This Russia thing with Trump and Russia

May 12th, 2017 9:05 am | By

The Post explains how Trump pulled the rug out from all the people who had been saying he fired Comey because the Deputy AG sent him this overwhelming memo and he leaped up and said “Fire him right now!” It never sounded very plausible, and the part about Clinton’s emails sounded even less plausible, but they stuck to it – until Trump stuck his lips out at Lester Holt and told a completely different story.

President Trump threatened Friday morning to end White House press briefings, arguing that “it is not possible” for his staff to speak with “perfect accuracy” to the American public.

Trump’s comments come after his description of his decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey in an NBC News interview Thursday flatly contradicted the accounts provided earlier by White House officials, including Vice President Pence, exposing their explanations as misleading and in some cases false.

And now he’s all petulant that the news media are reporting it. He wants his incoherence and impulsiveness and incompetence to be a SECRET.

The explanations for Comey’s firing from the Trump White House have shifted repeatedly since the move was announced late Tuesday afternoon, undermining the credibility of Pence as well as White House press secretary Sean Spicer, principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway.

Initially, Trump’s aides said the president acted simply at the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. After meeting with Trump, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum detailing what he considered to be mistakes in Comey’s handling of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.

…

All along, Trump’s spokesmen insisted that his decision was not shaped in any way by his growing fury with the Russia controversy, including the FBI investigation overseen by Comey into Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election and whether there had been any coordination with Trump associates.

But then he went and said it did. On tv. In an interview.

Then on Thursday, Trump told NBC anchor Lester Holt that the decision to fire Comey was his alone and that he would have made it “regardless” of what Rosenstein recommended. Furthermore, Trump told Holt that he had been thinking of “this Russia thing with Trump” when he arrived at his decision to remove the FBI director.

“In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story; it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won,'” Trump said.

He says it at 1:20 on this clip. He does a little vignette of himself talking to himself – it’s hard to describe how smug and self-admiring it is. He’s the kind of guy you want to escape from if he corners you at a party.

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James Comey better hope

May 12th, 2017 8:45 am | By

Trump has been erupting on Twitter again. He’s still descending. Bottom not yet in sight.

The last item yesterday was this clownish exclamation:

That guy next to him is the enforcer. He has the piss-the-bed tapes strapped to his leg.

Today is all Comey-Russia-press jabber.

“Again,” he says, as if repetition=truth.

This is the head of state, daily attacking the free press.

Grammar got away from him there. Also notice that he thinks he’s exceptionally busy. No, Donnie, that’s not it. It’s a big job.

Not to mention that many of the “things happening” are his own self-made disasters.

Don’t threaten us, Donnie.

Now he’s threatening the guy he just fired for no valid reason.

Big lie. Big big lie.

Quick, send Jared or Eric to collect the family cut.

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Trump begged Comey to cuddle him

May 12th, 2017 5:39 am | By

So Trump invited Comey over for dinner this one time. Comey didn’t want to go but didn’t think he could say no, so he went. It was a week after the inauguration.

As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.

Sly. That wasn’t the two of them making small talk. It was Trump boring on about his Crowd Size and Comey swallowing the urge to tell him to grow up.

Then Trump made a wholly inappropriate demand for “loyalty,” as if Comey were his personal assistant.

Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.

And in that job he’s not supposed to be “reliable” in that sense.

The White House says this account is not correct.

The White House puts out whatever lies Trump tells it to put out…and then watches as Trump contradicts the lies hours later.

Mr. Trump, in an interview on Thursday with NBC, described a far different dinner conversation with Mr. Comey in which the director asked to have the meeting and the question of loyalty never came up. It was not clear whether he was talking about the same meal, but they are believed to have had only one dinner together.

Trump is a fabulist. He makes shit up. You can’t trust a single word he says.

A businessman and reality television star who never served in public office, Mr. Trump may not have understood that by tradition, F.B.I. directors are not supposed to be political loyalists, which is why Congress in the 1970s passed a law giving them 10-year terms to make them independent of the president.

Mr. Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.

A White House spokeswoman on Thursday disputed the description of the dinner by Mr. Comey’s associates.

“We don’t believe this to be an accurate account,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary. “The integrity of our law enforcement agencies and their leadership is of the utmost importance to President Trump. He would never even suggest the expectation of personal loyalty, only loyalty to our country and its great people.”

Oh come on. You can’t possibly expect us to believe that. Trump who puts his ravenous enraged ego on parade on Twitter every day? He would demand loyalty from anyone and everyone.

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The broad, well-established, interdisciplinary scholarly fields

May 11th, 2017 4:58 pm | By

But wait, there’s more. One of the people who signed the letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel – one of the “colleagues” who signed it – wrote a piece for the CHE saying why the signers were right to sign it.

As one of the many scholars involved in writing the open letter calling on Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy to retract the essay “In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, I am compelled to come forward and attempt to reclaim a narrative spinning increasingly out of control.

