How Establishment/Corporate Politics Are Played Today

Career of Evil

Bill Clinton was only allotted 5 minutes to speak last night-- and not in prime time. The NY Times called it a "blink-and-you’ll-miss-him moment before a party that once revered him" and noted that that "is testimony to how his influence has faded... [and] of the baggage he carries with the re-examination of allegations of sexual assault and harassment over his years in public life in the wake of the #MeToo movement."

Even in John Harris' Politico opus yesterday-- The Bill Clinton Comeback is Coming Soon-- he immediately made sure his readers understood that Clinton's Republican-lite "centrism" isn't what he's talking about, and that it's just his way of making an argument that deserves a revival." Whew. Clinton's "brand of centrism," wrote Harris, "is seen as too compromising, and his private life and disreputable personal associations too compromised." Harris, a New Dem type centrist like Clinton, tries excusing his fear-based-- he was kicked out as Arkansas governor for being a liberal-- conservativism to make the case that he deserves a revival. He doesn't.

This morning I found a 44 page document, a complaint in the New York State Supreme Court pitting Rimylan Enterprises, LLC, Project Applecart, LLC, Tormima, LLC and Minino Productions against Clinton administration scumbags Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson, two of the worst characters-- a husband and wife team-- in American politics. I spent a lot of time and energy in 2018 and 2019 explaining how their malignant operations against progressives were especially detrimental to Marie Newman in Illinois, Dena and Alan Grayson in Florida and Matt Heinz in Arizona. The lawsuit is against their crooked front operations: "No Labels, Inc. , Forward Not Back, Inc, United For Progress, Inc. United Together, Inc., Citizens For A Strong America, Inc., Govern or Go Home, Inc., Americans Committed For Progress, Inc., Citizens for America, Inc., Progress Together, Inc., Patriotic Americans PAC, Inc., No Labels Action, Inc., and Progress Tomorrow, Inc., as well as Nancy Jacobson personally. The suit claims Rimylan is owed $3,708,214.26 by Jacobson and her nefarious entities. Rimylan wants the $3.7 they're owed plus about a million in damages plus another $3.7 million from Jacobson personally "for fraudulent inducement on the ground that she omitted to tell Rimylan that No Labels did not intend to be bound" by the contract.

Applecart is the trade name for Rimylan, Tormima, and Minino and it is a technology company that provides political data and analytic services. You know what Brad Pascale did for Trump-- the tsunamis of micro-targeted ads? That's what Matthew Kalmans and Sacha Samotin, co-founders of Applecart, do for candidates. Last year Applecart hired a new president, Democratic operative Joe Shafer, who was the head of the Democratic Governors Association’s (DGA) independent expenditure arm, and has begun an association with Rahm Emanuel's brother Ari. The Kalmans and Samotin big idea-- the "Social Graph"-- "uses a combination of human and artificial intelligence to mine publicly available data to identify online and offline social relationships between Americans. In the time since, Applecart has since mapped over 17 billion relationships between more than 250 million Americans and has been deployed as the analytics engine behind the highest stakes advertising campaigns of major politicians, corporations, and advocacy groups." One of their most successful campaigns was Conor Lamb's first congressional run.

Applecart, which had been working for John Kasich was introduced to Jacobson by former Utah Governor and former Applecart client John Huntsman, who was also one of No Label's "Honorary Co-Chairmen."

The suit says that "In October 2015, Kalmans and Samotin proposed to Jacobson that No Labels hire Applecart to demonstrate the impact of their strategy for supporting moderate [meaning conservative] candidates in congressional primaries in two such races, one Republican and one Democrat. In May 2016 Jacobson agreed to this proposal and selected two of several races proposed by Applecart. One, to support moderate Roger Marshall against three-term incumbent Freedom Caucus leader Tim Huelskamp in the Republican primary election in the First Congressional District of Kansas. The other, to support moderate Darren Soto to succeed far-left incumbent Alan Grayson in the Democratic primary in the Ninth Congressional District in Florida. No Labels formed two super PACs to support the elections of Marshall and Soto: Strong Leadership for America ('SLA') and Concerned Citizens for America’s Future ('CCAF'). No Labels established the super PACs because it, as a 501(c)(4) organization, is subject to limits on how much of its budget can be spent on political activities. No Labels also established the super PACs so that their work on behalf of Marshall and Soto would not be tied to No Labels, a bipartisan organization, because such an association was thought likely to be unhelpful in a partisan primary election. No Labels established separate super PACs for Marshall and Soto so that the work of one, on behalf of a Republican, would not be tied to the work of the other, on behalf of a Democrat."

The 44 pages are fascinating-- at least to me-- but what I really want to talk about how how a significant portion how U.S. politics has now come down to laundering money from vain billionaires-- Penn and Jacobson's specialty-- and laundering it into campaigns against progressives through an aggressive campaign of libel and slander while pocketing as much as the vain billionaires are unaware of. In this particular case, the vain billionaire/patsy was Nelson Peltz (chairman of Wendy's), who gives humongous amounts of money to conservative operations-- both the GOP's and Penn's and Jacobson's.

So basically it comes down to a small gaggle of manipulative vultures like Jacobson and Penn enriching themselves by sucking up to virulently anti-progressive billionaires like Peltz so that they can destroy the champions of the working class-- only and always-- in order to do well for themselves while... well, how else to say it: doing evil. This is the dark corruption that pervades American politics.

In 2018 Jacobson failed in her efforts to defeat now-Congresswoman Deb Haaland (D-NM) and this year all those millions she spent against Marie Newman went up in smoke as Newman beat reactionary Blue Dog Dan Lipinski. And, like I said... Bill Clinton was not allowed to address the Democratic convention in prime time.

A member of Congress who I asked about No Labels unethical and probably criminal activities turned me on to some Ryan Grim and Rachel Cohen work looking into No Labels funny business back in December, pointing out the built in conflicts of interest that should have long ago landed Penn, Jacobson and their board members in prison. For example, in late March of 2018, the reporters found an email in which "a representative for a No Labels donor expressed concern over the organization having 'perceived or potential' conflicts of interest. They urged Jacobson to disclose potential conflicts to the No Labels governing board. 'We believe that all Governing Board members need to be aware of the situation in order to prevent any misunderstanding and confusion going forward,' they wrote."

