Do You Consider Barr More A Crime Fighter Or More A Crime Spree?

Yesterday, Wall Street Journal reporters Aruna Viswanatha and Sadie Gurman wrote that Barr told Justice Department prosectors that he wants protesters charged with sedition. Wikipedia defines Sedition as "overt conduct that tends toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or resistance against, established authority" and reminded it's readers that "in 1940, the Alien Registration Act, or 'Smith Act,' was passed, which made it a federal crime to advocate or to teach the desirability of overthrowing the United States Government, or to be a member of any organization which does the same. It was often used against communist party organizations. This Act was invoked in three major cases, one of which against the Socialist Worker's Party in Minneapolis in 1941, resulting in 23 convictions, and again in what became known as the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 in which a number of pro-Nazi figures were indicted but released when the prosecution ended in a mistrial. Also, a series of trials of 140 leaders of the Communist Party USA also relied upon the terms of the 'Smith Act'-- beginning in 1949-- and lasting until 1957. Although the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the convictions of 11 CPUSA leaders in 1951 in Dennis v. United States, that same Court reversed itself in 1957 in the case of Yates v. United States, by ruling that teaching an ideal, no matter how harmful it may seem, does not equal advocating or planning its implementation. Although unused since at least 1961, the 'Smith Act' remains a Federal law"... There was "a brief attempt to use the sedition laws against protesters of the Vietnam War. On 17 October 1967, two demonstrators, including then Marin County resident Al Wasserman, while engaged in a 'sit-in' at the Army Induction Center in Oakland, California, were arrested and charged with sedition by deputy US. Marshal Richard St. Germain. U.S. Attorney Cecil Poole changed the charge to trespassing. Poole said, 'three guys (according to Mr. Wasserman there were only 2) reaching up and touching the leg of an inductee, and that's conspiracy to commit sedition? That's ridiculous!' The inductees were in the process of physically stepping on the demonstrators as they attempted to enter the building, and the demonstrators were trying to protect themselves from the inductees' feet. Attorney Poole later added, 'We'll decide what to prosecute, not marshals.'"

Sounds like something Barr would just love to be involved with, right? He "told told the nation’s federal prosecutors to be aggressive when charging violent demonstrators with crimes, including potentially prosecuting them for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government, people familiar with the conversation said. In a conference call with U.S. attorneys across the country last week, Mr. Barr warned that sometimes violent demonstrations across the U.S. could worsen as the November presidential election approaches. He encouraged the prosecutors to seek a number federal charges, including under a rarely used sedition law, even when state charges could apply."

Barr also told John Kass at the Chicago Tribune that "There’s no more secret vote with mail-in vote. A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots. You know liberals project. All this bullshit about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I’ve never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I’m the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it. They are projecting. They are creating an incendiary situation where there will be loss of confidence in the vote. Someone will say the president just won Nevada. 'Oh, wait a minute! We just discovered 100,000 ballots! Every vote will be counted!' Yeah, but we don’t know where these freaking votes came from." What a crime fighter!!

Prohibited Acts by Nancy Ohanian

Except when it comes to... crime. Yesterday Pam Martens and Russ Martens asked at Wall Street On Parade What Happened to the Criminal Case against Goldman Sachs at Barr’s Justice Department? Is Barr a criminal himself? Anyone who even scratches the surface can have here no doubt about it. Many members of the Trump Regime need to be tried and sentenced to very long terms in prison-- and no one who's name isn't Trump (or Kushner) more so than Barr.

On December 6 of last year, four reporters at Bloomberg News signaled that the U.S. Department of Justice was close to a settlement of its criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs in the 1MDB matter. The reporters wrote as follows:

“The Justice Department and other federal agencies, in internal discussions held in recent weeks, have weighed seeking penalties between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, the people said. That’s less than what some analysts have signaled Goldman might have to pay. While a settlement could be announced as soon as next month, the terms could change before a deal is finalized…”

The terms, indeed, seem to have changed. It’s now more than 9 months since that article was published and there hasn’t been a peep out of the Justice Department about criminal charges against Goldman Sachs. According to the Bloomberg report, Barr has “directly immersed himself in the case.”