Five words in the bullying starts – she has to make clear that it was many scholars. (I’m not sure they are all genuine scholars; I think some are adherents rather than scholars, adherents of a political view as opposed to scholars in a discipline.) Many scholars; we all hate you – it might as well be the playground.

And she’s not “compelled,” and nobody stole anything so there’s nothing to “reclaim,” and it’s not a “narrative,” it’s arguments. And it’s not out of control, it’s just not what the “many scholars” had in mind.

Many of us became involved at the request of black and/or trans scholars who feel completely demoralized by Tuvel’s article and the failure of peer review that it represents. Speaking for myself, I signed and circulated the letter because I know, firsthand, of the damage this kind of scholarship does to marginalized groups, especially black and trans scholars, in philosophy.

Tuvel’s article is not a reason to feel “completely demoralized.” That’s more bullying language. It would be fair if she had written a vituperative attack on black and/or trans scholars or people, but she didn’t do anything like that. Saying her article does “damage” is just more of the same bullying rhetoric. It is not reasonable.

Tuvel received substantive critical feedback at conferences from scholars in critical race theory and trans studies. We do not understand how this failed to shape the review process and can only assume that such scholars were not selected as peer reviewers.

Why should they have been? Tuvel wasn’t writing critical theory or trans studies, she was writing philosophy.

[T]he article’s publication signals an arrogant disregard for the broad, well-established, interdisciplinary scholarly fields of both critical race theory and trans studies.

But philosophers are allowed to write about philosophy. They’re not required to write about other fields. Also I have my doubts about the “well-established” bit.

While feminist philosophy should imply a critique of the field of philosophy itself, the open letter to Hypatia wasn’t aimed at the discipline over all. None of us ever expected it to circulate so widely, to garner so many signatures, or to become the object of news stories.

No, you wanted to bully Tuvel in private with nobody watching.

[T]he lightning-fast vituperative response by scholars who would never consider publishing in Hypatia (and who may not respect feminist philosophy) is suspect, to say the least. We authors of the open letter, and the associate editors of Hypatia, are accused of poor reasoning, poor scholarship, and lack of integrity. In other words, the overwhelmingly sexist, male, and white discipline has, once again, called out the feminists as irrational, hysterical, and immoral. To say that we’re engaging in a “witch hunt” couldn’t be more paradoxical when we, the feminist philosophers, have long been treated like the witches of the discipline.

But what about the feminist philosophers and other feminists who think the open letter is horrible? What about the feminists who think the treatment of Tuvel has been unbelievably shitty?

I signed the open letter as part of a continuing effort to make feminist philosophy something other than a damaged, dutiful daughter to the deeply troubled discipline of philosophy. I also signed it as part of continuing efforts to change philosophy’s practices. After all, the methodological insularity evidenced in Tuvel’s article and its publication effectively render ignored and disrespected black, trans, and other minority scholars who work in these fields doubly marginalized. The inequalities perpetuated are both conceptual and practical.

What about the business school? What about geology? What about chemical engineering?

The first comment is useful:

“The fundamental problem with Tuvel’s article isn’t her ability to construct a rational argument but rather the omission of any sustained engagement with the well-developed, interdisciplinary scholarship on race and gender, particularly by black and trans scholars.”

This seems to be a major point of disagreement among those who oppose the call for retraction and those who support it. I fall into the former category, and I do not think she had any obligation to ‘engage’ with the fields you mentioned. Hers was an analytic paper and is no different from other work, even on similar topics, in the field. Philosophers need to have the freedom to choose what method and framework they’re going to work within. Her method is a — though not the only — legitimate one, and this witch hunt (yes that’s what it is) is an attempt to violate her right to choose to use it.

It’s not voting or real estate or schools; it doesn’t have to be representative.

There are many excellent comments at Brian Leiter’s too. Such as:

Chris Surprenant said…

The two points that this article raises as defenses–the number of straight, white males in philosophy and that Tuvel supposedly didn’t cite the appropriate literature–both seem like distractions and are otherwise irrelevant. What was done by the associate editors, letter-writers, and letter-signers was egregious, professional misconduct.

Winnubst’s response is entirely tone deaf to the reasons why there was such a quick backlash from many members of our community on all sides of the spectrum: What was done not only violated clear professional norms, but it also violated norms of decency and kindness that we should show to other people, especially other people who are especially vulnerable in our discipline (untenured, female, etc.).

Oh but decency and kindness aren’t “well-developed, interdisciplinary scholarship on race and gender” so they don’t count.

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Rat shan’t visit party

May 11th, 2017 4:18 pm | By

So all last weekend Donald was fuming about Comey’s “mild nausea” at the possibility that his blather about Clinton’s emails might have affected the election – yet today, always resilient, always willing to think the whole world adores him, he was planning to visit the FBI to give them a nice morale boost…until he found out that they don’t love him all that much. He’s not a quick study, is he.

The White House has abandoned the idea of President Trump visiting FBI headquarters after being told he would not be greeted warmly, administration officials told NBC News.