And all we need to do is elect reformers to change this-- not defenders of the status quo like Biden, who makes excuses for lobbyists and crooked operatives, every member of his family being one. Instead we wind up with a classic lesser of two evils "choice" between an outright fascist who is an undeniable existential threat to democracy and the integrity of our nation or a feeble, status quo nothing. Last night, AOC reminded us what could have been (if not for Obama's orchestration of the neoliberal forces against it):

Overall, Who Is The Worst Democrat In The House? Hint: He Represents The Bada Bing Strip Club In Lodi, New Jersey

Many Americans are unaware of just how important an event in world history the French Revolution was. Before we talk about what Ryan Grim termed a counterrevolution for an The Intercept piece about reactionary Blue Dog and DINO Josh Gottheimer, let's remember, for a little context, that the French Revolution, gave hope to all Europe other than to the nobles, ecclesiastics, and some bourgeois (the 1%). The émigrés, who came from these groups, fought from outside France to defeat the revolution. They persuaded several monarchs to invade France to thwart Robespierre's Montagnards, who were determined to give the lower classes (the sansculottes) a greater share in political and economic power.

The counterrevolutionaries were eager to halt all efforts toward economic equality. In 2017 Paul Berman, wrote about counterrevolution in America for Tablet as an integral part of Trumpism. "What,' he asks, "has brought about the counterrevolution? Fear has brought it about-- a vague and unarticulated fear that life has spun out of control: a fear that assumes a different shape in each country, yet is visibly shared across half the world, such that people who experience the fear naturally feel a solidarity, even across the national borders. And what has brought about the fear? The liberal revolution itself has done this-- its aspirations, its successes, its failures, and the gap between aspirations and realities."

In economic matters, a fear, five times over: the fear that automation, computer efficiencies, and the globalized division of labor are replacing good jobs with bad jobs. The fear that an entire storied social class, the industrial working class, is being shrunk or eliminated, along with its social and political achievements, its privileges, historical sense, culture, and institutions. The fear that, amidst these developments, the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of skilled manual labor are being lost. The fear that, under the modern dispensation, the technocrats and bureaucrats who mandate these many developments have no sense of the human costs. The fear that trade pacts and other instances of economic planning are, on top of their other flaws, a lie, designed merely to benefit the tiny few, and not society as a whole-- as shown by, say, the European Union, whose policies, nominally in the name of the union, somehow conform to the interests of Germany and its banks, and not to Greece and other poor countries.

...The liberal revolution lasted 50 years before the undercurrents of counterrevolution began to sweep it away. How long will the counterrevolution go on? We only know that we do not know. Six months before the 2016 presidential election in the United States, not a single respected political analyst predicted the outcome with any accuracy. This does not mean that in the United States political analysts are stupid. It means that we have entered an era in which the analytic categories of the past do not reliably apply: one more occasion for fear.

Enter Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ), one of the most corrupt and conservative Democrats in Congress. Grim wrote that "Not long after Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were sworn into Congress, they began hearing from their new colleagues that one member of the House Democratic caucus, Josh Gottheimer, had particularly strong views about each of them. Gottheimer, a second-term representative from New Jersey, has deep ties to the lobbies for Saudi Arabia and Israel, while Tlaib and Omar are often critical of both Mideast governments."

So when Gottheimer reached out to meet with Tlaib, she was eager to take it, hoping that a personal connection would help bridge their differences. On the day of the meeting, February 6, Gottheimer arrived with a colleague, freshman Elaine Luria from Virginia-- and a white binder. Luria began by saying that she had met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu six weeks earlier, and Tlaib tried to break the ice with a joke: “How’s the two-state solution going?”

The joke fell flat. Gottheimer pulled out the binder, opening it to show Tlaib the contents. It was a collection of printed-out articles, with quotes and other lines highlighted. “He goes through them, ‘you said this, you said that,’ confusing me with other colleagues,” Tlaib said.

...Tlaib said she tried to reach Gottheimer on a personal level, telling him about her grandmother, who lives in occupied Ramallah. He wasn’t interested. “He was using a very stern tone, like a father to a child. At that moment, I realized he’s a bully,” said Tlaib. “He had a goal of breaking me down. I left feeling exactly that way.”

Breaking down Tlaib, Omar, and their allies on the left has been one of Gottheimer’s primary goals since the November elections. He has worked assiduously to carve out a role in the Democratic caucus as something of an avenger, a centrist proud of his centrism and willing to take the fight directly to the squad of freshmen trying to push the party in a progressive direction. He even has a name for his handpicked adversaries: “the herbal tea party.”

His definition of too progressive is startlingly broad. As the Democratic chair of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, he led a push against Nancy Pelosi as she ran for House speaker last year. He has consistently voted against the party even on procedural motions, threatening to hand control over the House to the GOP. This spring, he was one of just a handful of Democrats at a private retreat on Sea Island, Georgia, hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, mingling with Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other Republican heavyweights. He was one of just six Democrats to break with the party on a push for the DREAM Act in 2018, and he publicly undermined the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) during a hearing in which he fawned over CEOs of the nation’s biggest banks.

His boldest bid for internal power, however, came amid the push for a congressional War Powers Resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. As progressives in the House neared a historic achievement, Gottheimer organized behind the scenes to take the resolution down, in part by attempting to make it a referendum on support for Israel-- and very nearly succeeded.

The bill’s supporters out-organized him, and in April, Congress sent a War Powers Resolution to Trump’s desk. He vetoed their resolution, rejecting Congress’s demand that the president stop backing the Saudi-led war. Last week’s effort to override the veto failed in the Senate on a 53-to-45 vote.

Trump’s rejection of the resolution-- which was led in the House by Ro Khanna (D-CA) and in the Senate by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Mike Lee (R-UT)-- was expected. But for advocates who worked on it, Gottheimer’s intervention was unwelcome but not surprising. “He was counterproductive in a totally unnecessary way at a time when there was actually party unity on something really progressive and historic-- and that unity had been fought for a long time,” said Elizabeth Beavers, who was associate policy director at Indivisible during the Yemen fight. “This is a thing that he’s doing consistently, helping to organize against progress.”

Stephen Miles, head of Win Without War, which worked closely on the resolution, was befuddled by Gottheimer’s role. “It’s unclear what he’s trying to do, but the impact is causing discord within the Democratic Party, making it harder to end an immoral and unconscionable war,” he said. “He took an issue in which there’s a clear right and clear wrong, and he’s come down on the side of wrong.”

Gottheimer’s rearguard action against the Yemen resolution, and his attempt to link the issue to Israel, hasn’t been previously reported. It’s been perhaps the most aggressive move any Democrat has made against the caucus and its leadership this session-- and the intensity with which he approached it suggests that Gottheimer is working to establish himself as a leading player in the years to come.

Gottheimer's intervention in the effort to end the Saudi-led war in Yemen takes on new resonance in the context of his longstanding links to Saudi money. Gottheimer is a protege of Mark Penn, a notorious Democratic operative who has become a leading Trump cheerleader on Fox News. Penn’s companies, where Gottheimer has held senior positions over the years, have long been on Saudi Arabia’s payroll.