Both Barr and the Deputy Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, hail from Kirkland & Ellis, one of the primary law firms representing Goldman in the matter. Barr was “Of Counsel” to Kirkland while Rosen worked at the law firm for 29 years.

1MDB is a sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia. Goldman raised over $6 billion in bond offerings for the fund. According to the Justice Department, $4.5 billion of that was “misappropriated” and used “to fund the co-conspirators’ lavish lifestyles, including purchases of artwork and jewelry, the acquisition of luxury real estate and luxury yachts, the payment of gambling expenses, and the hiring of musicians and celebrities to attend parties.” Bribes and kickbacks were also allegedly made. Goldman made more than $600 million in fees from the bond offerings.

In July, the Malaysian government settled the case against Goldman Sachs for $3.9 billion. Another law firm representing Goldman Sachs is Sullivan & Cromwell. On June 19, Barr released a statement announcing that Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney (i.e. top federal prosecutor) for the Southern District of New York (where Goldman Sachs is headquartered), would be “stepping down.” Barr said President Trump would be naming Jay Clayton, the sitting chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to fill the slot. Clayton hails from Sullivan & Cromwell.

The problem was, Berman had not agreed to “step down”; he said so publicly, and was, in reality, being ousted by Barr in the midst of numerous key criminal cases being handled by his office.

The fallout resulted in 65 professors and faculty from Barr’s alma mater, George Washington University Law School, releasing a letter the following week stating that Barr’s actions “have undermined the rule of law, breached constitutional norms, and damaged the integrity and traditional independence of his office and of the Department of Justice.”

On the same day that letter was released, June 23, the New York City Bar Association sent a letter to leaders in the House and Senate calling for Barr to resign. The letter, which included the signature of the President of the Board of Governors of the National Bar Association, Alfreda Robinson, said that Barr’s actions “form an overwhelming public impression of an Attorney General whose primary loyalty is to the President who appointed him, not to the American public or the rule of law.”

There is little likelihood that Clayton will be confirmed by the Senate for the post. Both Senators from New York, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have said they will not give the greenlight to Clayton’s nomination. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he will not move Clayton’s nomination forward without the approval of those two Senators, following a longstanding policy of the Judiciary Committee.

That’s welcome news. As we previously reported, Sullivan & Cromwell was involved in making some of the luxury purchases on behalf of the alleged looters of 1MDB, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Two of Goldman’s senior bankers, Ng Chong Hwa (a/k/a Roger Ng) and Timothy Leissner, have already been indicted for “conspiring to launder billions of dollars embezzled from 1MDB,” and “paying bribes to various Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials.” Leissner pleaded guilty in the matter. Roger Ng’s trial has been delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. Attorney’s office that prosecuted the case against the Goldman Sachs’ bankers is the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. Quietly, on the eve of the July 4th weekend, Barr also removed the U.S. Attorney in that office-- Richard Donoghue. He is to become the Deputy to the Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen at Main Justice.

Rather than allowing the second in command of the Eastern District to take over, as Geoffrey Berman had demanded of Barr in the Southern District of New York matter, Barr announced on July 10 that Seth DuCharme, who had been working at Main Justice, would become Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York office. DuCharme was sworn in the same day that Barr made the announcement.

