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This Indictment Will Likely Come Too Early for Trump to Consolidate the Party

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After Trump propagandaist John Solomon published that Trump had been told he was a target of the Espionage Act investigation that has targeted him since last August, Trump did a post on his failing social media site. I’ve edited it down to the key bits:

Trump’s first response to the first public confirmation that he will soon be charged was not, as it turned out, to bellow, “Lock him up!” or even reconsider his past obstruction, but instead demand that the insurrectionists in Congress do something.

His first response was to demand that Republicans turn their focus — as they have for much of the last five years — on defending him at all costs, to the detriment of anything that better serves their interests (to say nothing of the interests of their constituents).

I’m not surprised. At some point, I will finally write a post describing how brilliantly Trump used the Russian investigation — assisted by a great deal of Russian disinformation — to successfully demand GOP loyalty to him over country. In the end, the Russian investigation was a tremendous tool Trump used to accrue power, all the while doing grave damage to the US.

His response to the public report he’ll soon be indicted was to attempt to do the same thing: make his own legal woes those of the entire GOP.

But this indictment — if it indeed gets filed in the next two weeks or so — may come too early for Trump.

That’s because, as I laid out here, there’s still plenty of time in the GOP primary for other Republicans to take advantage of Trump’s legal woes. Republicans seem to be sensing this opportunity. Chris Christie kicked off his undoubtedly doomed presidential race by focusing on Trump’s epic corruption. Mike Pence kicked off his equally doomed presidential run by emphasizing that he did his duty on January 6, unlike Trump (the presence of his brother Greg at the event undermined that message, because even after Trump almost got both he and the Vice President killed, Greg still challenged the election and voted against impeaching Trump). Asa Hutchinson called on Trump to step aside, noting he may be charged with Espionage [Act violations].

The point is not that these men will win the election. It’s that they’re using their candidacy to oppose Trump at a time when Christie and Pence and Hutchinson can anticipate that Jack Smith will soon give each a lot of material to work with. Many — not most, but many — Republicans are looking for permission to break with Trump and the timing of a potential indictment and the primary may give a way to do it.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s success at giving Kevin McCarthy a way out of the hostage situation he was forced to create just before the US credit rating was affected is having a remarkable effect on the House GOP.

Insurrectionists in Congress, who briefly considered trying to replace McCarthy, seem to have realized they don’t have the votes, and so have been trying to do something — anything — to look like they are tough. But it has only made them, and Republicans, look more ridiculous.

There are increasing reports that less radical Republicans want nothing to do with this chaos.

Greg Sargent wrote up what he describes as Biden’s deliberate attempt to marginalize the MAGAts, which is a good way of understanding it.

[I]n promising to restore “the soul of the nation” in the face of this threat, Biden has continually distinguished between MAGA Republicans and more conventional ones. This approach has been criticized by those of us who see much of the GOP as extreme and dangerous — after all, many elected Republicans helped whitewash Trump’s insurrection — and think Biden’s characterization of non-MAGA Republicans plays down that broader threat.

But Biden’s reading served him well in the debt limit standoff. Contrary to much criticism, Bidenworld believes that refusing to negotiate at the outset was key: It forced Republicans to offer their own budget, which created an opening to attack the savage spending cuts in it.

Notably, Biden and other Democrats relentlessly characterized those cuts as destructive and dangerous in the MAGA vein. Bidenworld did believe that some MAGA Republicans were willing to default and force global economic cataclysm to harm the president’s reelection, a senior Biden adviser tells me, but also that many non-MAGA Republicans ultimately could be induced not to go that far.

There’s no guarantee it’ll work. There’s no way to prevent some of the damage that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and James Comer intend to do.

But there’s always the threat that if ten Republicans decide they’ve had enough of this chaos, it creates the opportunity for a Fred Upton or similar to come in to lead a House that will function as a legislative body again.

If Trump weren’t indicted until September or October — still a realistic timeline for January 6, particularly if interim charges must occur first — Trump might have had an opportunity to seal the GOP primary and force the GOP to defend whatever crimes he gets charged with, to own and normalize those crimes as their own, as the GOP has chosen to do for the past six years.