Gottheimer’s first big job out of college was as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House, where he worked closely with Penn, the president’s pollster. The two have remained close since. Penn became CEO of the consulting firm Burson-Marsteller, long one of the PR outfits working closest with Saudi Arabia, and in 2006, he hired Gottheimer as an executive vice president. Gottheimer worked at the consultancy firm, where he reported directly to Penn, until 2010. In 2008, Penn joined Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign as chief strategist, notoriously urging her to paint Barack Obama as un-American, and took Gottheimer with him.

Burson-Marsteller, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow once laid out, has been a reliable voice for the worst of the worst. “When Blackwater killed those 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, they called Burson-Marsteller,” Maddow said. “When there was a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, Bobcock & Wilcox, who built that plant, called Burson-Marsteller. Bhopal chemical disaster that killed thousands of people in India, Union Carbide called Burson-Marsteller. Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu-- Burson-Marsteller. The government of Saudi Arabia, three days after 9/11-- Burson-Marsteller.”

She continued: “When evil needs public relations, evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed dial. That’s why it was creepy that Hillary Clinton’s pollster and chief strategist in her presidential campaign was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller.” (Penn, at the time still serving as CEO, disputed the characterization.)

The consulting firm has continued to do major business with Saudi Arabia, including by representing a Saudi-run alliance engaged in the Yemen war, a contract it inked in 2017. (Now known as BCW, the firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) One of Gottheimer’s earliest fundraisers in 2015 was hosted by Don Baer, an ex-Clinton aide who replaced Penn as CEO of Burson-Marsteller.

Gottheimer, a Harvard Law graduate, left Burson-Marsteller to work as a lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission in June 2010, and has remained close to Penn. In 2012, Microsoft hired Penn to build a guerrilla PR shop to battle rival Google in Washington, and Penn plucked Gottheimer from the FCC to join him. Gottheimer later became a consultant with the Stagwell Group, a Penn-owned private equity firm, according to a 2017 financial disclosure. Between 2015 and 2017, while Gottheimer was consulting for Stagwell, Saudi Arabia paid Targeted Victory, a digital company owned by Stagwell, more than $1 million to spread pro-Saudi information on Twitter. “The Congressman has never done any work for Saudi Arabia,” said Adams, Gottheimer’s spokesperson.

In Washington, a handful of law and lobbying outfits are registered as agents on behalf of Saudi Arabia. In the last election cycle, Gottheimer was among the top recipients of cash from those firms’ lobbyists and lawyers, taking in more than $20,000 from them in 2017 and 2018, according to Ben Freeman, an analyst at the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative.

That makes Gottheimer one of the top 20 biggest recipients of Saudi agent cash in either party, but that number is deceptive, as the rest of the list includes party leaders and veterans. “Almost everyone ahead of him was either up for Senate reelection or part of Party leadership. And he actually pulled more money from Saudi foreign agents than even some Senators up for re-election,” such as former Sens. Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, Freeman wrote in an email. Nobody as junior as Gottheimer comes anywhere close.

In 2016, Gottheimer flipped a northern New Jersey congressional seat that had been in Republican hands for more than two decades, representing a slew of Wall Street commuters, as well as more rural areas to the west. He played up his close ties to the Israel lobby, noting that he was a member of the most prominent Jewish fraternity in college and active with both the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and NORPAC. Donors connected to NORPAC, which advocates for Israeli interests, made up his largest source of campaign cash in the last cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He’s been a regular speaker at AIPAC’s annual conference and led the charge in the Democratic caucus to have Omar, D-Minn., condemned by her colleagues on the House floor for what he said were anti-Semitic remarks.

His ties to Penn have followed Gottheimer to Congress, where he co-chairs the Problem Solvers Caucus, which was established by the dark-money group No Labels, which Jacobson and Penn launched in 2010. (Jacobson still runs it, and Penn advises on strategy.)

No Labels launched “The Speaker Project” in June 2018, aimed at expanding the power of a small group of centrists if Democrats took power in the House of Representatives. The project pushed for a rules change that would give a clear path to a floor vote for any legislation that met a certain threshold of bipartisanship. It’s easy for K Street to round up small bipartisan groups, meaning the reform, if passed, would effectively hand control of the floor to corporate interests. “There’s a problem-solvers group that is looking to have some influence, if the result is close, in terms of changing the rules and naming the speaker,” Penn said in September on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News.

Meanwhile, No Labels deliberated making Pelosi, who was running for speakership, a “boogeyman” in its communications strategy, but ultimately decided against doing so. No Labels Chief Strategist Ryan Clancy argued that the time wasn’t right. The outfit “is probably going to go to war with Pelosi. And it probably should,” Clancy wrote in an email, published by the Daily Beast. “I don’t know that now is the time to do it, especially when we have a perfectly good villain to use in Bernie [Sanders].”

Gottheimer attempted to execute The Speaker Project in the run-up to the new Congress, organizing the Problem Solvers Caucus to withhold support from Pelosi. She made modest concessions and beat back his effort.

But Gottheimer is showing no signs of receding into the background. In the first quarter of 2019, he raised an astounding $830,000, almost none of it from small donors, giving him some $5 million cash on hand. Aside from the campaign cash he rakes in from the pro-Israel and pro-Saudi lobbies, he cultivates Wall Street openly. The tendency was on unusually obsequious display at an April Financial Services Committee hearing, where the CEOs of America’s major banks testified, including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon, Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman, and Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat.

At the hearing, titled “Holding Megabanks Accountable,” Waters, the committee chair, showed a rotating series of slides highlighting anti-social bank practices. When it was Gottheimer’s turn to question the bankers, he borderline apologized to them.

Thank you all for being here today and for your work and for what you do for New Jersey. I’m very grateful. I wish we had also put up slides earlier today that looked more like this. One about how many jobs your firms have created, or slides showing how many entrepreneurs and small- and minority-owned businesses have been supported by your institutions. Or slides showing how many pensions and 401ks and homes and other finances you’ve helped people secure. Your firms currently employ more than a million people. You’ve doubled your small-business loans in the last decade from $44 billion to $86 billion, including supporting small businesses in my district to the tune of $471 million. Making the dream of homeownership possible, your firms have originated $1.8 billion in home mortgages in my district alone and I’m grateful. Unfortunately, there’s no slide up there about that either.

His questioning was no less fawning: “Mr. Dimon, can you describe some of the work that your firm has done in the small-business lending arena and how those loans are helping to facilitate small-business growth?”

Tlaib, sitting in front of Gottheimer at the hearing, was startled. “I had to pause because he was on our side of the aisle,” she said. “I was taken aback by his strong stance for megabanks. There’s a way to do it that doesn’t undermine the leadership of the committee.”