There's More To Berman's Firing Than Meets The Eye

What could be a more perfect chief prosecutor (in Trump's own backyard, no less-- where he committed decades of crimes and where so many of his cronies reside) for Trump than one who has never prosecuted a case? Renae Merle, who covers white-collar crime and Wall Street for the Washington Post, noted in a piece yesterday that the Trumpanzee "pick to be the next U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, is the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a longtime corporate lawyer with deep connections to Wall Street. But he has no experience as a federal prosecutor." Ah... but his lack of experience is just the beginning of why he's not going to be confirmed, not even by this craven Trumpist Senate. (Lindsey Graham, Senate Judiciary Committee chair announced that he would not even open confirmation hearings for Clayton until New York’s two senators support the nomination. They both oppose it and Schumer has already called on Clayton to withdraw his name.) Berman showed up for work Saturday, by the way.

On his 2017 SEC financial disclosure form, for example, Clayton listed Deutsche Bank as a source of compensation “exceeding $5,000.” The bank was a client of his former law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

The German bank has repeatedly run afoul of federal and state laws and was implicated in large money laundering schemes. It is also at the center of a battle between the Trump administration and House Democrats over the release of the president’s financial records. The bank has played critical role in Trump’s real estate business, lending him more than $360 million since 2012.

When he took the job at the SEC in 2017, Clayton agreed to recuse himself from cases involving Deutsche Bank and other clients he had previously represented for two years. While at Sullivan & Cromwell, he advised Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital, among many others.

...Before Trump nominated him to the SEC, Clayton, a longtime partner with Sullivan & Cromwell, had never held a government position. He has represented some of the biggest names on Wall Street, including Bill Ackman of Pershing Capital.

...[C]onsumer advocates say some of his policies have weakened the SEC. The commission has made it easier for companies to raise money without traditional oversight and adopted weak protections for consumers working with brokers, they say. Clayton’s tenure will be known for “shrinking both the scope and the effectiveness of SEC regulation,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group.

Everyone is speculating on why Trump/Barr-- they disagree about who ordered it-- fired Berman. Was it to protect Giuliani? Was it because of Trump's business interests in Turkey? Could be dozens of reasons that impact Trump personally. One perspective worth considering comes from Wall Street on Parade where Pam and Russ Marten explained how Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan were facing uncomfortable criminal probes that Trump and Barr felt could not be permitted to go forward.

Clayton has no prosecutorial experience but what he does have, wrote the Martens, "is a lot of experience representing Wall Street’s largest banks, like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, both of whom are currently under intense criminal investigations by the Justice Department. Clayton was a former partner at Wall Street’s go-to law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, which is currently representing Goldman in the criminal case and representing JPMorgan in various matters. The breaking news last night went downhill from there. Several hours after Barr’s announcement, Berman announced that he had not resigned from his job and had no intention of leaving his post until his replacement had been confirmed by the U.S. Senate-- which could take months. There is also no assurance that Clayton would actually be confirmed, since some Republicans and Democrats believe that Clayton has been a lapdog for Wall Street in his current post.

Even more problematic, Clayton’s family has ties to an opaque company called WMB Holdings, described by David Dayen in The Nation magazine like this:

“This company and its affiliated partners (Delaware Trust Co and CSC) are conduits for creating shell corporations and other sketchy vehicles used in tax evasion and money laundering. Public Citizen found apparent links between these companies and Mossack Fonseca, the notorious Panamanian law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal.”

The timing of the attempted ouster of Berman is suspicious on multiple fronts. Goldman Sachs is under criminal investigation over a multi-billion-dollar money laundering and embezzlement scheme involving the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund known as 1MDB. Goldman Sachs has been fighting the Justice Department’s demand that it plead guilty in order to settle the case, according to media reports.

According to the Sullivan & Cromwell website, Nicolas Bourtin, Managing Partner of the law firm’s Criminal Defense and Investigations Group, “is representing Goldman Sachs in criminal and regulatory investigations in six jurisdictions” involving the 1MDB matter.

At the time of Jay Clayton’s nomination for SEC Chair, he had been outside counsel to Goldman Sachs for years and was married to a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, Gretchen Clayton, who had worked at the firm for 17 years. She stepped down from Goldman after her husband was confirmed.

