the purchase age in their stores as well (CVS stopped selling all tobacco products in 2014).

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