BY BRIAN BEUTLER, PRIYANKA ARIBINDI

& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, September 19, 2019

—Rex Tillerson explaining to Trump that he’s a dummy.

CUTTING HIS OWN DEEP THROAT

President Trump, his acting director of national intelligence (DNI), and senior Justice Department officials have teamed up to silence a whistleblower who has a credible, corroborated complaint that Trump did something very bad in his discussions with an as-yet unknown foreign leader. 

This is exactly as fucked up as it sounds. Here’s what happened: 

• Sometime in the past several weeks, Trump had a phone conversation, or multiple conversations, with a foreign leader and made a commitment that someone in the intelligence community with access to the details deemed an abuse of power, a crime, or a threat to national security. (Yes, one of the leaders Trump spoke with in this time frame was Russian President Vladimir Putin.)

• This intelligence official took his concerns to the intelligence community’s inspector general (ICIG), which is the first step the relevant whistleblower law requires. The ICIG agreed with the whistleblower that the complaint was “urgent” and even “relate[d] to one of the most significant and important of the DNI’s responsibilities to the American people.”

• At that point, the law says getting the whistleblower’s complaint before Congress should have been a formality. The ICIG must submit the complaint to the DNI who is obligated to let the complaint go to Congress, and give the whistleblower instructions on how to securely contact members of the intelligence committees. 

• Instead, Trump’s DNI Joseph Maguire took the complaint to Trump’s Justice Department (a step the whistleblower law doesn’t contemplate), which effectively reversed the ICIG’s decision and thus blocked the whistleblower and the ICIG from telling Congress what happened. 

How do we know any of this? Because the ICIG so profoundly disagreed with how the political appointees above him handled this, he informed Congress of the existence of the complaint and of its severity. House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff publicly disclosed that much on Friday. Since then, details about the complaint (that it involved Trump and a foreign leader) have begun to leak, but in a classified hearing on Capitol Hill this morning, the ICIG said DOJ had prohibited him from briefing committee members about its substance.

Why does it matter? Where do we start?

• The Trump administration has illegally concealed an urgent national security scandal involving the president.

• In doing so, it has sent a signal to all whistleblowers that if they follow proper procedures, the president’s political subordinates can intercept their complaints and implicitly threaten to fire or prosecute them if they go public. 

• The administration has also effectively taken the position that Trump can engage in crimes and corruption in his communications with foreign leaders, and nobody outside the executive branch is allowed to know about it. (Except the foreign leaders’s governments.)

This is a huge institutional test for the country. We’re already in uncharted waters. Clearly Congress and the public need to know what happened here. If the administration doesn’t cave, or Schiff can’t force its hand, or the information doesn’t leak to the media, we’ll be in uncharted waters in the dark. 

President Trump said his administration would issue San Francisco an “environmental violation” notice over the made-up problem of used needles draining into the ocean, to create a pretext to round up the city’s homeless population. According to the city’s mayor, London Breed, no sewer debris flows into the San Francisco Bay or Pacific Ocean, and Trump just finalized the repeal of Obama-era rules that protected drinking water from poisons, so this is a transparent effort to harass vulnerable people and parts of the country Trump doesn’t like. 

LISTEN UP. Vote Save America is partnering with Stacey Abrams’s voting rights organization, Fair Fight, to fund, staff, and train full-time voter protection teams in 20 battleground states at Democratic state parties—the entities that will be critical in the 2020 general election.

This is one of the most important things you can do right now to help win in 2020. HELP US! → votesaveamerica.com/fairfight 

A U.S. drone strike targeting an Islamic State hideout in Afghanistan ended up killing at least 30 civilian farm workers, and injuring 40 more. A senior U.S. official confirmed the strike, but declined to share details about the civilian casualties.

Photos of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in black and brownface from the early 1990s and in 2001 surfaced this week, in the midst of his campaign for re-election next month. Trudeau was 29 in 2001, and has now profusely apologized. But when asked how many times he wore blackface after a third image came to light Thursday, he said he was “weary of being definitive about this.” Yiiiiiiiiiiikes. 

Benny Gantz, the leader of Israel’s Blue and White Party, claimed victory and rejected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer to form a unity government on Thursday. Gantz instead said he would lead a “liberal” coalition (without Netanyahu’s longtime ultra-Orthodox, rightwing allies). 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he supports a plan to give states $250 million more in election security funding after opposing it for a year. We’ll retire Moscow Mitch until the next time he sells out the country, which will probably be later this week sometime.

Trump has sued his longtime accounting firm and the Manhattan district attorney to block the firm from complying with the D.A.’s subpoena for his tax returns and financial records. His legal team claims he should be immune from criminal investigation while in office, which is a convenient argument for a criminal to make. Fun fact: Trump has more pending lawsuits to prevent the public from learning about his finances than he has ex-wives.

Colt Firearms will cease production and sales of rifles, including AR-15’s, for civilian purchase because of lack of public demand. Guess they finally killed the last feral hog. 

India has banned all vaping products to stop the “impact of e-cigarettes on the youth.” Juul had planned to launch in India, home to over 100 million smokers, by the end of the year. 

The Navy confirmed that the footage of possible UFOs released by Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge were actual UFOs. Navy said so. It’s a UFO. Turn the lights off. Carry me home.

Our friends at Arena just launched Arena Careers, the new hub for progressive talent. Whether you’re with a progressive campaign or group looking to hire staff, an aspiring staffer looking for a job, or just someone looking to build your network, this community is built for you. Join today: https://app.arena.run/

A new report on gun violence in America shows that in 2017, gun deaths surpassed the number of deaths caused by car accidents for the first time. Nearly 40,000 people were killed by guns in 2017—60 percent of those were by suicide.

According to a study of 10 million college students across 1,000 campuses nationwide, college voting rates doubled in the 2018 midterm election relative to the 2014 midterms. Heading into the 2020 election, millennials and Generation Z voters are expected to make up 37 percent of the electorate. 

You can bet that Republicans will work hard to suppress their votes. So we’re working with Stacey Abrams’s voting rights organization Fair Fight to help protect voters around the country. It’s one of the most important things you can do to make sure every vote is counted in 2020. And we will need every vote → votesaveamerica.com/fairfight 

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