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To Become Leader of the Free(dom) World

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At the start of the week, WSJ began a profile of Kamala Harris’ tenure as Vice President with a review of concerns among her staffers about whether and, if so, how to properly return a salute.

In her first months as vice president, Kamala Harris’s staff faced a dilemma: When a military officer saluted her as she boarded Air Force Two, should she salute back?

Harris’s predecessors—including Joe Biden when he was vice president—routinely saluted back. But Nancy McEldowney, then her national security adviser, explained that military protocol didn’t require her to do so given that Harris wasn’t commander in chief and not in the military chain of command. Doing so could make Harris look like she was trying to inflate her role, former administration officials said.

Boarding one of her first flights on Air Force Two, Harris skipped the salute. Conservative commentators seized on the moment and accused her of disrespecting the military. Soon after, aides were told that Harris would salute going forward. An aide wrote up a memo on proper saluting protocol—including pictures of previous presidents who had gotten it wrong—and the vice president even practiced the gesture in private, people familiar with the matter said.

I thought about it as I was trying to process how and why we got Leon Panetta when we all thought we were getting Beyoncé.

I still expect we’ll get Beyoncé, one day.

I think it would have worked great (and absent her appearance, think organizers should have moved Pink to closer to Kamala’s speech). But the expectation that Beyoncé would show arose, first, from the earned arrogance that popular Democratic politicians can rely on the support of stars and most Republicans cannot. That expectation also arose, I think, from a conceit that we were getting a show for our benefit.

Expectations sky-rocketed after Lil Jon jumped out of the stands and led the entire stadium in a joyous rap. But that was during the Roll Call vote, a moment when delegates, committed Democrats, affirmed near-unanimous support for Kamala Harris.

But the hour in which the Vice President spoke was not, primarily, for our benefit.

Go back to what I said yesterday: This election will be won or lost on how much Kamala Harris can expand the reservoir of voters who might otherwise stay home. Returning to traditional Democratic levels of support among Black and Latino voters, inspiring a new generation of voters, further exciting the kind of people who want to see Beyoncé … that can get you to a two or three point lead in swing states that might be enough in a normal year for a white male candidate.

But for a Black person, a candidate aspiring to the first woman president, someone running against a desperate felon who has his own army of terrorists, it’s not enough.

Kamala Harris needs bigger margins to survive the shit Donny will throw at her. She needs to win enough states to squeak through if Trump manages to hang up two of them with some kind of frivolous legal challenge.

This hour, in which (with all due respect to my Governor, Big Gretch) Adam Kinzinger gave the second best speech, after Kamala’s, was for the sea of moderate voters with certain expectations about a Commander in Chief.

Kamala addressed this broader audience, fairly early in her speech, making a promise that defined much of what came later.

And let me say, I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know, I promise to be a president for all Americans. You can always trust me to put country above party and self. To hold sacred America’s fundamental principles, from the rule of law, to free and fair elections, to the peaceful transfer of power.

I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations. A president who leads and listens; who is realistic, practical and has common sense; and always fights for the American people. From the courthouse to the White House, that has been my life’s work.

She addressed principle.

The Commander of Chief challenge is one that faces every candidate who hasn’t spent a career, as Joe Biden has, accruing a track record on national security issues. Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a lifelong hawk, struggled with this issue because of her gender. Steve Bannon described that challenge in FBI interviews focused on how they approached the 2016 debates, how the one thing he needed to pull off was allowing people to imagine Donald Trump could be Commander in Chief. This convention was partially staged by David Plouffe, who sent Barack Obama to give a controversial speech in Berlin to acquire that kind of gravitas.

Kamala needed — or perhaps Plouffe believed she needed — someone to tell a story that afforded her the comparative seriousness of recent Democratic Administrations. In other circumstances, Joe Biden would have been the one to tell that story, to describe Kamala’s role in getting Evan Gerskovich home, to describe Kamala’s mission to prepare Volodymyr Zelensky in advance of Russia’s invasion. Other possible candidates are equally impossible. Tony Blinken, who might be permitted a political speech, has been tainted by Bibi’s warmongering. CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, both true heroes of any Biden foreign policy successes, cannot play such a partisan role.