In 2017, when the 1MDB matter began to intensify, Sullivan & Cromwell partner Karen Seymour left the law firm to join Goldman Sachs as co-General Counsel and partner. She is now the sole General Counsel and earned over $8 million last year for work that included “an active focus on the resolution” of the 1MDB matter.

JPMorgan Chase had multiple traders from its precious metals desk indicted by the Justice Department on RICO charges last year for allegedly running a racketeering enterprise out of the precious metals desk at JPMorgan. The firm itself is now under criminal investigation according to a February report at Bloomberg News.

Another felony count at JPMorgan Chase could be the death knell for the career of JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon. During Dimon’s tenure as CEO, JPMorgan has pleaded guilty to two criminal felony counts in 2014 for its role in handling the business bank account for Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. In 2015 the bank pleaded guilty to one felony count for its role in rigging foreign exchange trading. It’s unprecedented for a major Wall Street bank to survive three felony counts. A fourth felony count might be simply too much for even today’s crony regulators.

Mainstream media has made much out of the fact that this U.S. Attorney’s office is actively investigating Trump ally, Rudy Giuliani, and Deutsche Bank, a major financial lender to Trump’s companies. But the fact that Barr, and assumedly Trump, want to replace Berman with Clayton-- a man with no criminal prosecution experience but chummy ties to Wall Street-- suggests this is really about Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.

Update:

Berman has changed his mind and decided he will step down after all. The change of heart came after Barr issued another letter to Berman on Saturday, June 20. The new letter stated that President Donald Trump was removing Berman from his job. The letter also indicated that Berman’s Deputy U.S. Attorney, Audrey Strauss, would become the Acting U.S. Attorney. Barr’s earlier statement on Friday evening had indicated that Craig Carpenito, the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, would assume Berman’s post “while the Senate is considering Jay Clayton’s nomination.”

A new embarrassment is emerging for both Jay Clayton and Sullivan & Cromwell. On Saturday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, released a statement indicating that he won’t move forward on Clayton’s nomination without the standard policy of getting a go-ahead from the two Senators of the state where the new U.S. Attorney will serve. That means that Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand would have to give the greenlight to Clayton.

Schumer released the following statement:

“Forty seven years ago, Elliott Richardson had the courage to say no to a gross abuse of presidential power. Jay Clayton has a similar choice today: He can allow himself to be used in the brazen Trump-Barr scheme to interfere in investigations by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, or he can stand up to this corruption, withdraw his name from consideration, and save his own reputation from overnight ruin.”

According to the New York Times, Senator Gillibrand has also stated that Clayton should withdraw his name from consideration.

So what happens when Trump tells Graham that if he doesn't get Clayton confirmed tout suite he'll out him to South Carolina Republicans before the election?

How Much Better Off Would America Be If Trump Becomes Infected A Goes To Meet Satan?

Die For Me by Nancy Ohanian

In 1969 I bought a VW van in Wiesbaden, Germany and drove to India. When I drove back to Europe a couple of years later, I was sick and penniless and stranded. I made my way to Amsterdam and lived in my van and ate rice and vegetables everyday for a dollar at a macrobiotic restaurant in the city's meditation center, the Kosmos. Eventually the chef there liked me and told me she could cure what was wrong with me-- without the operation doctors said I needed. She gave name a job washing dishes, taught me how to work in a restaurant and how to cook. And cured me. I had some good years there and wound up as the manager but my favorite days were always the days I cooked; there were several of who took turns.

In January, when I caught on to Chris Martsenon's warnings about what the pandemic was bringing to America, I went out and started stocking up on the kinds of beans, grains and root vegetables I used to cook with in Holland-- common ones like carrots, onions, cabbage, potatoes and less common ones like daikon, turnips, rutabaga, celery roots... I hadn't been cooking regularly for decades. But it's like riding a bike; you don't forget, especially microbiotic cooking, which is also very reasonable and based on simple principles and techniques. So every day-- except Sundays when I fast, a hold-over from my Kosmos days-- I make healthy, delicious food for Roland and I.

