More Epstein Files

Three million more documents from the Epstein files have been released.

As far as I can make out, it's all sound and fury signifying nothing . . . yet.  There are too many new names to list are mentioned here, but Trump is mentioned over a thousand times in them, particularly where it pertains to allegations (unproven, but all worth investigating) that Trump was involved in sexual activity with minors.  And Harvard University is represented by enough allegations toward people associated with the higher-learning institution that ne'er-do-wells hoping to impress impressionable single women will start pretending that they're alumni of Yale.  Or even Stanford.

At first glance - and maybe at subsequent glances - there doesn't seem to be much in this latest file drop that most of us don't already know or haven't already figured out.   Why would anyone have had reason to believe that Steve Bannon wasn't involved with Jeffrey Epstein?  The smoking gun that prove Trump's sex crimes is likely in the files - another three million - that haven't been released.

Not much to say today.  Sorry.

(Note: Don Lemon was not arrested in Minneapolis.  He was arrested in Saint Paul.  I correcrted the original error.)

They Got Pics

The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released pictures of Epstein and his clients.

Not Brian Epstein with the Beatles, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and Cilla Black.  Jeffrey Epstein with some of the most powerful and/or revered men in the world.

Among the chaps in Epstein's company are, clockwise from top right, Bill Gates, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (whom King Charles III demoted by rescinding his royal titles), Alan Dershowitz, Woody Allen (not really surprising, given Allen's own scandals involving girls and young women, but still saddening), Richard Branson, a guy who looks like Richard Benjamin (but isn't, because if Richard Benjamin had had anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, his wife Paula Prentiss would have left him by now), and Epstein himself.

Oh yeah, and pictures of Bill Clinton too.

And of course, pictures of one Donald J. Trump.

The Epstein estate honored subpoenas by the House Democrats to produce such material related to the ongoing investigation into the late financier and pedophile.  Unlike Trump, Epstein's survivors and lawyers actually obey the law.  Out of 95,000 pictures provided to the House Democrats, they released 19.

Isn't nineteen thousand pictures a lot go through, you might ask?   Yes.  But they didn't released nineteen thousand pictures.  They released nineteen pictures.

Clearly, the Democrats don't want to flood the zone, as it were, to embarrass Trump or anyone else caught up in the Epstein scandal.  They want to release photos bit by bit, to make Trump in particular sweat as much as possible.  They need the as-yet unreleased pictures as leverage to get the Epstein files released.

In the meantime, they can laugh at the reaction one picture is likely getting - that of Steve Bannon (yeah, him too!) talking with Woody Allen.  What could be more embarrassing to the maestro of MAGA than to be seen talking with the one American filmmaker who has taken his cinematic cues from the French - and, artistically speaking, has much more in common with Jean Renoir than John Ford? 

If You Blinked, You Missed It

Steve Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress late last week.

It took forever to start the trial, but it only took a couple of days to end it.  The Justice Department had an airtight case, and the defense had no case at all.  Bannon had promised to "go medieval" on the prosecution - whatever that means - but the iron maiden never came out.   

Bannon plans to appeal his conviction, but he's likely to lose in an even quicker trial.   

Sentencing - which could be two successive one-year prison terms - is currently scheduled for October 21.  Uh, maybe they could delay the sentencing until, say November 7?  That way, if Bannon does get two successive one-year prison terms, he'll be in jail until just after the 2024 presidential election is over.

And when he does get out after two years, he'll have lost his right to vote.

Oh, the irony! 😃

Bannon Slammed

The January 6 select committee means business.  And the House of Representatives this past week ratified some of the committee's really mean business when it voted to hold the really mean Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for refusing to honor a congressional subpoena and testify before the January 6 select committee. 

Bannon will fight this, of course, citing executive and attorney-client privilege for his counsel to Trump, even though Trump is no longer President and Bannon is not an attorney and was not a White House staff member in early January 2021.  In the meantime, he loves the attention he's getting, convinced, like Trump himself and the many obnoxious celebrities that the equally obnoxious Trump emulated, that any press - even bad press - is good press.  And if he goes to jail for contempt of Congress, he'll likely paint  himself as martyr to the cause to secure a white-supremacist America for all time, trying every trick except a hunger strike to publicize his plight.

Except that Bannon could go to jail for more than just contempt of Congress.  Representative Liz Cheney, the ranking Republican on the January 6 select committee, has suggested that Bannon might have planned the insurrection or at least have been instrumental in the planning, and she wouldn't make that charge if she didn't think it was legitimate.  And the committee is working with other witnesses behind the scenes who could corroborate such an accusation.

But first comes the contempt of Congress charge.  Now it's up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide on whether to follow up on Congress's act. 