But at the moment, there are hints of a mood change, one in which at least a critical handful of Republicans will choose against the chaos they’ve been gripped by for six years.

Update: Added the Hutchinson tweet. h/t.

Distraction and Disinformation: The Stakes of Lessons Not Learned

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The other night (I’ve lost track of which night — they’ve all blended together), when Trump’s campaign first rolled out the rent-a-mobs and invent-a-law challenges to the MI election, I was frantically trying to get journalists I know and respect to do two things: stop reporting that Trump had sued until they had paperwork in hand, and stop using a term for the mobsters, “challenger,” which has a specific legal meaning in MI.

Challengers are defined individuals provided credentials to operate under specific rules. While there are NGO challengers as well, each party gets two challengers in a precinct, but just one can watch the actual vote tally. The GOP had the designated number of challengers in the polling room when the rent-a-mob got called (indeed, aggressive challengers are reportedly what caused a delay in the counting of my own vote in Grand Rapids, assuming it did get counted), and yet the mobsters were referring to themselves as challengers.

The frivolous lawsuit filed well after the mobsters descended claimed that challengers weren’t being given access.

In other words, the Trump campaign had created a disinformation event by obscuring the law and creating a media event for the media to cover.

That’s not new. It has been going on for five years. Indeed, Trump’s success at using disinformation and distraction to tell a false story of victimhood surely is part of why he did better in 2020 than he did in 2016. COVID Donny is a story-teller, and many Americans in the post-exceptionalism era gravitate to stories that explain away personal failures to victimhood. (There has been some of this on the left, too, though usually with more basis in fact.)

To be fair, the press has done a less bad job of falling for Trump’s distraction and disinformation since Tuesday than it has for most of his presidency. (That may be because they’re increasingly certain they won’t need to rely on access going forward.) Even Fox is insisting that Trump provide actual evidence for the claims being made — before, often, treating those claims as credible whether or not evidence supports it.  Most outlets even turned away from a presser where Trump falsely claimed victory.

Still, one after another paranoid hoax — a red wagon pulling camera equipment, an alleged sticky note, former senior Administration officials sprinting away from cameras — has been floated and taken as credible long enough to make it appear like Trump’s manic claims of fraud and those of his conspiratorial followers might have merit.

The press has done a good job demanding proof, and dismantling the claims by showing what would be necessary for proof one by one. GOP officials are adopting one of two stances — either admitting there is no proof, or stating that before Trump claims fraud he has to provide it (even while giving air to some of the claims that have been debunked) — that may eventually bring us to closure.

Still, the press is chasing every one of these claims without caveating that this delay was intentionally caused by the GOP, Trump telegraphed he’d be using this strategy even before the election, and all evidence suggests that when the counting is done Joe Biden will have a solid victory in the Electoral College and a far bigger one in the popular vote.

In any other election, we’d be pestering Biden to learn who will be Attorney General and who will be Secretary of State, but instead we’re still chasing Donny’s distractions.

Still, it is an improvement. It will likely get us through this period, possibly even before any of Trump’s supporters succeed at unleashing violence (though a handful have been trying).

I wonder what it would have taken to accomplish this far earlier in the presidency, before Trump used it to undermine a very damning Russian investigation, before he used it to successfully beat back impeachment, before he used it to undermine any response to COVID, and before Trump used it in an effort to criminalize Joe Biden. We need to think about this because the right wing has gotten this manic hoax-chasing into its bloodstream, and for far too many of these hoaxes, the press just ignores the claims rather than shows how a basic adherence to truth will debunk them.

We need to find a way to better debunk and ignore this guy, otherwise he will become a dangerous martyr doing further damage to this country.

Joe Pientka Warned Trump to Be Worried about People on His Periphery While Flynn Was Signing a Deal with Turkey

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Donald Trump continues to use the Office of Director of National Intelligence role to declassify information to feed to frothy journalists so they can misrepresent the investigation into his campaign. Yesterday, John Ratcliffe released the FBI part of the classified briefing given to Trump, Chris Christie, and Mike Flynn on August 17, 2016. Among the things Ratcliffe disclosed is the FBI case files for both Crossfire Hurricane and the Flynn investigation, the paltry content of defensive briefings for a Presidential candidate, and that the FBI believed there were more Russian spies working under official cover in 2016 than Chinese spies.