I've also been able to buy perishables easily-- fresh fruits and vegetables. Today I noticed for the first time there were no roma tomatoes , no string beans and no leeks at the organic store. Maybe they'll have them tomorrow. Or, maybe not, I thought, after speaking with a friend in New York, where the shelves are far emptier than in California and after reading the latest piece from David Cay Johnston at the DCReport.org, Another Trump Screw-Up: Food May 'Rot In The Fields'. Johnston's point? Trump's obsessive "anti-Mexican racism is barring legal workers from picking fruits and vegetables; food production, distribution system could collapse."

Early signs show that the systems that get fresh fruit and vegetables to American homes is strained and may experience major failures. The Trump administration is only making matters worse, allowing his racism against Mexicans to inflict damage on American farms that depend on legal labor from south of the border.

...“Nearly all of our fruits and vegetables are not automated and you need a strong labor force to handpick those crops,” John Walt Boatright of the Florida Farm Bureau Federation told the Palm Beach Post.  “We are hearing a lot of concerns from the blueberry industry and other labor-intensive crops, and working to find a solution.”

U.S. farmers depend on more than 200,000 Mexicans who get visas each year to pick apples, pears and other crops.

Yet Mother Jones magazine reports that the American consulate in Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city, and other consulates have closed. That means most Mexican farmworkers have no way to get annual work visas. Unless the visas are issued much of this year’s American fruit and vegetable crops will not be harvested, barring some other unexpected development.

Each year as president, Donald Trump has gotten such visas for Mar-a-Lago while assiduously avoiding the many qualified workers in Palm Beach County, many of whom are African American. Federal law allows such visas for chambermaids, cooks and waitstaff only when no Americans are available.

...Representative Austin Scott (R-GA) says that delays in issuing visas to farm laborers are a serious threat to vegetable and fruit growers who, unlike grain farmers, don’t have federal crop insurance. “If delays continue” in issuing visas to Mexican farmworkers “we’re going to see crops rotting in the field,” Scott said.

The number of these Mexican farm labor visas has grown more than six-fold since 2000, a revealing indicator of how much America depends on Mexican labor to supply fresh fruits and vegetables in grocery stores.

Of course, Trump is hostile to all Mexicans and his administration has shown no signs it wants to resume the issuance of visas for Mexican farm laborers who take most of their money home with them. Trump thinks like a 16th Century mercantilist, believing any dollar that leaves us makes America worse off. It’s discredited and downright crazy economic thinking that hurts America more than Mexico, not that Trump understands this.

A lack of imported farm labor means not just the loss of those foodstuffs, but of income for farmers and those in the related packing, processing and shopping businesses, worsening the cascade of economic damage.

Labor intensive crops such as strawberries and crops that require placing beehives for pollination will be most affected by a shortage of labor.

Tree fruits require intensive labor not just to harvest, but also to cut away diseased limbs and plant replacement trees. Not minding the trees each year means reduced production in future years... Trump’s de facto policy: Crops be dammed, just keep Mexicans out.

You can always count on Trump to make everything and anything worse. As Jennifer Rubin noted in yesterday's Washington Post, "No one could make up a character as narcissistic and lacking in human empathy as President Trump... More than 2,400 Americans had died by Sunday. Governors around the country are screaming for more assistance from the federal government. Trump? He obsesses over ratings. It is hard to comprehend how indifferent he is to human suffering."

Increasingly, the country seems to operate on two tracks. On one, groveling courtiers flatter Trump, try to soften his impulsive pronouncements and scramble to catch up after months of delay. As they cater to the president, exploring patently absurd ideas, they have less attention to devote to real issues that only the federal government can address. On the other track, governors have no time for bowing and scraping; they are dealing hands-on with hundreds of logistical challenges, made worse by the absence of coordinated purchasing and by lack of a comprehensive testing program. Thank goodness governors are actually doing their jobs, which increasingly entail navigating around Trump.