Gottheimer, the most aggressively anti-progressive Democrat in Congress, is constantly at war with the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He hates CPC co-chair Mark Pocan and goes out of his way to undermine him. Although Gottheimer isn't officially a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia, that is exactly what he is. They figure out ways to funnel money for him and he does their dirty work in Congress. He certainly spends far more time and energy on the problems of Saudi Arabia than on the problems of Bergen, Passaic Sussex or Warren counties. He does far more for Riyadh than for West Milford, Paramus, Hackensack or Mahwah, that's for sure. When he tried to stop the push in Congress to end U.S. participation in the Yemen genocide, he tried making it about anti-semitism. He failed and the only Democrats who voted with him were fellow DINOs Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog), a machine politician and freshman from New Jersey; Elaine Luria (New Dem), a DCCC-recruited former naval commander; New York freshman Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog); and South Carolina freshman Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog). Grim ended his piece by conveying a chat he had with Madeline Trimble, a steering committee member for the main Indivisible chapter in Gottheimer’s district. She told him that "local activists’ hard work to elect a Democrat in the seat wasn’t paying off. 'Many of our members actively supported Josh Gottheimer’s re-election efforts because we believe in the Democratic Party platform. Some of us are concerned that sometimes it seems like Congressman Gottheimer is working at odds with that platform,' she said. 'We understand this is a purple district and we’re not expecting an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in NJ-5; we just want him to meet us halfway and act like a normal Democrat who believes in the party.'"

Gottheimer didn't have a primary opponent last year and it looks like he won't have one next year. I called 5 members of Congress-- Pocan not being one of them-- and asked them if they would support a primary opponent for him. None were willing to go on the record but they were all positive about the idea of a primary that discussed the core Democratic issues and values he opposes. Like these:

• There are 204 Democratic cosponsors for H.R. 860, John Larson's Social Security 2100 Act. Gottheimer is an opponent.
• There are 123 Democratic cosponsors for H.R. 1046, Lloyd Doggett's bill to lower prescription drug prices. I bet Bergen County Democrats would like that. Gottheimer is an opponent.
• There are 108 Democratic cosponsors for H.R. 1384, Pramila Jayapal's new and improved Medicare-For-All Act. Gottheimer is an opponent.
• There are 93 Democratic cosponsors for H Res. 109, AOC's Green New Deal resolution. Gottheimer opposes it, even though Bergen County Democrats overwhelmingly favor it.

NJ-05 needs a new congressman. Progressive Punch rates Gottheimer an "F" and his lifetime crucial vote scores is 40.51%. The only Democrats with worse scores are Collin Peterson, Henry Cuellar, Anthony Brindisi, Ben McAdams, Joe Cunningham and Jeff Van Drew, all fellow Blue Dogs. And when you look at just votes in the 116th Congress (the current session), Gottheimer's crucial vote score-- 28.57%-- is the very bottom of the barrel... the worst of any Democrat and in fact, Michigan libertarian Republican Justin Amash has a much more progressive score-- 42.86-- and is far more likely to support progressive legislation than Gottheimer is. His Trump adhesion score, 55.2%, is very high for a Democrat. In fact, the only Democrats who have voted more often with Trump than Gottheimer are Collin Peterson (56.1) and Henry Cuellar (55.5%).

Photo by Mark Pocan

Mark Penn Is No Democrat-- And The Democratic Party Is WAY Better Off Without Him

In 2018, Chicagoland Blue Dog Dan Lipinski-- who is virulently anti-Choice, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-healthcare-- and who has a solid voting record for a moderate Republican-- was on the verge of defeat in the primary. One poll had the 2 candidates within the margin of error and the other showed progressive challenger Marie Newman beating Lipinski by 5 points. At that point, the Republican version of EMILY's List (the Susan B. Anthony List) started spending big to support Lipinski and the web of dark money super-PACS run by Mark Penn and his wife, Nancy Jacobson, through No Labels let loose a $975,894 direct mail and television campaign smearing Newman with baseless charges. The result was a swing towards Lipinski the week before election day and a narrow 51.1% win for Lipinski. (Last night Newman told me that "We now know that No Labels’ extreme lies were tightly tied to the Lipinski campaign and if Congressman Lipinski wants to continue his very close relationship with them, it will simply continue to eliminate what is left of his credibility.")

In every part of the country, Penn and Jacobson jumped in to back Republican-lite Blue Dog and New Dem candidates against progressives, spending immense amounts of money-- almost all of it coming from Republican plutocrats, like the Murdoch family, and Wall Street Democrats. You've heard the term "Fox Democrat," right? Mark Penn is the prototype. Politically he's another Bill and Hillary Clinton-Tony Blair fox in the henhouse, always working to pull the Democratic Party rightward-- for which he gets paid-- and handsomely so-- by wealthy conservatives. They are the couple from hell behind the corporately-funded No Labels cabals and SuperPACs that finance the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. And they make their living by taking a cut from every penny that comes in.

Penn spreads his poisonous corrupt conservatism all over the world-- supporting right-wing candidates from Menachem Begin in Israel, Carlos Andrés Pérez (El Gocho) in Venezuela and Belisario Betancur in Colombia to Tony Blair, Ed Koch and, of course, the Clintons. Here in the U.S. their sewer money-- from charter school fanatics, hedge fund managers and GOP financiers-- that flooded into Democrat primaries against Marie Newman, Alan Grayson in Orlando, Deb Haaland in Albuquerque, Matt Heinz in Tucson and Susan Wild in the Philly suburbs was spent through shady conservative PACs like United for Progress, United Together, Forward Not Back, Progress Tomorrow, Patriotic Americans PAC, Citizens for a Strong America, etc, entirely funded by contributions from 5 and 6-figure right wing donors, sleaze bags trying to turn the Democratic Party into another corporately-owned arm of Wall Street, just like the GOP. Most recently, Penn's and Jaconson's No Labels operation was behind the failed Seth Moulton coup plot against Pelosi.

Please consider contributing to progressive Democrats battling Penn's Blue Dogs and New Dems by clicking on the 2020 primaries thermometer on the right. And pushing the Republican wing of the Democratic Party isn't the only thing Penn is up to these days. He's a regular contributor to the influential right-of-center Beltway rag, The Hill, This weekend's OpEd was the all-to-predictable, Mueller's done, and Dems should be too-- because Trump is no Nixon. This is what the right-wing of the Democratic Party has to say in defense of Trump, voiced by the venal Penn: "There was, at the end of the day, no evidence whatsoever of any collusion-- and there was nothing but a president frustrated at being wrongly accused and wrongly investigated over a very effective hoax." Before going any further with his bullshit, I just want to list the members of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, which Penn and Jacobson control. They once had Trump address the group. Most of the GOP problem-makers were defeated in November, so the group, which prides itself on having an even number of Dems and Republicans is now way over-balanced with Dems, but since they're virtually all from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, many on their way to the same inevitable "metamorphosis" Penn is in the midst of, it doesn't really matter anyway; does it? These are the ones who call themselves Democrats:

• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Julia Brownley (New Dem-CA)
• Salud Carbajal (New Dem-CA)
• Tony Cardenas (D-CA)
• André Carson (New Dem-IN)
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Debbie Dingell (D-MI)
• Vicente González (Blue Dog-TX)
• Josh Gottheimer, chairman (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA)
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Eleanor Norton (D-DC)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Jimmy Panetta (D-CA)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)
• Brad Schneider (Blue Dog-IL)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Darren Soto (New Dem-FL)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Tom Suozzi (New Dem-NY)
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Peter Welch (D-VT)

Yesterday, Digby, writing for Salon, explained Mueller's purpose-- a roadmap Democrats now need to pick up, real Democrats,not the Mark Penn variety. "No matter how many times," she wrote, "Trump and his minion Barr say the words 'no collusion, no obstruction' over and over again like a couple of malfunctioning robots, the report shows something very different. The Trump campaign clearly 'colluded.' Its officials clearly knew a hostile power was helping them by sabotaging their rival and they never reported it to the authorities. Indeed, they welcomed it and eagerly encouraged more of it. There is apparently no law against doing that, largely because, I suspect, no one ever anticipated that a presidential nominee for a major political party could possibly do such a thing. But it was an ethical lapse of epic proportions, and the belated recognition of that fact partially explains the president's frenzied denials that the interference and sabotage ever happened. He has shown in dozens of different ways that he believes that he can manipulate reality by repeatedly denying that it exists... Mueller concluded that his investigation didn't establish that Trump and company conspired and coordinated with the Russians. But the detail he provided shows that Trump's dishonesty and unfitness for the office he holds is indisputable. And the second section shows that despite Barr's contention that Trump was just frustrated (as if that were a valid excuse) and couldn't have committed obstruction of justice because he had committed no underlying crime, he had ample, serious motivation to try to cover it up." Penn has an entirely different persopective. I wonder how many of his Problem Solvers agree. Here's more of his defense of the Trumpist interpretation of the Mueller report:

Most people don’t understand what it is to not only to be personally investigated for something you didn’t do but to have your friends, family members and associates placed in legal jeopardy over it. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team systematically targeted the people around the president, squeezing them like lemons, indicting them on mostly process crimes created by the investigation itself. They reviewed everyone’s emails, text messages, phone calls, bank statements-- and yet, their conclusion on collusion was clear and definitive. It has to be believed.

I was there working with President Clinton in 1998 when he pondered whether to send missiles against Osama bin Laden but was concerned it would be viewed as “wagging the dog.” We missed bin Laden that day. It was symbolic of how everything in the White House was affected by the Monica Lewinsky investigation; it changed everything we did. And, yes, there was a good bit of cursing then, too.

The big difference between today and what happened in 1998 or during the Nixon era is that, at the end of the day, the Mueller investigators found no stained dress, no break-in, no hush money, no enemies list. There never was a crime, and what seemed far-fetched was simply that-- this time, a duly elected president was investigated for a crime that never even existed. In fact, evidence is mounting that the investigation itself was launched on phony grounds.

And so, the screaming partisan antics of Democrats in the House are likely to set the Democratic Party back a decade if they do not get a grip on themselves. In partisan unison, with scripted talking points, they keep calling everyone else “partisan.” It simply does not pass the laugh test at this point.

But the problem is that Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) are congressmen from safe districts who are nobodies if they have no investigations to launch. It’s in the interest of their egos to keep it all going so that they can have daily press availabilities. And they are whipping up their political bases. It will take some Democrats of courage to turn this off and stop the abuse of going after the president’s financial records. These are the kinds of things Nixon was doing, and there is no justification for those in Congress to be doing exactly those things for which Nixon resigned from office-- going after his political enemies.

...It’s time for Democrats and the country to move past the Russia collusion narrative, and for the media to ’fess up. If we are not going to respect the outcome of the Mueller report, then what was the point of the whole exercise? They found no collusion and they did not charge obstruction.

The cloud under which the president and his associates have lived for more than two years deserves to be lifted. The officials who launched this aborted investigation should be held accountable for their actions. And the country deserves a Congress focused, not on investigations, but on issues like health care, infrastructure and immigration.

The hell with Mark Penn. That's not a Democrat-- and hasn't been for a very long time. Are his "Problem Solvers?" Go over that list above again. Let's face it-- that's largely where the opposition to impeachment is coming from. Any of them yours?

Turn Over The Shit-Smeared Rock And You'll Find... Mark Penn Fellating Trump

Mr. and Mrs. Penn

Yesterday, reporting for the New York Times, Annie Karni wrote of Mark Penn's "inevitable... long-running political metamorphosis." An alternative interpretation of Penn's meeting with Trump last week is that the inevitability is that two sticky-palmed grifters were meant for each other. Him and his wretched wife, Nancy Jacobson, are two of American politics' most dishonest people, stealing massively from anyone they come in contact with foolish enough to take an eye off either of them. We'll get to the latest fraud case working its way against them in a moment. First I just want to list the members of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, which Penn once had Trump address. Most of the GOP problem-makers were defeated in November, so the group, which prides itself on having an even number of Dems and Republicans is now way over-balanced with Dems, but since they're virtually all from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, many on their way to the same inevitable "metamorphosis" Penn is in the midst of, it doesn't really matter anyway; does it? First all the ones who call themselves Democrats:

• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Julia Brownley (New Dem-CA)
• Salud Carbajal (New Dem-CA)
• Tony Cardenas (D-CA)
• André Carson (New Dem-IN)
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Debbie Dingell (D-MI)
• Vicente González (Blue Dog-TX)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA)
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)
• Daniel Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Eleanor Norton (D-DC)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Jimmy Panetta (D-CA)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)
• Bradley Schneider (Blue Dog-IL)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Darren Soto (New Dem-FL)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Tom Suozzi (New Dem-NY)
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Peter Welch (D-VT)

And here are all the Republicans who have signed up for the Mark Penn/Nancy Jacobson cabal:

• Earl Carter (R-GA)
• Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
• Mike Gallagher (R-WI)
• Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon (R-Puerto Rico)
• Dusty Johnson (R-SD)
• David Joyce (R-OH)
• John Katko (R-NY)
• Peter King (R-NY)
• Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)
• Dan Meuser (R-PA)
• Tom Reed (R-NY)
• Lloyd Smucker (R-PA)
• Glenn Thompson (R-PA)
• Fred Upton (R-MI)
• Steve Watkins (R-KS)

Penn consistently paints himself "one of the primary architects of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign." He's trying to sell himself to Trump as the guy who can get Trump back into the White House. Penn and another scumbag ex-Dem, Andrew Stein (a crooked Trump crony and felon) arrived at the White House together. I've long maintained that one way for Democrats to start winning elections and rebuilding their tattered brand would be to pay very close attention to all the advice they get from Mark Penn-- and then do the exact opposite. Penn has teamed up with Andrew Stein to tell the Democrats all they need to know about how to continue losing. Penn's an ad guy, pollster and political strategist. He's always wrong about everything and his advice very much helped turn the personal brands of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to shit. He was a key Hillary Clinton advisor in 2008 and most observers of that race give him immense credit for her loss. [Example: he urged Hillary to go subtly racist against Obama.]