They just don’t give a fuck anymore. They will compromise whatever they need to to try to spin the investigation into Trump, even if most of what they release doesn’t back their story.

The briefing also demonstrates that Trump had no concept of how spies work. He asked a childish question about whether — because they have more spies under official cover — whether they are bad.

Trump asked the following question,”Joe, are the Russians bad because they have more numbers are they worse than the Chinese?” Writer responded by saying both countries are bad. The numbers of IOs present in the U.S. is not an indicator of the severity of the threat. Writer reminded Trump the Chinese asymmetrical presence in the U.S. [redacted]. In addition, the OCONUS cyber threat posed by []PLA would have to be considered when making comparisons.

Having just been briefed that the Russians use official cover while the Chinese use non-official cover, Trump then collapsed that very basic concept to address just diplomatic cover.

The only interesting comment from Trump or Flynn, from an investigative standpoint, was that Trump seemed to suggest that Russia could match the US counterterrorism resources, an inaccurate belief the genesis of which is actually really interesting.

Meanwhile, Flynn asked Joe Pientka something totally off topic — how many FBI Agents they had as compared to counterterrorism cases. Flynn also, later, bragged about having done SIGINT (he seems to have wanted to prove his expertise).

Nothing in this briefing — not even the role of Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok in approving an anodyne report — supports the frenzied response to it, and most commentators are totally misrepresenting what the briefing as a whole was (the first intelligence briefing, as reflected by redacted references to who gave those briefings), and what the nature of the defensive briefing that Pientka gave.

The far more interesting details is that Pientka warned Trump (accurately, as it turned out) about Russia and others trying to get to Trump through peripheral people and businessmen,

In the classical sense, an IO will attempt to recruit an individual to tell him or her the things he or she wants to know. This is known as HUMINT. It is highly unlikely a Foreign Intelligence Service will attempt to recruit you, however you need to be mindful of the people on your periphery: your staff , domestic help, business associates, friends, etc. Those individuals may present more vulnerabilities or be more susceptible to an approach. Those individuals will also be targeted for recruitment due to their access to you. That does not mean IOs will not make a run at you . They will send their IOs in diplomatic cover, businessperson NOCs, as well as sources they have developed around you to elicit information and gain assessment on you.

At the time Pientka gave this briefing, Flynn was finalizing the details of a deal with Turkey, using a businessman the government has credibly accused of being an agent of Turkey to cover up the Turkish government’s direct role in the deal. In his grand jury testimony, Flynn described knowing almost nothing of Ekim Alptekin when he pursued this deal.

So even as the FBI was trying to explain to Trump that people like his coffee boy and his rat-fucker would be used to assess his intentions, the guy sitting in the room was pursuing a big payday with a frenemy government seeking to do just that.

Pientka’s briefing lasted 13 minutes out of a total of at least 1 hour 55 minutes, though it looks like Trump left the briefing before they had presented everything, to catch a plane.

The Christie Ouster and the Flynn Hiring

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The Guardian has an excerpt from Michael Lewis’ new book, The Fifth Risk, which happens to be the chapter focusing on Trump’s transition team. On top of describing how Trump believed spending money, as required by law, to pay a transition team amounted to stealing his own money, the excerpt includes this account of Chris Christie’s firing.

Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said: “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy – the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain – but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like … I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He had asked Kushner what that was about, and Kushner had simply said, Trump ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols.

[snip]

Christie was scheduled to brief the Trump children, Kushner and the other members of Trump’s inner circle. He was surprised to find, suddenly included in this group, retired army lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Flynn was a jobseeker the transition team had found reasons to be extremely wary of. Now he wanted to be named Trump’s national security adviser, which was maybe the most important job in the entire national security apparatus. The national security team inside the Trump transition – staffed with senior former military and intelligence officials – had thought that was an especially bad idea. Flynn’s name was not on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he would like to have.