Waiting For the Worms - Again

And Steve Bannon is the slimiest worm of all.

Bannon, a longtime adviser to Donald Trump, laid out his game plan for the Republicans in 2022 and 2024.  He plans to help the party win back both houses of Congress by large margins in 2022, then have Trump appointed as Speaker of the House (the Speaker does not have to be the leader of the majority caucus) and have President Biden impeached for illegitimately rigging the election to win.  Then in 2024, the Republicans will win the White House and keep Congress.  The new Republican President - Trump? - will be sworn in on January 20, 2025.  Then, on January 21, "shock troops" will immediately deconstruct the workings of the federal government and establish a right-wing dictatorship. 

"If you're going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately," Bannon explained.

Even Adolf Hitler didn't consolidate power on a timetable that fast.

Bannon may have been subpoenaed by the January 6 House select committee, but he incredibly hasn't been charged with sedition by the Justice Department.  He can evade a subpoena with savvy lawyer. (Fines for not complying? Fines, shmines!)  An indictment? Not so much.  In any case, you'd best be afraid, because when Bannon says he's going to do something he usually means it.  

And if his plan comes to fruition, don't count on escape to Canada once the worms take over. The first thing tyrants do when they assume power in a country is to make sure that no one escapes.

One Pardon Short of Gross

Trump issued 143 pardons and commutations on his last day in the White House.

He pardoned Steve Bannon for his border wall scam.  He also pardoned Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., better known as Li'l Wayne, for illegal firearms possession.  Among 141 others.

I don't want to comment any more on this . . . 

Overpowering

So why did Trump try to continue to keep immigrant children detained apart from their parents and doubling down on the policy while blaming the Democrats for it, even that the legislation he cited as their responsibility has nothing to do with the policy, which was concocted by his anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller?

Very simple: He's been trying to energize his base.  He wants to excite them enough to get them to come out and vote in November to overpower Democratic enthusiasm.

Trump reversed the policy of separating children from parents in an executive order when the negative publicity got too bad, but he will still detain families together in atrocious conditions while trying to get Congress to pass unpopular legislation that won't really solve the problem . . . to allow him to keep deflecting blame to others for his own policy.  Children who have already been separated from their parents are still separates, and many of them are becoming unaccounted for.  Trump's overall objective is to look as if he's securing the border while playing up the concerns of "natives" at the expense of people coming here from Latin America and denying the most basic human rights.  Detaining children apart from their parents was meant to send a message,  and it was part of the strategy of ultra-conservative nationalist Steve Bannon.  He hopes to help Trump in the midterms by pushing the idea that America comes first, we don't need or want the rest of the world, and any form of internationalism - not to mention support of the Democratic Party - is tantamount to treason.  He will push it so hard that the Trump base shows up at the polls to punish the Democrats into total irrelevance, if not outright extinction.

In other words, something that should finally bring Trump down is only going to be used in an attempt to cripple the opposition.

And if this ploy works, God help us.

Wolff At the Door

If any one book takes Trump out of office prematurely, it will be this one.

Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" is shaking things up, both for its controversial source material and for its stunning revelations about the Trump White House.  Some of the "revelations" are facts we already know, like Rex Tillerson saying that Trump is a moron.  But other so-called allies can't find nice things to say about Trump's intellect of lack thereof either; Reince Priebus and Steven Mnuchin both said he's an idiot, economic adviser Gary Cohn called him "dumb as sh--," and national security adviser H.R. McMaster thinks he's a dope.  Another aide couldn't get Trump to understand the Bill of Rights.  Wolff confirms that New Jersey governor Chris Christie was slated for a job in the administration but was denied on the basis of his success at putting Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's banker father in jail  when Christie was U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in the two thousand zeroes.

There's more - too much for me to repeat in this space.  Among other tidbits, Trump eats fast food to avoid being poisoned (these jokes write themselves, folks!), Melania never wanted to be First Lady, and the only reason we lucked out with Tillerson - our most avuncular Secretary of State since Dean Acheson - at the State Department when we could have gotten Trump's fellow xenophobe John Bolton is because Trump didn't think Bolton would go over well because of . . . his moustache.  (Our last mustachioed Secretary of State?  Dean Acheson.)

Steve Bannon doesn't look to good in this book . . .  to those who like the guy.  He apparently had a problem or two - or more - with all those Trump campaign meetings with the Russians at Trump Tower, calling some campaign members "treasonous" and "unpatriotic," adding that Trump had to have known about the meeting involving Paul Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr. Bannon even suggests that the President may have met with the Russians himself, and he even thought that the way Trump handled the Charlottesville incident in August 2017 might have been "25th-Amendment bad," requiring his removal of office due to a loss of sound mental capacity.