Then there's the way grocery chains-- lookin' at you, Whole Foods-- treat their workers. In fact Whole Foods workers are going out on strike today nationwide to protest unsafe work conditions. They plan to "call in sick to demand paid leave for all workers who stay home or self-quarantine during the crisis, free coronavirus testing for all employees, and hazard pay of double the current hourly wage for employees who show up to work during the pandemic. 'COVID-19 is a very real threat to the safety of our workforce and customers,' Whole Worker, the national worker group that is organizing the 'sick out' wrote in a statement. 'We cannot wait for politicians, institutions, or our own management to step in to protect us.' The sick-out follows reports that Whole Foods workers at numerous stores across the country, including locations in New York City, Chicago, Louisiana, and California have tested positive for Covid-19. In each of these locations, the stores have remained open, leading some employees to charge that Whole Foods has failed to prioritize their safety during a period of record sales for the company."

While Trump was accusing NYC hospitals of illegally selling masks and respirators "out the back door"-- an excruciating and typical Trump lie-- the city's health care providers have been getting infected and dying. Many people question if Trump is human. "The coronavirus pandemic," wrote Michael Schwirtz, "which has infected more than 30,000 people in New York City, is beginning to take a toll on those who are most needed to combat it: the doctors, nurses and other workers at hospitals and clinics. In emergency rooms and intensive care units, typically dispassionate medical professionals are feeling panicked as increasing numbers of colleagues get sick... Medical workers are still showing up day after day to face overflowing emergency rooms, earning them praise as heroes. Thousands of volunteers have signed up to join their colleagues. But doctors and nurses said they can look overseas for a dark glimpse of the risk they are facing, especially when protective gear has been in short supply. In China, more than 3,000 doctors were infected, nearly half of them in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, according to Chinese government statistics."

And it isn't only Americans' physical health he's threatening. Americans' fiscal well-being is in great jeopardy because of his mental debilities, incompetence and self-absorption. Wall Street on Parade noted yesterday that in 2015 Carl Icahn called BlackRock "an extremely dangerous company." And the Fed picked them to manage their corporate bond bailout programs.

Icahn was specifically talking about BlackRock’s packaging of junk bonds into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and calling them “High Yield,” which the average American doesn’t understand is a junk-rated bond. The ETFs trade during market hours on the New York Stock Exchange, giving them the aura of liquidity when one needs it. Icahn said: “I used to laugh with some of these guys…I used to say, you know, the mafia has a better code of ethics than you guys. You know you’re selling this crap.” Icahn warned that “if and when there’s a real problem in the economy, there’s going to be a rush for the exits like in a movie theatre, and people want to sell those bonds, and think they can sell them, there is no market for them.”

BlackRock not only sells junk-rated bond ETFs under the brand name iShares, but it has some of the largest investment grade corporate bond ETFs, including one that trades under the stock symbol LQD, which was experiencing serious losses and seeing major outflows of money until the Federal Reserve announced recently that it was creating three facilities to buy investment grade corporate debt from the primary and secondary markets, as well as investment grade corporate bond ETFs, along with agency commercial mortgage-backed securities.

And just who is going to be running these facilities for the Federal Reserve? None other than BlackRock-- posing an enormous conflict of interest which was readily observable in the market as BlackRock’s investment grade ETFs rallied dramatically on the news.

...Picking a highly conflicted Wall Street firm to manage a taxpayer-subsidized bailout of the highly reckless and irresponsible securitization practices of Wall Street is nothing new for the Federal Reserve and its unlimited money spigot, the New York Fed. The Fed did the same thing during the financial crisis of 2008. (See The New York Fed Has Contracted JPMorgan to Hold Over $1.7 Trillion of its QE Bonds Despite Two Felony Counts and Serial Charges of Crimes.)

An Invisible Hand In The Miraculous Resuscitation Of The Comeback Codger?