Before Christie could intercede, Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie followed Bannon to his office impatiently. Hey, this is going to have to be quick, said Christie.

It’s really quick, said Bannon. You’re out.

Why? asked Christie, stunned.

We’re making a change.

“OkayOK, what are we changing?

You.

Why?

It’s really not important.

A week after Christie, along with former HPSCI Chair Mike Rogers, got purged from the Transition Team, I wrote a post that concluded this way.

One of the first things Trump has done has been to ensure agreement in its national security team on this point: that by letting our Middle Eastern allies arm al Qaeda-allied fighters, the Obama Administration created the mess that is in Syria.

And unanimity on that point — accompanied by what is sure to be a very ugly campaign of recriminations against the Obama Administration for cooking intelligence (even aside from the merit of this claim, Flynn has been bitter about his firing for what he sees as objecting to this cooked intelligence) — will provide the basis for Trump to work with Putin on ending the civil war in Syria to Bashar al-Assad’s advantage.

When I wrote that post, this text I received less than 15 hours after the polls closed, from someone I later came to conclude was involved in the election attack, was in my mind.

The text continued, in part, “clearly this confirms key role for Trump admin.”

As I surmised two years ago, there was a close tie between the moment Christie and other Republican realists got fired and when Flynn got picked.

According to this Michael Lewis account, though, the tie is far more direct than I imagined. The moment that Flynn got hired is the moment that Chris Christie got fired.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Chris Christie and Karl Rove’s US Attorney Project

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The Republicans were supposed to talk about how they plan to Make America Work Again last night. And I supposed Paul Ryan — and to a lesser extent Mitch McConnell, when he wasn’t being booed — presented a vision of how they think Republicans run the economy. That vision doesn’t actually resemble the protectionist big government approach Donald Trump has been running on. But given the revelation that Trump offered to let John Kasich run both domestic and foreign policy if he would be his VP candidate (Kasich was still reluctant), perhaps we should focus more on how Mike Pence wants to suffocate the economy.

Instead, as most people have focused, Republicans continued to attack Hillary (Hillary continues to attack Trump, though I suspect she will focus somewhat more on policy next week than Republicans have thus far). Many people have unpacked Chris Christie’s rabble inciting witch hunt last night, but Dan Drezner backs his review of it with some data on the risks to democracy (click through to read all of, which is worth reading).

Gov. Chris Christie’s speech garnered particular attention. It triggered similar reactions from The Weekly Standard and Vox, two outlets not known to agree on all that much.

The climax of Christie’s speech was a call-and-response with the crowd listing Clinton’s various misdeeds.

[snip]

Indeed, political events in both Turkey and the United States makes one somewhat concerned about the future of democracy as a political institution. Francis Fukuyama has banged on in recent years on the problems of political decay in the advanced industrialized democracies. He’s a bit more sanguine about this election cycle than most, but the erosion of accepted norms of political behavior is an extremely disturbing trend. Donald Trump (and his campaign manager) certainlyepitomizes this contempt for such minor things as the Constitution and the rule of law:

As the cherry on the top of this worry sundae, the Journal of Democracy has just published an article by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk entitled, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect.” Foa and Mounck have previewed their findings here and here over the past year, and their thesis is pretty damn sobering: 

[snip]

What we find is deeply concerning. Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider set of indicators than previously appreciated….

In theory, it is possible that, even in the seemingly consolidated democracies of North America and Western Europe, democracy may one day cease to be the “only game in town”: Citizens who once accepted democracy as the only legitimate form of government could become more open to authoritarian alternatives.

[snip]

By all means, read the whole thing. As an American, I find it particularly troubling that Ronald Inglehart’s rebuttal essay says that Foa and Mounck are exaggerating because this phenomenon is limited to the United States.

Foa and Mounck’s data ends in 2010. One could argue that things have only gotten worse since then, as Christie’s show trial speech suggests. But if I have a sliver of optimism, it is that the Trump campaign is America’s moment of staring into the anti-system abyss and seeing the ugliness that would await.

I will be curious if, after this election cycle, there is a greater appreciation for the democratic institutions that have made America great for more than a century.