Amid the continuing fallout over his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, Trump was considering an appearance at the FBI’s J Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, DC. The White House publicly floated the idea as recently as Thursday morning.

Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked by a reporter whether such a visit was imminent, replied, I believe that it’s very likely that takes place sometime in the next few days.”

But that idea was dropped later Thursday, administration officials said, after the FBI told the White House the optics would not be good. FBI officials made clear that the president would not draw many smiles and cheers, having just unceremoniously sacked a very popular director.

Here’s the thing, Donnie. You’re an asshole. You’re the biggest asshole many of us have ever seen. You’re horrible in almost every way there is to be horrible. A few people must have told you this by now. You don’t seem to take it in.

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Donald doesn’t know what he doesn’t know

May 11th, 2017 3:34 pm | By

Today in an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News Trump called Comey a showboat.

Yes that’s right. Trump called Comey a showboat.

Trump called Comey a showboat.

He also said he asked Comey whether he was under investigation.

“Sir, sir, please sir, am I under investigation?”

He says Comey told him he wasn’t. Yeah right. He also said Obama spied on him in his jammies at Schlump Tower, so what he says happened isn’t worth a dog’s fart.

“I actually asked him” if I were under investigation, Trump said, noting that he spoke with Comey once over dinner and twice by phone.

“I said, if it’s possible would you let me know, ‘Am I under investigation?’ He said, ‘You are not under investigation.'”

“I know I’m not under investigation,” Trump told Holt during the 31-minute White House interview.

It would be highly unusual for someone who might be the focus of an FBI probe to ask whether he was under investigation and to be directly told by the FBI director that he was not.

Unusual, inappropriate, unethical, a dereliction of duty, a firing offense…the list is long.

The president also reiterated his claim that he had been planning to fire Comey even before he received Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s recommendation to do so.

“He’s a showboat, he’s grandstander, the FBI has been in turmoil,” Trump said of Comey in his wide-ranging interview with Holt. “You know that, I know that. Everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil, less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that.”

Oh Donald. Look at yourself. Look. Turmoil, thy name is Donaldus Reginae.

Trump also insisted there was no “collusion between me and my campaign and the Russians.”

“Also, the Russians did not affect the vote,” he said.

Stupid, stupid man. He doesn’t know that. He can’t know that.

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Oh, are they Russian?

May 11th, 2017 11:29 am | By

Yesterday the traitorous lying thief in the White House held a meeting with his Russian buddies and kept the press out. He kept the press out. He really does think he’s a dictator and can do any damn thing he wants to, and that we are his peons.

When President Trump met with top Russian officials in the Oval Office on Wednesday, White House officials barred reporters from witnessing the moment. They apparently preferred to block coverage of the awkwardly timed visit as questions swirled about whether the president had dismissed his F.B.I. director in part to squelch the investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Moscow.

They prefer lots of things that are in their interest but not ours; they shouldn’t be allowed to put their preferences into action.

But the Russians, who have a largely state-run media, brought their own press contingent in the form of an official photographer. They quickly filled the vacuum with their own pictures of the meeting with Mr. Trump, Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to the United States.

The Russian press? More than welcome. Ours? Get out.

Within minutes of the meeting, the Foreign Ministry had posted photographs on Twitter of Mr. Trump and Mr. Lavrov smiling and shaking hands. The Russian embassy posted images of the president grinning and gripping hands with the ambassador. Tass, Russia’s official news agency, released more photographs of the three men laughing together in the Oval Office.

The White House released nothing.

I for one welcome our new Russian overlords.

Mr. Trump’s session with Mr. Lavrov was listed on his schedule as “Closed Press,” meaning the news media would not have a chance to photograph or otherwise document the meeting. “Our official photographer and their official photographer were present — that’s it,” a White House aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity, lacking authorization to describe the ground rules.

The difference, of course, is that while official White House photographers have broad access to the president, their presence is not considered a substitute for that of independent news media, which routinely request and secure access to official presidential movements and meetings so they can obtain their own images and produce their own reports. In Russia, where the independent news media are severely limited, there is no such regular press access to government officials apart from state-controlled organizations.

Trump wants to do things the way the Russians do.

Former White House officials were left to wonder about the security implications of having allowed a Russian photographer unfettered access to the American president’s office.

Colin H. Kahl, the former national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., took to Twitter to pose what he called a “deadly serious” question: “Was it a good idea to let a Russian gov photographer & all their equipment into the Oval Office?”

David S. Cohen, the former deputy director of the C.I.A. during the Obama administration, responded: “No, it was not.”

The Post explores that question further.

A photographer for a Russian state-owned news agency was allowed into the Oval Office on Wednesday during President Trump’s meeting with Russian diplomats, a level of access that was criticized by former U.S. intelligence officials as a potential security breach.

The officials cited the danger that a listening device or other surveillance equipment could have been brought into the Oval Office while hidden in cameras or other electronics.

The White House says don’t worry, somebody patted them down first.