Yesterday, Bernie told the media that "what has become more and more apparent, with each passing primary, is that while we are currently trailing in the delegate count, we are strongly winning the debate about the future of our country. In poll after poll after poll, including exit polls, a strong majority of the American people support our progressive agenda. The American people are deeply concerned about the grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality in this country. The American people believe it is time for the wealthy and profitable corporations to be paying their fair share. The American people understand that the federal minimum wage is a starvation wage and that it is time to raise it to a living wage of $15 an hour-- nothing less. The American people understand that if our kids are going to make it into the middle class, we must make public colleges, universities and trade schools tuition free. The American people understand that we cannot continue a cruel and dysfunctional health care system where we are spending twice as much per capita as any other nation, yet 87 million of our neighbors remain uninsured and underinsured. And that last point is becoming more and more obvious to the American people as we face the challenge of the coronavirus. Imagine a pandemic where 87 million people have a difficult time going to a doctor. The American people understand that climate change is an existential threat to our planet and we need to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. The American people understand that we need to transform our broken and racist criminal justice and immigration system that locks up four times as many people as communist China and leaves millions here at home living in fear.

...On Sunday, I very much look forward to debating Joe Biden about these issues in Arizona. This will be the first 1-on-1 debate of this campaign, and I am eager for the American people to see which candidate-- which agenda-- is best positioned to defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history."

People are confused with how Status Quo Joe's utterly moribund campaign came back to apparent vibrancy so suddenly and so unexpectedly. I asked people why in a twitter poll yesterday, right after Bernie finished speaking about his on-going campaign plans (video up top). This is how that poll looked just a few minutes in:

Earlier in the day Pam and Russ Martens from Wall Street on Parade addressed the role of one particular Wall Street law firm in that resurgence-- and what it means to progressives and progressivism.

There has been the feeling of an invisible hand in the miraculous comeback of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Biden lost all three of the first races in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, then spiraled to a long series of state victories despite a lackluster and sometimes rambling performance in the presidential debates.

Since the invisible hand in unlikely elections always has a money trail somewhere, we decided to pull back the dark curtain using campaign financing data at the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org). The name of the giant Wall Street law firm-- Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP-- emerges as a common denominator.

Paul Weiss has not only been a major donor to the Biden campaign but it was simultaneously a major donor to the campaigns of the four presidential candidates who dropped out of the race and then endorsed Biden at critical moments in his miraculous resuscitation. (As the Center for Responsive Politics notes on its website, the law firm itself is prohibited from making donations under federal law. The money came from the law firm’s partners, employees, their immediate family members or its PAC.)

Donors from Paul Weiss rank as the 12th largest donor to the Joe Biden campaign with a tally of $168,412. Paul Weiss was the top donor to Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, sluicing $151,102 into his campaign coffers. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who hails from Minnesota-- pretty far from the law firm’s Wall Street focus-- received $76,932 from Paul Weiss, making it her third largest donor in her presidential bid.

Pete Buttigieg, who was the former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana-- about as far from Wall Street as one can get, received $133,261 from those generous folks at Paul Weiss, making it his seventh largest donor.

And, finally, there was presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the junior Senator from California, who received the sizeable sum of $193,873 from the folks at Paul Weiss, ranking them her second largest campaign contributor.

Just how statistically likely is it that one law firm would show up in the campaigns of five different Democratic candidates for president without there being an agenda?

Adding to the suspicion is this. On March 2, the day prior to the make-or-break Super Tuesday primary elections on March 3, which guaranteed maximum media coverage, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg endorsed Joe Biden for President, giving him a critical lift.

One day before this week’s Super Tuesday II elections, Senator Cory Booker endorsed Biden, which followed by one day the endorsement of Biden by Senator Kamala Harris.