So Leon Panetta it was, according to Vice President Harris the glory of that goddamned raid on Osama bin Laden once again.

To be clear, given what she’s up against, I think it was a missed opportunity.

The Commander in Chief test is also wrapped up in America’s rusty sense of its own exceptionalism. At this moment, the threat to any claim of exceptionalism comes from within as much as outside.

Kamala is fighting America’s aspiring dictator, not just dictators overseas. The national security part of her speech defined herself in contrast to Trump’s abdication of America’s role in the world.

As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. And I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families, and I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.

I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence. That America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership. Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could “do whatever the hell they want.”

[snip]

I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists. I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump. Who are rooting for Trump.

Because, you know, they know — they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.

And as president, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs.

In many ways, these parts of Kamala’s speech — the ones addressed to those measuring up a possible Commander in Chief — echoed Kinzinger’s earlier speech.

His fundamental weakness has coursed through my party like an illness, sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.

Our democracy was frayed by the events of January 6th, as Donald Trump’s deceit and dishonor led to a siege on the United States Capitol. That day, I stood witness to a profound sorrow: the desecration of our sacred tradition of peaceful transition of power, tarnished by a man too fragile, too vain, and too weak to accept defeat.

How can a party claim to be patriotic if it idolizes a man who tried to overthrow a free and fair election? How can a party claim to stand for liberty if it sees a fight for freedom in Ukraine—an attack pitting tyranny against democracy, a challenge to everything our nation claims to be—and it retreats, it equivocates, it nominates a man who is weirdly obsessed with Putin and his running mate who said, “I don’t care what happens in Ukraine”? Yet he wants to be Vice President, yeah. How can a party claim to be conservative when it tarnishes the gifts that our forebearers fought for—men like my grandfather, who served in World War II, who believed in a cause bigger than himself, and he risked his life for it, behind enemy lines? To preserve American democracy, his generation found the courage to face down armies. Listen, all we’re asked to do is to summon the courage to stand up to one weak man.

[snip]

[D]emocracy knows no party. It’s a living, breathing ideal that defines us as a nation. It’s the bedrock that separates us from tyranny. And when that foundation is fractured, we must all stand together united to strengthen it.

Democrat and Republican agree on the challenge.

But if Kamala Harris succeeds in this race, American is long overdue for a reckoning on what these values mean. We got into this mess — Donald Trump’s demagoguery resonated with far too many people — not just because the financial crisis left so many behind, not just because of the racism bred into America from the moment of its founding, but because a War on Terror that left many damaged also poisoned much of the claim to American exceptionalism, leaving others devoid of their source of self-worth.

Kamala Harris has a story to tell about diplomacy and cooperation. One of the most interesting anecdotes came from someone who claimed that, while serving as California’s Attorney General, Kamala presided over a new kind of cooperation in law enforcement that has become the norm; in reality, she likely just happened to be the top cop for a country-sized state as the techniques of the War on Terror were adopted, with a big boost from Silicon Valley, to other kinds of security challenges.

If she becomes Commander in Chief, Kamala Harris would take over the helm not just of an oversized military, but also the manufacturing base that has armed Ukraine to defend itself and an information-sharing machine that provided European allies with a way to combat Russia’s sabotage.

These are still awesome, potentially monstrous, tools. That dragnet, in Trump’s hands, could quickly become the instrument of totalitarianism.

But Kamala Harris’ experience wielding them and her ties to their base in California may provide the roots of a different model.

America’s past mistakes — including its failures in Gaza — have tarnished the claims to principle. Decades of increasing reliance on coercion rather than cooperation created the opportunity for someone like Trump, who peddles a false claim that coercion makes you strong.

Kamala offered a clear sense of how she defines freedom within America. But if she’s promising to move forward from the danger of Donald Trump, she would do well to consider what it means to be Leader of the Freedom World.

This image, which Miles Curland created in response to the Shepard Fairey one, is available under Creative Common license.