The White House played down the danger, saying that the photographer and his equipment were subjected to a security screening before he and it entered the White House grounds. The Russian “had to go through the same screening as a member of the U.S. press going through the main gate to the [White House] briefing room,” a senior administration official said.

But the Russian press isn’t exactly the same as the US press, is it. Here’s why: Russia is a hostile foreign power. It doesn’t love us. It really really doesn’t. It doesn’t love Trump either, it’s using him. The media present was state-owned, not independent.

The administration official also said the White House had been misled about the role of the Russian photographer. Russian officials had described the individual as Lavrov’s official photographer without disclosing that he also worked for Tass.

“We were not informed by the Russians that their official photographer was dual-hatted and would be releasing the photographs on the state news agency,” the administration official said.

Oh god. How can they be that stupid? “We were not informed by the Russians” – of course you weren’t! “We will be bringing state media personnel to take pictures and plant listening devices” – you were expecting them to say that?

White House officials said they were surprised to see photos posted online showing Trump not only with Lavrov but also smiling and shaking hands with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

That was supposed to be their little secret, god damn it.

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A pointed rebuke

May 11th, 2017 10:37 am | By

Awkward for Donald: the acting director of the FBI says Donald’s claim that the agents didn’t love Comey any more is Not True. So much of what Donald says is Not True.

McCabe is testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee right now.

Mr. McCabe rejected the White House’s assertion that Mr. Comey had lost the backing of rank-and-file F.B.I. agents, a pointed rebuke of what had been one of the president’s main defenses for the move.

“Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the F.B.I. and still does to this day,” Mr. McCabe said at the hearing.

“The vast majority of F.B.I. employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey,” he added.

But but but but the president said…

Mr. McCabe also said that the Justice Department’s investigation into whether any Trump associates colluded with Russia in the presidential election was “highly significant,” another direct contradiction of the White House.

A day earlier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, trying to parry accusations that Mr. Comey’s firing was related to the Russia inquiry, called it “probably one of the smallest things that they’ve got going on their plate” at the F.B.I.

Yeah, it would be, wouldn’t it. A hostile foreign power interfering in a presidential election? Pfff, small potatoes; nobody cares about that.

Mr. McCabe was also adamant that the firing of Mr. Comey had not affected the investigation.

“The work of the men and women of the F.B.I. continues despite any changes in circumstances,” he said in response to a question from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date. Simply put, you cannot stop the men and women of the F.B.I. from doing the right thing.”

It’s comforting to remember that Deep Throat was the Deputy Director of the FBI.

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Voter suppression time

May 11th, 2017 10:22 am | By

The Times reports:

President Trump plans to name Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a long-promised commission to investigate voting fraud in the United States, a White House official said Thursday.

The commission is the official follow-through on Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that several million “illegals” voted for his Democratic rival and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote.

An unsubstantiated claim of that kind is more properly called a lie, especially when it’s made with malice by a sitting president. Trump just makes shit up, and since he’s not six years old and not talking about pixies in the garden, that is lying.

Mr. Kobach, who has championed the strictest voter identification laws in the country, will be the vice chairman of the commission, which is to be led by Vice President Mike Pence and is expected to include about a dozen others, including state officials from both political parties, the official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to detail an announcement expected later Thursday.

We know how this will go. They will cook the books and use the books as a reason to make voting ever more difficult. The more difficult it is to vote, the fewer disadvantaged people are able to vote, because of the disadvantages. If voting takes place in few locations and during working hours and with burdensome requirements for layers of identification, then fewer poor people will be able to vote. They’re basically doing everything they can to make sure most people who vote Democratic can’t vote.

Mr. Kobach has been the driving force behind a Kansas law requiring new voters to produce a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers as proof of citizenship or be denied the ability to cast ballots. He worked last year to disqualify the state and local votes of thousands of people who did not meet the criteria. He has advocated the proof-of-citizenship requirement at the federal level as well, citing rampant voter fraud without producing proof of a widespread problem.

“Kris Kobach being named to run a commission on ‘voter integrity’ is like naming Bernie Madoff to run a commission on financial crimes,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice Education Fund. “He has dedicated his professional career to trying to deny people of color the vote and to trying to drive millions of immigrants out of the country.”

…

Civil rights groups also reacted with alarm to the impending creation of the task force, arguing that Mr. Trump’s own comments about illegal voting by immigrants suggested that his intent was to work to restrict the voting rights of minorities.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the commission “a thinly veiled voter suppression task force,” adding that it was “designed to impugn the integrity of African-American and Latino participation in the political process.”

If they would only learn to vote Republican Trump would be more understanding.

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can we get this person fired

May 11th, 2017 9:35 am | By
can we get this person fired

Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter.

It turns out it’s a public post, so we can all read it.

zoe

who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?

who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access and wouldn’t mind sending me copy so i can read it and properly put forth a response, i’d deeply appreciate it.

The first comment is

Lol author’s name is Becky!

But they soon get down to business.