I’m sympathetic to the notion that democracy is becoming delegitimized here and elsewhere, and in part blame the elites who have divorced policy outcomes from democratic accountability and therefore from benefits for average voters.

But the Chris Christie witch hunt is a special case. After all, this is a former US Attorney, a former top embodiment of America’s criminal justice system (and Christie’s attack was far more irrational than that of another US Attorney, Rudy Giuliani, earlier in the night).

And he’s not just any US Attorney. He’s a US Attorney who got that role largely off his fundraising for George W Bush, even in spite of concerns about his experience. Christie was, in some ways, one of the early test cases for Karl Rove’s theory that US Attorney positions would make great launching pads for further political advancement — and it worked, to some degree. After prosecuting a bunch of Democrats in an equal opportunity political corruption state, Christie won the governorship and started abusing his power, most spectacularly with Bridgegate. He came close to winning the VP nomination with Trump (and if last night is any indication, perhaps he should have). Along the way he pioneered Deferred Prosecution Agreements, making monitor positions another piece of pork for loyal Republicans.

In other words, Christie is the personification of a Republican effort to politicize a position that — while political — had previously been treated with some respect for precedent and neutrality.

No longer. Last night, Christie broke down all remaining barriers between law enforcement and political prosecution. It was the inevitable outcome of Rove’s little project.

Like Drezner, I’m worried generally about the state of our democracy (though unlike him I think the elite have a lot to answer for letting it happen). But the Christie witch hunt is a development above and beyond that general trend.

Will September 16, 2015 Mark the Beginning of the End of the War on Drugs

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At Salon yesterday, I pointed to the most interesting part of the GOP debate on Wednesday — the policy debate over how to deal with addiction. As I point out, one reason this debate is taking place is because New Hampshire is really struggling with heroin addiction right now. But the debate started about pot, not heroin. And even tough on crime candidates like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush struggled to spin their approach as kinder and gentler; Christie pitched his support for decriminalization as another expression of pro-life.

This was the moment, I argued, when the GOP found ways to pitch a more reasonable approach to drugs in GOP ideology (and Rand Paul deserves credit for pushing this).

Even while Christie and Bush, to differing degrees, cling to old-style War on Drug rhetoric, this campaign (and particularly the New Hampshire addiction crisis Bush mentioned) will force real debate about what combination of treatment, decriminalization, legalization, and education might provide some way out of the failed drug war. This discussion framed that dramatic policy shift in rhetoric — states rights and pro life — that Republicans can rally behind.

All this, of course, took place in the Reagan library, the shrine to the man who formally declared the now-failed War on Drugs in 1982. CNN even used his damn plane to ask candidates to project themselves into Reagan’s legacy. “Ronald Reagan, the 40th President, used the plane behind you to accomplish a great many things….How will the world look different once your Air Force One is parked in the hangar of your presidential library?” But one of the most constructive policy discussions in last night’s debate constituted a renunciation, finally, of Reagan’s legacy.

Mind you, the foreign policy and immigration stances of candidates undermines the value of this — few Republicans will give up the excuse of the War on Drugs to big foot in Latin America, no matter how counterproductive that is. And some candidates — such as Trump, who probably hasn’t exactly eschewed drugs all his life — weren’t clamoring to look soft on drugs.

All that said, amid all the talk of starting new wars in the shadow of Saint Ronnie’s plane, I was heartened by a moment that might lead toward ending one.

Christie Lied about 9/11 to Try to Shut Down Paul’s Opposition to Dragnet Spying [Updated]

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One of the most contentious exchanges in last night’s debate came when Megyn Kelly raised Chris Christie’s past attacks on Rand Paul for opposing the bulk dragnet.

KELLY: Alright, gentlemen, we’re gonna switch topics now and talk a bit about terror and national security.

Governor Christie. You’ve said that Senator Paul’s opposition to the NSA’s collection of phone records has made the United States weaker and more vulnerable, even going so far as to say that he should be called before Congress to answer for it if we should be hit by another terrorist attack.

Do you really believe you can assign blame to Senator Paul just for opposing he bulk collection of people’s phone records in the event of a terrorist attack?