More recently, Penn worked with hereditary multimillionaire Andrew Stein-- a former boyfriend of Ann Coulter, a failed, dumb-as-brick New York politician who once famously was caught soliciting the Republican nomination for mayor of New York City and was later arrested for his involvement with a ponzi scheme and endorsed Trump for president-- on their centrism-uber-alles OpEd in The Times. I can't imagine anyone would be surprised to hear Penn and Finkelstein (Stein's real name) denouncing progressives, urging the Democratic Party to move right the way they and all their greed-obsessed cronies have, and rewriting history to glorify their reactionary instincts. Both are masters of collaborationist politics. They would have been perfect advisors to Marshall Pétain in France or Vidkun Quisling in Norway during WWII. And now they've joined up with Trump. What could be more natural and inevitable?

Penn, Jacobson and Stein especially hate Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and everything they stand for-- especially honesty, ethics and opposition to elite corruption, elite corruption being the center piece of Penn's and Stein's entire lives. To them, the Democratic Party has "embraced sharply leftist ideas" and they blame all the losses the party has suffered, on the left instead of on the Republican wing-- their wing-- of the Democratic Party. 'If only the Democrats were more elitist, more corrupt, more bigoted they would still own the working class' is the tired Penn/Stein thesis. Lee Fang had a better explanation of Penn's OpEd at The Intercept in 2017: Penn now invests in Republican advocacy firms-- and profits from the electoral defeat of Democrats. He's a part owner of the GOP consulting firm that advices Trump and developed strategy for the Handel win over Ossoff in Georgia. But certain types of Democrats still take Penn seriously and value his advice. Personally, I hope he takes some of his Problem Solvers Caucus fake Dems with him, especially the real garbage like Gottheimer and Van Drew from New Jersey, Brindisi and Rose from New York and Lipinski and Schneider from Illinois.

As Karni mentioned, Penn has even adopted Trump’s "deep state" conspiracy theories for his appearances on Fox, where he accuses Democrats of sabotaging the Trump administration from within the government.

In an email, Mr. Penn played down the significance of the visit. “I tagged along with my friend Andrew Stein at his request to one of his meetings, and for the first time to meet the president,” he said. “I have had hundreds of meetings with presidents and I don’t relay their conversations but this was a cordial meeting and no advice was given or taken-- but old-time politics was discussed.”

Mr. Penn added, “Despite my misgivings about the Mueller investigation, let me be clear as a lifelong Democrat under no circumstances would I work paid or unpaid for President Trump nor was this meeting about that in any way.”

...[H]is fallout with the onetime reigning brand in Democratic politics began during Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, where he clashed with other advisers and was ultimately removed as the chief strategist. Over the past year, like Mr. Schoen and Mr. Morris, he too has won praise on the other side of the political spectrum as he has become seen as a heretic on the left.

Mr. Penn has been praised internally at the White House, and by the president himself, for his fulsome attacks on the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. In his appearances on Fox News-- he has been banned from appearing on MSNBC and CNN-- and in his opinion pieces in the conservative-leaning opinions pages of The Hill, Mr. Penn has accused Mr. Mueller of overreaching in his investigation.

But an actual sit-down meeting with the president in the Oval Office was, for some former colleagues of Mr. Penn, the inevitable outcome of what they see as his rightward lurch. “Some people are loyal to Republican red, some people to Democratic blue and some capitalism green,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Mrs. Clinton, who served as her gatekeeper in the Senate and at the State Department.

Mr. Penn currently runs the Stagwell Group, a private equity firm, and claims his political career is behind him, even though his firm owns two public affairs agencies that have worked for both Democratic and Republican officials.

I'm glad to see Mark Pocan finally see the light and jump ship, leaving Penn and Jacobson and their anti-progressive Problem Solvers, though that's probably where he learned to love New Dems. It's hard to believe that Debbie Dingell, Peter Welch and Eleanor Norton are still along for the ride. Penn is the prototypical Fox Democrat, a real shitbag always working to pull the Democratic Party rightward-- for which he gets paid-- and handsomely so-- by wealthy conservatives. His wife, a professional fundraiser, is even worse. And aside from the Problem Solvers, they are the couple from hell behind the corporately-funded No Labels cabals. Their web of dark money PACs and SuperPACs finance the Republican wing of the Democratic Party with money from-- for example-- Republican billionaires like the Murdoch family. And they make their living by taking a cut from every penny that comes in.

In the past cycle, Penn and the Mrs. were behind the sewer money-- from charter school fanatics, hedge fund managers and GOP financiers-- that flooded into Democrat primaries against Marie Newman in Chicago, Alan Grayson in Orlando, Deb Haaland in Albuquerque, Matt Heinz in Tucson and Susan Wild in the Philly suburbs. They are behind shady conservative PACs like United for Progress, United Together, Forward Not Back, Progress Tomorrow, Patriotic Americans PAC, Citizens for a Strong America, etc, entirely funded by contributions from 5 and 6-figure right wing donors, such as Rupert Murdoch, his son James Murdoch, Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, hedge fund manager Louis Bacon, former Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan Selig and Wheels Inc. executive Jim Frank and like-minded sleaze bags trying to turn the Democratic Party into another corporately-owned arm of Wall Street, just like the GOP.

Late last year Penn and Jacobson were behind the failed Moulton coup against Pelosi. Ryan Grim put up a related blockbuster at The Intercept: Who's The Mystery Man Behind The Latest Pelosi Putsch? It's Mark Penn. Grim's right on target: "a small group of billionaire-backed Democrats, part of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus in Congress, has launched a last-ditch effort that threatens to derail Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s election as House speaker. They’ve framed their challenge to Pelosi, a California Democrat, in terms of good government and high-minded bipartisanship. Yet the force behind their campaign is one of the most toxic and notorious partisan warriors the Democratic Party has produced in the past three decades: political and corporate consultant Mark Penn." No bullshit about "moderates," especially not when he introduced Penn-protégé and Wall Street whore-- founder of the Problem Makers Caucus-- Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)

The links between Gottheimer and Penn go back decades. Gottheimer was Penn’s assistant in the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. Then in 2006, when Penn was CEO of the consulting firm Burson-Marsteller, he hired Gottheimer as an executive vice president, with Gottheimer reporting directly to him. When Penn became chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, he brought on Gottheimer as an adviser. In 2012, Penn set up shop at Microsoft, where he built a guerrilla PR operation to do battle in Washington with rival Google. There, too, he brought on Gottheimer.