Capture

Alexis Shotwell It’s really messed up. I’m on the editorial board of Hypatia, and surprised that this one didn’t come to me for review, given my work. I’m working up a response/intervention with a few folks now, too.
Like · 11 · April 28 at 3:02pm

Mimi Thi Nguyen Alexis, I’m also part of a loose group –including Aren (a mutual FB friend!)– writing a response. Should we coordinate? Ideas for best strategies?
Like · 1 · April 30 at 1:03pm · Edited

Zoé Samudzi i’m not a part of anything, but would love to be 👀
Like · 3 · April 30 at 1:14pm

Alexis Shotwell I think the letter we’ve been working on is about to be done! I’ll post it here when I get the okay from the others
Like · 5 · April 30 at 2:47pm

Someone else offers to connect Samudzi – or everyone reading, it’s not clear which – with people at the university where Tuvel teaches.

Tallyn Owens If you want to get in touch with anyone at Rhodes, shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to help.
Like · April 28 at 12:45pm

Then someone posts what is apparently a list of her courses:

Capture

There’s a lot more ugliness after that. A colleague at Rhodes chimes in. Someone suggests a demand that she pay reparations.

Capture

The final comment is “can we get this person fired” [sic]

So that, I think, clarified Samudzi’s role in all this. She was part of the inspiration for the open letter, and she did her bit to work people into a rage at Rebecca Tuvel the person. (She told me on Twitter that her “critique” of the article wasn’t personal at all. I think this pretty effectively demolishes that claim.)

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An enraged president stewing

May 10th, 2017 5:25 pm | By

The Times has the inside scoop on how it all went down inside Trump’s brain psychotic rage organ and the surrounding buildings.

The countdown to President Trump’s dismissal of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, began last weekend with an enraged president stewing over Mr. Comey’s testimony to Congress last week, when he admitted to being “slightly nauseous” about doing anything to get Mr. Trump elected.

Mr. Trump, according to people close to the president, had been openly talking about firing Mr. Comey for at least a week. Despite the objections from some of his aides about the optics and the lack of an obvious successor, the grumbling evolved into a tentative plan as he angrily watched the Sunday news shows at his Bedminster, N.J., golf resort.

I guess he thinks of underlings as more or less janitors, who are there to please him and if they stop doing that they gotta go.

By Monday, capping off months of festering grievances, Mr. Trump told people around him that he wanted Mr. Comey gone, repeatedly questioning Mr. Comey’s fitness for the job and telling aides there was “something wrong” with him, several people familiar with the discussions said.

I bet I know what’s wrong with him! He doesn’t kiss Trump’s bum enough.

At first, Mr. Trump, who is fond of vetting his decisions with a wide circle of staff members, advisers and friends, kept his thinking to a small circle, venting his anger to Vice President Mike Pence; the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II; and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who all told him they generally backed dismissing Mr. Comey.

Another early sounding board was Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime director of security and now a member of the White House staff, who would later be tasked with delivering the manila envelope containing Mr. Comey’s letter of dismissal to F.B.I. Headquarters, an indication of just how personal the matter was to the president.

Wise counselors all, I’m sure.

Bannon advised delay, saying there would be less of a backlash if he waited. (Why would that be? More time would merely be more time for Trump to act like an unhinged greedy lunatic, so how would that help?) Anyway Trump was having none of it.

Mr. Trump was adamant, denouncing Mr. Comey’s conduct in both the Clinton and Russia investigations, and left aides on Monday with the impression that he planned to take action the next day.

He’s decisive! He’s bold! He’s strong! He’s resolute.

Ok he’s petulant and stubborn. Whatever.

Early Tuesday, he made his final decision, keeping many aides, including the president’s communications team and network of surrogates, in the dark until news of the firing leaked out late in the afternoon.

Ah that’s sweet. “Surprise!!” It must be fabulous working for him.

Mr. Trump explained the firing by citing Mr. Comey’s handling of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server — a justification that was rich in irony, White House officials acknowledged, considering that as recently as two weeks ago, the president appeared at a rally where he was serenaded with chants of “Lock her up!”

I wouldn’t call it irony, exactly. Shameless lying? Cynical brutality? Abusing our intelligence?

On Wednesday, the president and his staff had widened their criticism of Mr. Comey’s conduct on the Clinton inquiry to include a wider denunciation of his performance. “He wasn’t doing a good job,” Mr. Trump said, before entering a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, early Wednesday. “Very simply, he was not doing a good job.”

How would he know? He has no idea what a good job is. He thinks it’s making money by whatever means come most readily to hand.

Yet even in his letter to Mr. Comey, the president mentioned the Russia inquiry, writing that “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.”

Jeffrey Toobin is emphatic on how utterly inappropriate that was if it happened. He’s also quite sure it didn’t happen as described. He’s also emphatic on how inappropriate it is for Trump to say it, whether it’s true or not.

And that reflected, White House aides said, what they conceded had been his obsession over the investigation Mr. Trump believes is threatening his larger agenda.

The hostility toward Mr. Comey in the West Wing in recent weeks was palpable, aides said, with advisers describing an almost ritualistic need to criticize the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation to assuage an anxious and angry president.