Trump didn't like that.  He's since turned on Bannon, even though many in the administration agree that it is Trump, not Bannon, who, as Trump said about Bannon, has "lost his mind."  But here's the kicker: Trump was hoping to lose and planning on losing.  The Guardian reports that, according to Wolff's book, Trump "expected to leverage his defeat for wealth, fame and a Trump-branded TV network," and "key advisers wanted jobs in television or politics."

And if that shrew Debbie Wasserman Schultz had given Martin O'Malley a fair chance at the Democratic presidential nomination instead of backing Hillary, we'd still be in the Paris Agreement now. >:-(  

How did Wolff get so much access to the Trump White House?  They gave it to him, carte blanche, and practically let him wander around interviewing everyone he could find.  Trump knew a little about Wolff's reputation and was actually expecting a favorable report.  

So what effect will Wolff's book actually have?  Sadly, despite the first sentence of this blog entry, little if any whatsoever.  First, many people found Wolff's sources to be highly suspect, and some of his stories may be exaggerated.  Second, even if these stories are completely and thoroughly true, the people who should read this book won't.  And, as  I wrote in this blog entry from December 2015, Donald Trump, like Madonna, has a knack for maintaining and even increasing his popularity with fans after saying and doing outrageous and offensive things that no one else would have gotten away with.  The idea of Trump's opponents hoping for Wolff's book to destroy his Presidency reminds me of us Madonna-haters hoping that her career was through after her movie Body of Evidence tanked.

And her cover of Don McLean's "American Pie" was the pop-music equivalent of Trump hypothetically shooting someone on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue.

Loose Bannon

Steve Bannon is out.  Fired.

The dark knight of the Trump White House may be gone, but Donald Trump's Presidency could be in even greater trouble.  Because Bannon has long since indicated that he could be more of a problem spitting into the tent than spitting out of it.  And he demonstrated that by, in the style of Anthony Scaramucci, talking to a reporter when he thought he was speaking off the record.

At one point in his talk with  Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal American Prospect magazine, Bannon said tht white supremacists were a "collection of clowns" whose anger could be harnessed to help Trump, thus producing a double-edged sword that he ended up falling on - both edges.  Bannon dismissed Trump's tough talk on North Korea as just that - talk.  Bannon says that the White House knows that any attempt by Trump to make good on his threats against North Korea will lead to a war that no one really wants. 

"Forget it," Bannon said about the North Korea crisis, calling it a sideshow. "Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in the first 20 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us."

Gee, thanks, Steve.  I suddenly feel a whole lot better. :-p

But here's something else Bannon said that Democrats should take note of about the Democratic Party's pre-occupation with identity politics - the idea that a racial, ethnic or other sort of group's unique concerns are more important than the concerns of the general population.

"The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em," Bannon said.  "I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

I want the Democrats to talk about racism every day, too.  But that's not all I want them to talk about.  I want them to talk about the economy, infrastructure, income equality - everything Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley have talked about.  Bannon is no longer there to help Trump crush the opposition, but he was right in saying what others had said in the past - that if the Democrats keep focusing on ethnic or cultural identity to the point where they disregard issues that affect everyone, they're never going to work their way back to anything resembling real power.  I was flabbergasted when Hillary Clinton's supporters bashed Bernie Sanders and his supporters for focusing too much on income inequality and called it an issue that white men were "privileged" to focus on because they didn't have to worry about being oppressed.  I explained back in May 2016 what an asinine argument that was, but it was an argument that the Hillary Clinton campaign evidently embraced at her own peril in the general election.  Democrats are already hoping to nominate another non-white and non-male presidential candidate in 2020, though that could easily put a non-white centrist like Cory Booker ahead of a white liberal like Sherrod Brown for the Presidency at at time when the Democratic Party has to return to its progressive origins and not care about the race or sex of the presidential candidate who could lead the party back there.  Just remember . . . it was a privileged white male - Franklin Roosevelt - who initiated the New Deal, and it was a white male Southerner - Lyndon Johnson - who initiated the Great Society, the centerpiece of which was civil rights legislation.

And what was it I pointed out in discussing Martin O'Malley's presidential prospects for 2020, back in March 2017?  "If the Democrats are so obsessed with identity politics that O'Malley has even less of a chance for the party's presidential nomination in 2020 than he had in 2016, then they deserve to go the way of the Whigs."  Bannon knows that.  And, more importantly, he's let on that he knows that.

And now that he's left the Trump administration. he could let on a lot more that Trump doesn't want you to know.

Spitting into the tent . . .

So good riddance  But in some respects, it's too late; he did the worst damage he could ever do when he stoked racial animosity and also when he convinced Trump to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement, thus restoring America's place as the world's toxic idiot.