Gottheimer had the full-throated support of both Bill and Hillary Clinton when he ran for Congress in 2016, with Hillary Clinton calling him “something of a family member.”

No Labels launched what it called “The Speaker Project” in this past June, proposing a sweeping set of rules changes that lawmakers should demand before agreeing to elect the next speaker, which by then was presumed to be a Democrat. The next month, the Problem Solvers Caucus embraced the plan. In September, Penn went on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News to talk up the project. “There’s a problem-solvers group that is looking to have some influence if the result is close, in terms of changing the rules and naming the speaker,” Penn said.

A lawsuit this summer by former No Labels contractors who alleged that they were bilked by the group claimed that Penn was was “calling the shots” at the organization. Penn, according to the Washington Post, has denied involvement with the operation of No Labels, and the group rejected the assertion that he was in charge. Neither No Labels nor Penn responded to The Intercept’s questions about Penn’s relationship with the group.

But aside from the claims of the contractors, there are also direct links between groups Penn owns and No Labels’s political activity. Penn is a minority owner of the consulting firm Targeted Victory, which the group contracted with for some of its 2018 campaigns. No Labels uses an affiliate, Victory Passport, for its online fundraising. Penn’s firm Harris Interactive does the group’s polling; SKDKnickerbocker, of which Penn is an owner, produces and places the group’s television ads, as it did in its campaign to support the re-election of Rep. Daniel Lipinski in Illinois, according to the lawsuit. Hilary Rosen, an SKDK partner, said that the firm does not produce ads for No Labels.

The New Center, a think tank launched by No Labels to house its 501c3 nonprofit operation, listed Mark Penn as a contact for inquiries about its invitation-only “ideas summit.” Penn is managing partner and president of the Stagwell Group, the holding company that owns SKDKnickerbocker. Penn regularly talks up the great work of No Labels during his appearances on Fox News.

...Penn is notorious in Washington as the metaphorical devil on the shoulder, whispering toxic advice into the ears of Democratic candidates. Penn and Jacobson were both early players in the Democratic Leadership Council, a faction that emerged within the party in the 1980s to push it to align with corporate money and to move in a more conservative direction. He’s perhaps most well known for urging his client, Hillary Clinton, to attack Barack Obama as un-American during the 2008 presidential primary.

In a now-famous 2007 memo to Clinton, Penn noted that there had been much coverage in the media of Obama’s “boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii… geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050.”

In other words, Penn argued, an appeal to diversity wouldn’t work politically for another half-century. “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values,” he wrote.

How Penn planned to isolate Obama’s alleged otherness is a window into how he views the kind of glossy, good government rhetoric now deployed by No Labels-- its meaning is found less in what it says than in what it doesn’t. He advised Clinton that “we give some life to this contrast without turning negative” by elevating the values she grew up with as uniquely American. “Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century.”

That, Penn argued, would make an implicit contrast with Obama, who allegedly lacked those values-- “fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back”-- due to his lack of American roots. “Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this the new American Century, the American Strategic Energy fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds,” he advised. “We are never going to say anything about his background-- we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most Americans-- the invisible Americans.”

Clinton, clumsy in her rhetoric, would occasionally make the subtext into text. In a 2008 speech in West Virginia after she beat Obama in Indiana, she said, “Senator Obama’s support among working-- hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.” (Obama went on to win Indiana in the general election.)

A more effective dog-whistler, in the 2016 campaign, would boil the Penn approach down to just four words: “Make America Great Again.” Donald Trump was named by No Labels in 2016 as an official “Problem Solver.”

A Trump surrogate accepted the award, even though two months earlier, Trump had spoken at a No Labels conference and delivered a speech larded with Trumpisms. (Since his 2017 swearing in, Gottheimer, the Problem Solvers Caucus chair, has voted with Trump more than half the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.)

Today, among Democrats, only fellow Blue Dogs Collin Peterson and Henry Cuellar vote more frequently with Trump than Gottheimer. The Problem Solvers are putting all their energy into two problems right now: sabotaging the Green New Deal and sabotaging Medicare-For-All. This is the polar opposite of these shit-heads:

Mark Penn Wants To Tell You Who Upended Our Election Process, Fanned Partisan Political Fames, Distorted Our Foreign Policy By Isolating Us From Russia, And Abused The Powers Of Their Office

Yesterday's big NY Times book review was Dwight Garner's look at The Threat by Andrew McCabe. Fox News has a very different perspective on the book and we'll get to that in a moment. Garner points to McCabe's first sentence-- "Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law"-- and suggests that it demands to be read in the voice of Jack Webb from Dragnet. It may not be Dostoevsky but Garner is a fan: "McCabe is, of course, the former deputy director of the F.B.I. who was fired last March, just 26 hours before his scheduled retirement. He was briefly the F.B.I.’s acting director, after the dismissal of James B. Comey. The president hooted on Twitter: 'Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the F.B.I.-- A great day for Democracy.' This lawman, a registered Republican for the entirety of his adult life, may have been driven out of Dodge. But he has dusted off his white hat and returned with a memoir that’s better than any book typed this quickly has a right to be."

The Threat is a concise yet substantive account of how the F.B.I. works, at a moment when its procedures and impartiality are under attack. It’s an unambiguous indictment of Trump’s moral behavior. “Let me state the proposition openly,” McCabe writes. “The work of the F.B.I. is being undermined by the current president.”

It’s a rapid-fire G-man memoir, moving from the author’s training in Quantico (shades of The Silence of the Lambs) through his experiences chasing the Russian mob, the Boston Marathon bombers and others. The book is patriotic and oddly stirring. It has moments of opacity, where you feel he is holding back at crucial moments, but it is filled with disturbingly piquant details.

...McCabe’s accounts of his baffled interactions with Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, would be high comedy if they were not so dire. They are a highlight, or a lowlight, of this book. We see a Sessions who is openly racist. “Back in the old days,” he says to the author about the F.B.I., “you all only hired Irishmen. They were drunks, but they could be trusted.”

Sessions seemed not to read his daily briefings. He had “trouble focusing” and “seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement.”

Sessions concentrated almost solely on the immigration aspect of any issue, McCabe writes, even when there was no immigration aspect. Similarly, “Sessions spent a lot of time yelling at us about the death penalty, despite the fact that the F.B.I. plays no role of any kind in whether to seek the death penalty.”

The portrait of Sessions is of a man for whom merely ordering lunch seems to be above the timberline of his intellect and curiosity.

...Mueller is, in this book, the Mueller we have come to know: punctual, determined, the antithesis of casual, with a special loathing for people who speak when they don’t know what they are talking about.

“Ball-busting is his way of expressing affection,” McCabe writes. “If he said, Where does a person even find a tie like that? I knew things were fine: He never went out of his way to insult anyone he didn’t actually like.”