And that angry, anxious, obsessive president has access to the nukes.

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Please sir, can I have some more?

May 10th, 2017 3:53 pm | By

They just wanted to slow the investigation down a little, that’s all.

Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to four congressional officials, including Senator Richard J. Durbin.

Mr. Comey made his appeal to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who also wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of Mr. Comey this week, the officials said.

“I’m told that as soon as Rosenstein arrived, there was a request for additional resources for the investigation and that a few days afterwards, he was sacked,” said Mr. Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois. “I think the Comey operation was breathing down the neck of the Trump campaign and their operatives, and this was an effort to slow down the investigation.”

Of course they shouldn’t be making any effort to slow down the investigation…

The timing of Mr. Comey’s request is not clear-cut evidence that his firing was related to the Russia investigation. But it is certain to fuel bipartisan criticism that President Trump appeared to be meddling in an investigation that had the potential to damage his presidency.

Noooooooo, why would anybody think that.

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Ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise

May 10th, 2017 11:53 am | By

At Quillette, Oliver Traldi on the Rebecca Tuvel uproar.

The letter he refers to is the open letter explaining how Tuvel was wrong wrong wrong.

The letter’s most important point is hidden in the first complaint: that Tuvel “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” In the Daily Nous comments, academics in these subfields struggled to identify precisely which arguments Tuvel failed to cite or address, or where her thinking might have gone wrong on a more than superficial level. Indeed, many philosophers of both gender and race have come out against retraction. But “the relevant subfields” are not really the academic studies of gender and race. They are the political interests and values associated with a certain conception of those topics. The real complaint is that anyone who publishes in a journal like Hypatia, itself a blatantly activist organ, ought to share those politics. In turn, the necessary politics are built in to the “vocabulary and frameworks” used by the academics. This is ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise.

That is exactly what I’ve been chewing over all along. I’ve been trying to figure out in what sense these fundamentally (and obviously) political ideas are “subfields” in philosophy. I’ve been trying to figure out in what sense they’re academic, and what “peer review” can mean in connection with them, and why other academics are trying to punish another academic for getting them “wrong.”

Tuvel was criticized for not citing enough black or transgender scholars. Such a complaint could be leveled at virtually any philosophy paper. But Tuvel’s critics think it is especially relevant here, because they believe black and transgender scholars would have alerted her to the problematic elements of her work. In her response, however, Tuvel cited both Julia Serrano and Adolph Reed, Jr., who seem to share her methods or contentions; and black and transgender philosophers alike have come out in support of Tuvel in the face of the mob. We are back at a standard paradox of identity politics: its most fervent practitioners often seem most trapped in the delusion that marginalized groups are homogeneous.

That too. It was drearily obvious that the issue wasn’t quantity, it was viewpoint. She didn’t cite “enough black or transgender scholars” saying the approved thing.

Rather, it is Tuvel’s critics who don’t seem to know the feminist literature. Trans-exclusionary positions are actually quite popular among the reigning generation of feminist philosophers, who often hew to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum that “gender is the social meaning of sex.” Sally Haslanger, the most notorious feminist metaphysician and a leader of several online mobs in her own right, gives an account of gender that both explicitly analogizes it to race and seems to have trans-exclusionary implications. (Tuvel adapts her theory in one part of the paper.) One wonders why the purported opponents of power would attack a young assistant professor at a small school in Tennessee rather than the most prominent writer in the field and a fixture on the faculty at MIT.

By which he means one doesn’t wonder at all, one realizes they are bullies and chickenshits.

In the same way, Tuvel was criticized for not focusing on “lived experience”—the idea being that testimony from the lived experience of black and transgender people would have spurred her to a different conclusion. Guenther similarly but not equivalently talks of Tuvel’s commitment to “ideal theory” rather than “the network of power relations that shape particular historical contexts and meanings.” But to someone who hasn’t rejected out of hand the possibility of transracialism, Tuvel will seem exquisitely attuned to a certain kind of lived experience: the transracial experience. She writes about this experience with great empathy and imagination, but her opponents offer it only ridicule and opprobrium. What then could we say about the reactions of Guenther and others? Well, we might say, for example, that they are themselves unknowingly agents of a network of power relations which we might call cisracial privilege, and that their critiques here serve not only to mock and deride transracial individuals but to marginalize, silence, and erase transracial narrative and experience. The fervency of the reaction we might call evidence of cisracial fragility. For example.

But we had better not be untenured academics if we do.

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Roger Stone is delighted

May 10th, 2017 10:07 am | By

Politico reports that Trump has been increasingly furious about the way Russia keeps upstaging him, so Rosenstein’s memo was an excellent excuse to give Comey the hook. Apparently he thought that if Comey went away everyone would forget all about Russia.

Trump had grown angry with the Russia investigation — particularly Comey admitting in front of the Senate that the FBI was investigating his campaign — and that the FBI director wouldn’t support his claims that President Barack Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower.