Bill Barr’s Attempt to Corrupt EDNY May Have Saved the Republic

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Almost all of the witnesses the January 6 Committee has relied on are deeply conflicted people. The same Trump attorney, Justin Clark, who allegedly coached Steve Bannon to withhold information from the Committee about communications with Rudy Giuliani and Mike Flynn appeared on video claiming to have qualms about using fake electors in states where the campaign did not have an active legal challenge. Ivanka claimed to believe Bill Barr’s claims that voter fraud couldn’t change the election, but the Committee just obtained video of her saying otherwise. And Bill Barr himself has gotten credit for fighting Trump’s false claims of voter fraud even though he spent months laying the groundwork for those claims by attacking mail-in ballots.

But yesterday’s hearing was something else.

After Liz Cheney invited watchers to imagine what it would be like to have a DOJ that required loyalty oaths from lawyers who work there — a policy that Alberto Gonzales had started to implement in the Bush-Cheney Administration — Adam Kinzinger led former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue through a narrative about the Republican Party and the Department of Justice they might like to belong to.

The whole thing was a flashback. In May 2007, I was tipped off to cover Jim Comey’s dramatic retelling of the first DOJ effort to push back on Presidential — and Vice Presidential, from Liz Cheney’s father — pressure by threatening to quit. Only years later, I learned how little the 2004 Hospital Hero stand-off really achieved. So I’m skeptical of yesterday’s tales of heroism from the likes of Jeff Rosen and Steve Engel.

But that’s also because their record conflicts with some of the things they said.

For example, check out what Engel — someone who played an absolutely central role in Bill Barr’s corruption of the Mueller investigation, and who wrote memos that killed the hush payment investigation into Trump and attempted to kill the whistleblower complaint about Volodymyr Zelenskyy — had to say about politicization of investigations.

Kinzinger: Mr. Engel, from your perspective, why is it important to have a [White House contact] policy like Mr. Rosen just discussed?

Engel: Well, it’s critical that the Department of Justice conducts its criminal investigations free from either the reality or any appearance of political interference. And so, people can get in trouble if people at the White House are speaking with people at the Department and that’s why, the purpose of these policies, is to keep these communications as infrequent and at the highest levels as possible just to make sure that people who are less careful about it, who don’t really understand these implications, such as Mr. Clark, don’t run afoul of those contact policies.

Or consider how Special Counsels were described, as Kinzinger got the witnesses to discuss how wildly inappropriate it would have been to appoint Sidney Powell to investigate vote fraud. Here’s how Engel explained the limited times there’d be a basis to appoint one:

Kinzinger: So during your time at the Department, was there ever any basis to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate President Trump’s election fraud claims?

Engel: Well, Attorney General Barr and [inaudible] Jeffrey Rosen did appoint a Special Counsel. You would appoint a Special Counsel when the Department — when there’s a basis for an investigation, and the Department, essentially, has a conflict of interest.

Engel is presumably referring to John Durham with that initial comment. But Durham fails both of those tests: there was never a basis for an investigation, and for most of the time Durham has been Special Counsel, he’s been investigating people outside the Department that present absolutely no conflict for the Department. [Note: it’s not clear I transcribed this properly. The point remains: Rosen and Barr appointed a Special Counsel that violated this standard.]

In other words, so much of what Engel and Rosen were describing were abuses they themselves were all too happy to engage in, up until the post-election period.

Which is why I’m so interested in the role of Richard Donoghue, who moved from EDNY to Main Justice in July 2020, to be replaced by trusted Bill Barr flunkie Seth DuCharme. It happened at a time when prosecutors were prepared to indict Tom Barrack, charges that didn’t end up getting filed until a year later, after Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco had been confirmed. The 2020 move by Barr looked just like other efforts — with Jessie Liu in DC and Geoffrey Berman in SDNY — to kill investigations by replacing the US Attorney.

That is, by all appearances, Donoghue was only the one involved in all these events in 2020 and 2021 because Barr was politicizing prosecutions, precisely what Engel claimed that DOJ, during his tenure, attempted to avoid.

That’s interesting for several reasons. First, in the context of explaining the January 3 stand-off in the White House, Donoghue described why environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark was unqualified to be Attorney General.

Donoghue: Mr. President, you’re talking about putting a man in that seat who has never tried a criminal case. Who has never conducted a criminal investigation.