CHRISTIE: Yes, I do. And I’ll tell you why: because I’m the only person on this stage who’s actually filed applications under the Patriot Act, who has gone before the federal — the Foreign Intelligence Service court, who has prosecuted and investigated and jailed terrorists in this country after September 11th.

I was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bush on September 10th, 2001, and the world changed enormously the next day, and that happened in my state.

This is not theoretical to me. I went to the funerals. We lost friends of ours in the Trade Center that day. My own wife was two blocks from the Trade Center that day, at her office, having gone through it that morning.

Never mind that most US Attorneys don’t, themselves, go before the FISC to present cases (usually it is people from the National Security Division, though it was OIPR when Christie was US Attorney), never mind that the name of the court is the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The real doozie here is Chris Christie’s claim that he “was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bush on September 10th, 2001.”

On December 7, 2001 — three months after the attacks — President Bush released this notice of nomination.

The President intends to nominate Christopher J. Christie to be United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.   Christie has been a partner with Dughi, Hewitt and Palatucci of Cranford, New Jersey since 1987.  He is a graduate of the University of Delaware and Seton Hall University School of Law.

Christie was confirmed quickly and started as US Attorney in January 2002.

Now, maybe Bush spoke with his big New Jersey fundraiser Chris Christie and assured him the payoff — in the form of a key appointment — would be coming. Maybe that conversation even happened on September 10.

But it is not the case that he was nominated on September 10.

I attribute this fib — like the mistakes about the name of FISC — to be bluster and debate confusion. What I find more offensive is that Andrea Mitchell, when hailing Christie’s national security credentials later in the night, literally claimed he was nominated on September 10 and started on September 12.

And there’s a far bigger subtext here.

Christie implies he was involved in the dragnet in question. He was US Attorney from January 2002 to December 2008 — so he in fact would have been in office during the two years when the phone dragnet worked through the Servic–um, Surveillance court, and four years of the Internet dragnet. But if, as he implies, he was involved in the dragnet for the entire span of his tenure — and remember, there were huge cases run out of Trenton right out of 9/11 — then he was also using the fruits of illegal wiretapping to do his job. Not Servic — um, Surveillance court authorized dragnets and wiretaps, but also illegal wiretaps.

Which may explain why he’s so invested in rebutting any questions about the legitimacy of the program.

Update: Here’s what his official biography says about his tenure as US Attorney. (h/t JH)

Christie was named U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey in 2002. As the chief federal law enforcement officer in New Jersey, earning praise from leaders in both parties and drawing national attention for his efforts in battling political corruption, corporate crime, human trafficking, gangs, terrorism and environmental polluters.

Update: In an absolutely hysterical attempt to rebut the clear fact that he was not nominated when he said he was, Christie’s people said he was informed he would be on September 10 at 4:30 (as I suggested was likely). But the rest of the explanation makes it clear they hadn’t even done a background check yet!

The intervening crisis caused by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington then delayed action on the nomination. In the interview for the book, Christie said he didn’t hear again from the White House for two weeks and that things were slowed because there were no available FBI agents to do background checks, as they had been assigned to investigating the 9/11 attacks.

 

Christie’s Quarantine Over-Reaction Ignores How Ebola is Transmitted

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While Chris Chrisite toasted fellow quarantine advocate Rick Scott at a fundraiser in Florida on Sunday, Kaci Hickox met with her attorney to prepare a legal challenge to her quarantine.

While Chris Chrisite toasted fellow quarantine advocate Rick Scott at a fundraiser in Florida, Kaci Hickox met with her attorney to prepare a legal challenge to her quarantine.

It’s really difficult to say which poor response to Ebola has done more damage to the public health system in the United States. First, we had the series of unforgivable errors at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas that resulted in Thomas Duncan being sent home with Tylenol and antibiotics when he first presented with Ebola symptoms. This was followed up after he was admitted by Nina Pham and Amber Vinson coming down with the disease after they treated him. Now, we have Kaci Hickox, who treated Ebola patients in West Africa, confined to an unheated tent in a New Jersey hospital for 21 days even though she is asymptomatic and has tested negative for Ebola. Twice.