And yet his claims were simply made up, out of the thin dry air of his own brain. It’s fatuous to expect the FBI director to support one’s personal fantasies.

But the fallout seemed to take the White House by surprise. Trump made a round of calls around 5 p.m., asking for support from senators. White House officials believed it would be a “win-win” because Republicans and Democrats alike have problems with the FBI director, one person briefed on their deliberations said.

Instead, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told him he was making a big mistake — and Trump seemed “taken aback,” according to a person familiar with the call.

…

Trump received letters from Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, calling for Comey’s dismissal, on Tuesday, a spokesman said. The president then decided to fire the FBI director based on the recommendations and moved quickly. The spokesman said Trump did not ask for the letters in advance, and that White House officials had no idea they were coming.

But several other people familiar with the events said Trump had talked about the firing for more than a week, and the letters were written to give him [a] rationale to fire Comey.

He thinks he has absolute power. He can’t absorb information that would convince him otherwise.

While shock dominated much of the FBI and the White House, the mood was more elated at Roger Stone’s house in Florida. Several Stone allies and friends said Stone, who has been frequently mentioned in the investigation, encouraged the president to fire Comey in conversations in recent weeks.

On Twitter, Stone signaled praise for the move by posting an image of Trump from The Apprentice saying, “You’re fired.”

Stone declined to comment Tuesday night but said he was enjoying a fine cigar.

Sweet.

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Very simply he was not doing a good job

May 10th, 2017 9:29 am | By

Now he’s called in Kissinger in hopes that that will make him look not-lunatic.

In his first in-person statement to the press since he fired now-former FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump did not mince words.

“Very simply he was not doing a good job,” Mr. Trump told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan Wednesday during a meeting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

If it’s so simply that he was not doing a good job, why did it take so long to fire him? If it’s so simply, why didn’t Trump fire him as soon as he took office? If it’s true that he was not doing a good job, why was Trump apparently unaware of it until yesterday? If it’s true that he was not doing a good job, why did Trump heap him with praise during the campaign?

Before this, the president had met privately with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Brennan was the pool reporter.

Mr. Trump added that the firing did not affect his meeting with Lavrov  — the highest-ranking Russian official Mr. Trump has met with face-to-face — in any way.

How would he know? I don’t suppose Lavrov told him “Thank you, Mr President, for making it so clear to the entire world what a hopeless incompetent buffoon you are,” but we can be confident that’s what he was thinking.

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And then there’s the money-laundering question

May 10th, 2017 9:08 am | By

The Post gathers up some items under the heading: After the president fired James Comey, the cloud hanging over the White House just got bigger and darker.

— Donald Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants and amateurs who are either unwilling or unable to tell him no

He’s got no one intelligent and independent to warn him when he’s about to walk off a cliff.

That’s not surprising, of course; it’s more like inevitable. No one intelligent and independent would want to work for Trump. That’s perhaps the fatal flaw in being as comprehensively awful as Trump: the awfulness repels people of quality and doing without them can’t work forever.

— Senior officials at the White House were caught off guard by the intense and immediate blowback to the president’s stunning decision to fire James Comey. They reportedly expected Republicans to back him up and thought Democrats wouldn’t complain loudly because they have been critical of Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Indeed, that was the dubious excuse given publicly for his ouster.

They were saying that, in wonder and amazement, on cable news last night. I shared the wonder and amazement. Seriously? How is that possible?

I guess that demonstrates just how hard it is to find even halfway competent people willing to work for Trump. You have to be really thick not to realize that Trump’s firing Comey would not be a good look.

Spicey had a rough night. The story he tells is bizarre:

“As Spicer tells it, (Deputy Attorney General Rod) Rosenstein was confirmed about two weeks ago and independently took on this issue so the president was not aware of the probe until he received a memo from Rosenstein on Tuesday, along with a letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommending that Comey be fired. The president then swiftly decided to follow the recommendation, notifying the FBI via e-mail around 5 p.m. and in a letter delivered to the FBI by the president’s longtime bodyguard. ‘It was all him,’ Spicer said of Rosenstein.” (No serious person believes this.)

It does sound like Trump though. It sounds exactly like Trump. Rosenstein writes a memo, Sessions passes it on along with advice from himself, Trump reads it and is struck all of a heap and leaps to perform An Action. That’s Trump all over. An adult in that job would talk to people first, would think, would consider the likely consequences. But Trump? Nah – he just reacts to stimuli. Rosenstein’s memo was a stimulus.

The Trump people said golly isn’t it time to move on from this Russia thing?

CNN reported that federal prosecutors – as part of the ongoing Russia probe – have now issued grand jury subpoenas to associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. “The subpoenas represent the first sign of a significant escalation of activity in the FBI’s broader investigation that began last July into possible ties between Trump campaign associates and Russia,” Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz and Pamela Brown reported. “The subpoenas issued in recent weeks by the US Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Virginia, were received by associates who worked with Flynn on contracts after he was forced out as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014.”