McCabe’s memoir joins a roster of recent and alarming books by high-ranking members of the United States’ justice and intelligence communities, each pushing back sharply against the president’s war on facts and competence.

These books include Comey’s A Higher Loyalty as well as  The Assault on Intelligence, by Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, and Facts and Fears, by James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, written with Trey Brown.

Each is its own Paul Revere ride of warning. Each is a reminder that we will be reading about Trump and his administration for the rest of our lives, for the exact opposite reason that we will also be reading about Lincoln and his for the rest of our lives.

There’s much more in McCabe’s book. He’s good on things like what it’s like to take a polygraph test, and the fastest way to take off a seatbelt.

He wades back through the big muddy of the Benghazi hearings. He writes of his fears about the increasing use of encryption.

He spends a good deal of time talking about Hillary Clinton and her email server. He argues that Comey, whom he admires, made crucial mistakes in how he handled the matter. “As a matter of policy, the F.B.I. does everything possible not to influence elections. In 2016, it seems we did.”

He recounts the attacks on his credibility, by Trump and others, after his wife, Jill, ran for Virginia’s State Senate as a Democrat in 2015. He hurt his own credibility, according to the F.B.I. inspector general, by making false statements about his contacts with the media.

The Trump-bashing texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, his F.B.I. subordinates, did something worse: They cast doubts about the impartiality of the agency. McCabe rushes past this material too swiftly. Yet if McCabe has made mistakes, his basic decency shines through in this memoir.

He adds to our understanding of how deeply Trump remains under Vladimir Putin’s sway. After a North Korean ballistic missile test, Trump told an F.B.I. briefer that reports of the test were a hoax. McCabe writes, incredulously: “He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”

About Trump, the author asks, “What more could a person do to erode the credibility of the presidency?” He watches this moral limbo dancer go lower and lower. Yet he sees the president as a symptom as much as a disease.

“When is the right time,” he asks, “to give up on people’s general ability to understand any slightly complicated statement that they don’t agree with?”

So many Trump books... which one(s) to actually sit down and read? Fox News knows its audience well enough to be certain the answer, for them, is "none of them." The Threat-- How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump is not going to be on many nightstands of Fox viewers. Sunday Fox published two commentaries on McCabe's book. The first was an OpEd by one of the most odious of creatures inhabiting the swampy fringes of American politics, Mr. Repulsive, Mr. Problem Solvers himself. In fact, his Fox OpEd, shows exactly from where the Problem Solvers world view emanates. "The most egregious anti-democratic actions ever taken by the what can now fairly be called the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey." Pure Trump defense from the phony-center. I wonder if Josh Gottheimer, Penn's contemptible little lap doggie inside the House Democratic caucus, would agree. This is exactly what Fox wants to reinforce in the lizard brains of its viewers:

Justice Department and FBI officials spied on U.S. citizens with false warrants, gave a pass to one presidential campaign with a predetermined investigation, investigated another political campaign on the basis of no verified evidence, and illegally leaked information on investigations. They discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump, and appointed a special counsel as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

It is now crystal clear that the highest echelons of the Justice Department and FBI had morphed from the world’s most professional law enforcement organization into a Third World rump group. They had the hubris to believe that they-- not the American people or their duly elected representatives-- should decide who governs and how.

They upended our election process, fanned partisan political flames, distorted our foreign policy by isolating us from Russia, and abused the powers of their office.

Remember that McCabe, Comey and the intelligence community heads all publicly testified to Congress even after the Comey-Trump meetings and memos that no investigation had been tampered with in any way. None.

Yet upon President Trump’s firing of Comey, the remaining officials didn’t wait for the proper appointment of a new FBI head. Instead, they worked themselves up into an unfounded hysteria and acted to create an independent counsel over obstruction that never happened – and was never happening.

...[T]he FBI and Justice Department officials acted to keep the investigation they created under their supervision and with their friends whom they would appoint. And so rather than allow the new incoming head of the FBI to make these decisions, they acted to empower their buddy Robert Mueller as a special counsel.

Mueller, in turn, hired only Democrats, including a lawyer for the Clintons, and the “insurance policy” was launched and ensconced in power. So a counterintelligence investigation that was formed without probable cause now became the largest criminal investigation in history of a campaign and a presidency, dragging on since May 2017.

Adding to the intrigue is that Comey, McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein all disagree with each other in material ways.

McCabe believes he never lied to investigators and had permission from Comey to leak to the press. Comey says McCabe acted on his own.

McCabe and others say Rosenstein was deadly serious when he discussed invoking the 25th Amendment and wiretapping against President Trump in an effort to remove the president from office. Rosenstein says he was just joking around.

Newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr needs to crack all this wide open. The secret charge to Mueller needs to be released. The FISA warrants need to be declassified.

A grand jury must be empaneled to investigate all this and get testimony from officials under oath, and the certification of the warrants used to wiretap the Trump campaign needs to be fully investigated. Dossier author and former British spy Christopher Steele and Glen Simpson-- founder of opposition research firm Fusion GPS-- need to be called to the grand jury.

Operating a year past his commitment to the president’s lawyers, Mueller needs to finish his investigation, shut down his office, and distribute any remaining cases back to the Justice Department that now has a fully empowered attorney general.

If Mueller wants to continue instead, he should be required to balance his team with Democrats and Republicans, removing any former Clinton lawyers.

Rosenstein, who never should have been allowed to run this investigation because he was a fact witness who wrote a memo justifying firing Comey, will be leaving shortly.

McCabe and Comey appear on TV, write books, and have become nakedly partisan, revealing political attitudes no different from Strzok and Page. They readily believed unsubstantiated information and then took power into their own hands.

Every Democrat, Republican and independent should stop angling for partisan advantage and agree, regardless of who is helped or hurt, that these officials acted without proper authority and are responsible for unprecedented damage to our democracy and our political system.

By the way-- a bonus-- this is as good a time as any to let you know which freshmen Democrats have joined Penn's purposefully misnamed "Problem Solvers Caucus." Don't expect any surprises:

• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)

And now, another Fox OpEd willfully trying to distort McCabe's book, this time by deranged conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe Andrew McCarthy. (His latest is that Jamal Khashoggi was a Muslim Brotherhood operative and that that's why it was a good thing that Trump and the Saudis had him murdered.) His "review" of The Threat is just a dull regurgitation of the currently circulating far right trope that the FBI and CIA have been plotting a coup against Trump. As self-aware as any Trumpist, McCarthy, a lawyer, starts by asking his readers of they "ever wonder why people hate lawyers." Other than that, his review asserts that "There are really no new revelations in this week’s breathless reporting. The story is a retread, trotted out again because CBS is hoping to generate ratings for its 60 Minutes interview of McCabe on Sunday night, the launch of the McCabe book tour." His main point is that Trump is not unfit.