Well, neither had regulatory lawyer Jeffrey Rosen (or, for that matter, Billy Barr). That is, in explaining why Clark should not be Attorney General,  Donoghue expressed what many lawyers have likewise said about Barr, most notably during Barr’s efforts to undermine the Mike Flynn prosecution (the tail end of which Donoghue would have been part of, though DuCharme was likely a far more central player in that).

In the collective description of the showdown at the White House on January 3, it sounds like before that point, Donoghue was the first one who succeeded in beginning to talk Trump out of replacing Rosen, because it was not in Trump’s, or the country’s, interest.

Mr. President, you have a great deal to lose. And I began to explain to him what he had to lose. And what the country had to lose, and what the Department had to lose. And this was not in anyone’s best interest. That conversation went on for some time.

Donoghue also seems to have been the one to explain the impact of resignations in response to a Clark appointment.

Mr. President within 24, 48, 72 hours, you could have hundreds and hundreds of resignations of the leadership of your entire Justice Department because of your actions. What’s that going to say about you?

To be clear: Rosen would have pushed back in any case. As he described,

On the one hand, I wasn’t going to accept being fired by my subordinate, so I wanted to talk to the President directly. With regard to the reason for that, I wanted to try to convince the President not to go down the wrong path that Mr. Clark seemed to be advocating. And it wasn’t about me. There was only 17 days left in the Administration at that point. I would have been perfectly content to have either of the gentlemen on my left or right to replace me if anybody wanted to do that. But I did not want for the Department of Justice to be put in a posture where it would be doing things that were not consistent with the truth, were not consistent with its own appropriate role, or were not consistent with the Constitution.

But Rosen had already presided over capitulations to Trump in the past, including events relating to the first impeachment and setting up a system whereby Rudy Giuliani could introduce Russian-brokered disinformation targeting Joe Biden into DOJ, without exposing Rudy himself to Russian Agent charges. Repeatedly in yesterday’s hearing, I kept asking whether the outcome would have been the same if Donoghue hadn’t been there.

Plus, by all appearances, Donoghue was the one providing critical leadership in the period, including going to the Capitol to ensure it was secured.

Kinzinger: Mr. Donoghue, we know from Mr. Rosen that you helped to reconvene the Joint Session, is that correct?

Donoghue: Yes sir.

Kinzinger: We see here in a video that we’re going to play now you arriving with your security detail, to help secure the Capitol. Mr. Donoghue, thirty minutes after you arrived at the Capitol, did you lead a briefing for the Vice President?

Donoghue: I’m not sure exactly what the time frame was, but I did participate in a call and participate in a briefing with the Vice President as well as the Congressional leadership that night. Yes.

Kinzinger: Where’d you conduct that call at?

Donoghue: I was in an office, I’m not entirely sure where it was. My detail found it, because of the acoustics in the Rotunda were such that it wasn’t really conductive to having a call so they found an office, we went to that office, and I believe I participated in two phone calls, one at 1800 and one at 1900 that night, from that office.

Kinzinger: What time did you actually end up leaving the Capitol?

Donoghue: I waited until the Senate was back in session which I believe they were gaveled in a few minutes after 8PM. And once they were back in session and we were confident that the entire facility was secured and cleared — that there were no individuals hiding in closets, or under desks, that there were no IEDs or other suspicious devices left behind — I left minutes later. I was probably gone by 8:30.

Kinzinger: And Mr. Donoghue, did you ever hear from President Trump that day?

Donoghue: No. Like the AAG, the acting AG, I spoke to Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows and the Vice President and the Congressional leadership but I never spoke to the President that day.

So it seems possible, certainly, that one of the few things that held DOJ together in this period is Donoghue, seemingly installed there as part of yet another Bill Barr plot to corrupt DOJ.

Congresswoman Cheney, who in her opening statement talked about how outrageous it was for Trump to demand that DOJ make an announcement about an investigation into voter fraud (but who voted against the first impeachment for extorting Volodymyr Zelenskyy for exactly such an announcement), ended the hearing by inviting those who had put their trust into Donald Trump to understand that he had abused that trust.

She’s “No Angel:” Josh Dawsey’s Nice Little Old Lady Suspected of Crimes to Steal an Election

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According to this Josh Dawsey piece on the GOP’s vote to censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Ronna Romney McDaniel claims she decided to support this censure effort after a little old lady friend of hers was subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee.