The hysteria over retracing the steps of Craig Spencer in New York City just before he developed his fever illustrates the way the US press has misled the public about when and where Ebola risk exists. Abundant evidence from this and previous Ebola outbreaks demonstrates clearly that there simply is no risk of transmission from asymptomatic patients and that transmission risk grows through the course of the infection.

We see that principle demonstrated very clearly in Duncan’s case history. See this terrific ABC timeline for relevant dates quoted below. Duncan arrived in Dallas September 20. No passengers on any of the flights he took have developed Ebola. The incubation period has elapsed, so we know that no transmission of the virus occurred during any of his flights. Duncan had symptoms on his first hospital visit on September 26 but was sent home. He was later admitted on September 28. No patients or personnel from the hospital became infected from his visit September 26. The incubation period has expired, so we know for certain that transmission did not occur for anyone near Duncan that day. Similarly, even though they were in the apartment with him for days after he developed symptoms, none of the residents of or visitors to the apartment where Duncan was staying in Dallas became infected. The incubation period for that exposure also has expired. From this timeline developed by the New York Times, it appears that Pham and Vinson treated Duncan on the day before he died, which would be at the time when the amount of virus being produced by his body was nearing its maximum.

The load of virus in a patient’s blood over the course of Ebola infection has been studied. In this CDC review, we have a graph showing the amount of virus over time: Read more →

Last Week in Deferred and Non-Prosecution Agreements: Arming China and Stealing Trillions from Municipalities

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I’m so old I remember the time, four years ago, when Democrats hated Deferred Prosecution Agreements.

Back in the days when Chris Christie, former US Attorney, was challenging Jon Corzine, once and future bankster, to be governor of New Jersey, Democrats made hay of the significant numbers of DPAs Christie signed, mostly with a series of medical device companies busted for kickbacks. After it was revealed Christie had picked his former boss, John Ashcroft, to make $52 million monitoring one of those medical device companies, it became a convenient way to show the corporatist corruption of Christie.

There was even a bit of discussion, in early 2009, about whether DPAs made banks more likely to engage in fraud because they assumed they’d get a DPA rather than a prosecution. Those discussions largely centered on the two DPAs AIG got in the mid-00s for fraudulently hiding its risk, which nevertheless didn’t prevent AIG from taking on so much risk it blew up the entire financial system. One of the monitors of those DPAs–who arguably should have but didn’t see AIG’s ongoing fraud–was a guy by the name of James Cole. He’s now the Deputy Attorney General.

And as recently as 2010, NJ Congressman Bill Pascrell had this to say, in response to the publication of a GAO report showing some improvement but greater need for oversight over DPAs.

One cannot ignore the spike of 38 deferred prosecution agreements in 2007, up from a mere four agreements in 2003. That proves that what was supposed to be an option to be used in rare circumstances had become the norm at the Department of Justice.

[snip]

It is imperative that the Congress reign in the unmitigated power that federal prosecutors hold to serve as judge, jury and sentencer in the deferred prosecution process.

And yet I have heard very little about the two DPAs signed last week–perhaps because big corporate impunity has become such a common occurrence in the post-crash era.

First, there’s the deal Pratt & Whitney and two subsidiaries signed for evading export restrictions to help China build an attack helicopter. Effectively Pratt & Whitney laundered their production of some development helicopters–plus the military grade engine control module software to go with them–through a Canadian subsidiary. And when they finally admitted they had deliberately avoided US export restrictions on military equipment, they lied to DOJ about doing so. While they have to pay a $75 million fine, some of the charges are being deferred. And no individual has been charged with helping China get a helicopter designed to attack tanks.

So DOJ’s punishment for a defense contractor to put Chinese civil contracts ahead of US national security is a big fine, deferred prosecution, but no jail time.

Even more troubling is the Non-Prosecution Agreement signed with Barclays over its manipulation of the LIBOR rate. Effectively, during the heady bubble days, Barclays colluded to lie about the interbank lending rate to maximize its own trades; as finance was crashing and Barclays itself had to pay higher rates for credit, it lied about that to imply the bank was healthier than it was. And while between DOJ, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Britain’s Financial Services Authority, Barclays will have to pay around $475 million in fines, and while CFTC imposed the kind of mandated fixes that DOJ normally would under a DPA, Barclays is basically scot-free for colluding to lie about a rate that affects people throughout the financial system.