And then…

It emerged yesterday that Senate investigators have asked the Treasury Department’s criminal investigation division for any relevant financial information related to Trump, his top officials, or his campaign aides. “We’ve made a request, to FinCEN in the Treasury Department, to make sure, not just for example vis-a-vis the President, but just overall our effort to try to follow the intel no matter where it leads,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, per CNN. FinCEN is the federal agency that has been investigating allegations of foreign money-laundering through purchases of U.S. real estate. “You get materials that show if there have been, what level of financial ties between, I mean some of the stuff, some of the Trump-related officials, Trump campaign-related officials and other officials and where those dollars flow — not necessarily from Russia.” Until the Treasury Department responds with documents, Warner said, he plans to withhold support for Trump’s nominees.

That could be the proverbial

Image result for smoking gun

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So he persisted

May 10th, 2017 8:32 am | By

Meanwhile, in Trump’s US, reporters are not allowed to ask administration officials questions if the officials don’t feel like being asked questions. By “not allowed” I mean they get arrested and charged with a crime if they do.

A veteran West Virginia reporter has been arrested and charged with “disruption of government services” in the state capitol for “yelling questions” at visiting Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price and White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway.

Daniel Ralph Heyman, 54, with the Public News Service of West Virginia, was freed on $5,000 bond Tuesday night on a charge of “willful disruption of government processes,” according to a criminal complaint.

“The above defendant was aggressively breaching the secret service agents to the point where the agents were forced to remove him a couple of times from the area walking up the hallway in the main building of the Capitol,” the complaint states. It adds Heyman caused a disturbance by “yelling questions at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price.”

The misdemeanor carries a possible fine of $100 and up to six months in jail.

Heyman later told reporters he was “trying to do my job” by pressing the secretary on whether domestic violence would be considered a pre-existing condition under the proposed American Health Care Act.

This isn’t obnoxious fans pestering a rock star. It’s journalists asking government officials questions. We need them to do that, especially with this administration. Trump and his gang are secretive and they tell lies. We need reporters to press them.

Heyman, a veteran reporter who covers health issues for Public News Service, said he was holding his phone out to record the impromptu hallway interview but Price repeatedly refused to respond. “He didn’t say anything,” Heyman told reporters. “So I persisted.”

Elizabeth Warren joke there.

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia called the charges “outrageous” and said the arrest was “a blatant attempt to chill an independent, free press.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia posted a statement on Facebook:

This a dangerous time in our country. Freedom of the press is being eroded every day. We have a President who calls the media “fake news” and resists transparency at every turn. And today, a reporter was arrested for trying to ask a question to members of President Trump’s administration. Mr. Heyman’s arrest is a blatant attempt to chill an independent, free press. The charges against him are outrageous, and they must be dropped immediately.

By asking Tom Price and Kellyanne Conway whether domestic violence was considered a preexisting condition under President Trump’s healthcare proposal, Dan Heyman was doing his job as a reporter. He was fulfilling that sacred role of the media in a democratic state of holding our elected officials accountable regarding the vital issues of the day. And for that, he was arrested.

What President Trump’s administration is forgetting, and what the Capitol Police forgot today, is that the government works for us. Today was a dark day for democracy. But the rule of law will prevail. The First Amendment will prevail. The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia stands ready to fight any attempt by the government to infringe upon our First Amendment rights.

We are allowed to ask them questions.

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Trump says he’s draining the swamp

May 10th, 2017 7:57 am | By

You’ve probably seen them already, but I can’t not post Trump’s After the Firing tweets.

Well, first there’s the characteristic vulgarity and inappropriateness – a stupid childish epithet as the first word, from the sitting president. Then there’s the ludicrous point-missing. The issue isn’t the merits of Comey. It’s why now and not last July; it’s the investigation; it’s the suddenness and randomness; it’s the investigation; it’s the conspicuously shitty way it was done; it’s the investigation.

Same thing. No, Donald, that’s not it.

Then why did you wait more than three months?

Then he retweets something about Mexico and drugs from the Drudge report. Diversion! Road trip!

Then back to the firing.

Oh christ. Can he really believe that? Is he that stupid?

Then another RT of the Drudge Report, but this time with a Comey-scandals story. Subtle!

Next up, three tweets attacking a Democratic Senator.

And last for now, the one where he tipped off CNN that he was watching CNN with the result that CNN addressed him directly with some useful advice.

This is our new reality.

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Library trolling

May 9th, 2017 5:02 pm | By

The BBC’s live coverage of the Tuesday Afternoon Massacre:

Richard Nixon Library stands behind its man
Posted at
16:37
Richard Nixon’s presidential library is effectively trolling on Twitter, pointing out that the disgraced former president managed not to fire the director of the FBI.

Trump’s dismissal of Comey drew widespread comparisons with Nixon’s actions over the Watergate scandal, leading ‘Nixonian’ to trend on Twitter.

#Watergate is also trending on Twitter.

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The previous coup

May 9th, 2017 4:52 pm | By

Via Ira Flatow:

Image may contain: 2 people

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