McDaniel said she was particularly upset when an elderly, recently widowed friend of hers was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee after it was reported the friend was an alternate elector at the campaign’s behest. She declined to name the friend.

This nice little old lady is probably Kathy Berden, one of the two people from Michigan who were subpoenaed. Dean Berden passed away last August.

It took me 3 Google searches to find Berden’s name and Dean’s obituary, and unlike me, Dawsey has the support of an entire newsroom. But rather than ask a follow-up question about the most likely person that McDaniel was discussing, Dawsey just accepted McDaniel’s refusal to name the person and published the GOP Chair’s spin with absolutely no pushback.

That let Dawsey off easy.

Rather than explain that, if it is Berden, she is someone whom Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has said obviously broke Michigan law.

There’s no question a troop of faux GOP electors violated the law when they signed on to phony documents and tried to barge into the Michigan State Capitol in an effort to fraudulently award the state’s electoral votes to former President Donald Trump, says Attorney General Dana Nessel.

But, given the scope of what Michigan’s top law enforcement official called a “conspiracy,” Nessel says the criminal prosecution of at least the 16 sham Republican delegates is better suited for federal authorities.

“Seemingly there’s a conspiracy that occurred between multiple states. So if what your ultimate goal is, is not just to prosecute these 16 individuals, but to find out who put them up to this, is this part of a bigger conspiracy at play in order to undermine the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, not just in Michigan but nationally? … It creates jurisdictional issues,” Nessel said Tuesday during a virtual news conference.

“I feel confident we have enough evidence to charge if we decide to pursue that. Again, I want to make it clear, I haven’t ruled it out. But for all the reasons I stated, I think that it’s a better idea for the feds to pursue this.”

More importantly, Nessel described this as a “multi-state conspiracy,” something criminally implicating those beyond just the fake electors. Given McDaniel’s position in both Michigan and national politics, McDaniel likely at least knows key details of any such conspiracy, if she wasn’t an active part of it herself.

And it’s not just Michigan. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has confirmed that federal prosecutors are also investigating suspected crimes associated with the fake certificates.

So Dawsey let McDaniel’s claim that she was taking action to censure (and possibly fund the opponent of) Liz Cheney because of some nice little old lady, without mentioning that that nice little old lady is by definition someone being criminally investigated by the FBI for her role in an effort to steal the election. Dawsey also didn’t mention that that nice little old lady might also have information that would implicate McDaniel personally in that crime.

This is in a larger article that frames this all as some horserace politics — even if “unprecedented” — and not a fight about the aftermath of an attack on the peaceful transfer of power.

Dawsey published text from the resolution against Cheney and Kinzinger, describing them as “two members engage[d] in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse,” in paragraph five.

He doesn’t get into the substance of what Republicans are defending with this vote until paragraph nine, which quotes Cheney.

“The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy. I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what,” Cheney said.

Dawsey never considers what it means that the Chair of the Republican Party says that Democrats may keep the House if a full investigation of these alleged crimes occurs, or even what it means that McDaniel intervened to turn David Bossie’s motion to expel Cheney and Kinzinger from the caucus entirely into one calling for censure, a pretty important point if, like Dawsey, you’re pretending this is just boring old horse race politics.

The RNC will vote today to say that if the Select Committee investigation into January 6, including into Kathy Berden and those suspected of conspiring with her, is allowed to continue, the Democrats may to keep the House, a fairly stunning concession that hints at the depths of the conspiracy.

But instead of telling that story, horse race journalist and WaPo’s full-time Mar-a-Lago stenographer wants to tell the story about nice little old ladies.

Update: Via JR, it turns out Berden has some curious ties with McDaniel.

McDaniel was reelected as chair of the RNC in January 2019, with Trump’s endorsement. Two days earlier, her PAC paid $5,000 to Kathleen Berden, a voting member of the RNC, a volunteer position. Reed said the PAC paid Berden because she “whipped votes” for McDaniel’s reelection. He would not address why McDaniel needed Berden’s services or whether it was appropriate for McDaniel to pay a volunteer RNC voting member to influence fellow voters.

When reached for comment, Berden declined to elaborate on her work for McDaniel.

h/t unhuh who first focused on this paragraph