Matt Taibbi explains why this is so important: because when the banks said the LIBOR rate was lower than it really was, a lot of investors got a smaller return on their LIBOR-tracked investments than they otherwise would have.

A sizable chunk of the world’s adjustable-rate investment vehicles are pegged to Libor, and here we have evidence that banks were tweaking the rate downward to massage their own derivatives positions. The consequences for this boggle the mind. For instance, almost every city and town in America has investment holdings tied to Libor. If banks were artificially lowering the rates to beef up their trading profiles, that means communities all over the world were cheated out of ungodly amounts of money.

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Why Doesn’t the FBI Follow SAC Michael Ward’s “Specific Articulable Basis” Standard?

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The Special Agent in Charge of the Newark FBI, Michael Ward, laid into the NYPD’s CIA-on-the-Hudson program for its spying on New Jersey’s Muslims. He raised several legitimate gripes: that the NYPD was picking and choosing the information it shared, that the NYPD wasn’t focused on centers of terrorism, that it has created distrust between the Muslim community and law enforcement.

But there is one complaint that Ward should direct closer to home: that law enforcement officers have a specific articulable basis for mapping out the location of ethnicities. (Ward’s comments in this start after 7:00–note what he says on video is slightly different from what he appears to have said later to the NJ Star-Ledger journalist.)

[The public needs to know] you’re following leads that are warranted and that you’re not out chasing anything but you have a–there’s a specific law enforcement reason behind what you’re doing, and that you use the least intrusive means possible, when available.

[snip]

It’s also important that [the public] know that Joint Terrorism Task Force, the FBI, and law enforcement in New Jersey in general, that we take the guidelines which we’re supposed to follow very very seriously.

Mind you, I think there should be an articulable basis to map out locations of specific ethnicities.

But just as the NYPD doesn’t agree, neither does the FBI. In fact, as the ACLU’s FOIA is showing, the FBI is doing precisely the same kind of demographic mapping around the country as the NYPD is doing in NYC with their Domain Assessment program.

While the office is dawdling over releasing the unredacted copies, here’s the plan the FBI put into place for mapping out Muslims in Detroit, just as the NYPD did in NYC.

There are more than forty groups designated as terrorist organizations by the US State Department. Many of these groups originate in the Middle-East and Southeast Asia. Many of these groups also use an extreme and violent interpretation of the Muslim faith as justification for their activities. Because Michigan has large Middle-Eastern and Muslim population, it is prime territory for attempted radicalization and recruitment by these terrorist groups. Additionally, Sunni terrorist groups always pose a threat of attack on U.S. soil since it is the stated purpose of many of these groups. The Detroit Division Domain Team seeks to open a Type IV Domain Assessment for the purpose of collecting information and evaluating the threat posed by international terrorist groups conducting recruitment, radicalization, fund-raising, or even violent terrorist acts within the state of Michigan.

And here’s how Ward’s own office used census data to map out the Latino population in New Jersey as part of their efforts to fight the MS-13 gang (this was done in 2008, before Ward got appointed to Newark, but while Chris Christie was still US Attorney).

MS-13 is comprised of members from Central American countries, primarily El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. According to the 2000 Census, there are 67,320 individuals from these countries living in New Jersey. [redacted] from these countries during the time period of January. 2008 to July 2008. An analysis of Hispanic populations and [redacted] helps the Domain Team assess where [redacted] The Domain Team assesses [redacted] The Domain Team notes that New Jersey has the fifth largest Central American population in the United States. [redacted]

[snip]

According to the 2000 Census, the largest Hispanic communities in New Jersey are Puerto Rico with 366,788, the Dominican Republic with 91,316, Columbia with 69,754, Mexico with 67,667, and Cuba with 55,241. In addition tthheerree are an estimated 1,265,000 African Americans living in New Jersey from which [redacted]

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