Paul Weiss gained notoriety in May of last year when the Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote a decision finding that the U.S. Justice Department had outsourced a criminal investigation to the target of the investigation-- Deutsche Bank-- and Deutsche Bank’s outside law firm (wait for it) Paul Weiss. (See our full report: Judge Issues Scathing Rebuke of DOJ and Law Firm, Paul Weiss.)

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, is struggling after years of sagging profits, multiple CEOs, police raids, and a series of big fines for market abuses including money laundering. Last year, Congress subpoenaed documents from Deutsche Bank related to its dealings with Donald Trump. The New York Times reported in May that senior Deutsche Bank executives had blocked employees from alerting a federal government watchdog about suspicious money activity linked to Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Deutsche Bank has been one of Trump’s largest bank lenders, continuing to make loans to him when other mega banks refused, following a series of bankruptcies by Trump’s businesses.

Paul Weiss has also been outside counsel for decades to Citigroup, another serially charged Wall Street bank. (See our previous article: Meet the Lawyer Who Gets Citigroup Out of Fraud Charges.)

Both Deutsche Banks and Citigroup have been suffering severe stock market losses over the past two weeks.

What Can Be Done About A Criminal Presidency? Just Grin And Bear It? Pelosi Still Refuses To Protect The Country And The Constitution

Remember when fact-checking Trump and reporting how many lies he had told was a national sport? [Update, according to PolitiFact, 84% of the Trump statements they've checked have been false or partially false. Biden, who lies just 61% of the time, almost seems like a paragon of virtue compared to Trump.] But now Jonathan Chait is starting a new game. How many impeachable acts has Trump committed today?

Yesterday, he wrote that Trump had committed 5 more just this week. I know; it's not funny and it's not a game. But with Pelosi's partisan calculations making it impossible for Democrats to even begin the process of holding him accountable, what can we do other than look on in horror? Chait wrote that at his MAGA rally in an airplane hanger in tiny Montoursville, Pennsylvania this week, "Trump’s characteristic threats of vengeance against his enemies took an especially chilling turn. 'There was treason!' he announced, summarizing the investigation into the Mueller probe. The crowd began chanting, 'Lock them up! Lock them up!'"

Trump initially returned to his prepared text, itself a creepily ethno-nationalist paean to his narrow Electoral College win. “You reclaimed your destiny, you defended your dignity, and you took back your country,” he read, in a passage that probably sounded better in the original German. But the “Lock them up!” chants persisted, and, with his showman’s gift for timing, Trump turned back to his audience and paused as the chants increased, then theatrically relented to the demands of the crowd that he had stoked. “We have a great new attorney general who will give it a very fair look, very fair look,” he promised... As Trump said “very fair,” he wore an arch expression. Trump of course does not use “fair” in anything like the dictionary definition of the term. Trump’s notion of “fairness” is purely positional, revolving entirely around his own self-interest. With his expression, Trump-- unusual for him-- brought the crowd in on the joke. “Very fair” was a punch line.

Trump’s notion of a “fair” attorney general, as he has stated many times, is one who loyally protects the president’s political interests. His frequent expressions of confidence in William Barr are therefore an important indicator. Barr conspicuously refused to answer a question about whether he had been ordered to investigate anybody, then announced a new, third, investigation into the origins of the Russia probe. Barr has also repeatedly prejudged the outcome of that probe in public. Trump “has told close confidants that he ‘finally’ had ‘my attorney general,’ according to two Republicans close to the White House,” reports the Associated Press. Every indicator suggests Trump believes, correctly or otherwise, that his attorney general shares his peculiar, mob-family sense of fairness.

In a pre-Trumpian world, this sequence of events would set off a political crisis. In the surreal landscape we inhabit, it barely registers. But it is worth noting that Trump continues to commit impeachable offenses at an unprecedented pace. Last night’s threats to make good on his “lock them up” promises are merely one more in another recent flurry. The space between Trump’s long-standing authoritarian rhetoric and the deployment of his powers of office is slowly collapsing on several fronts.

Consider some of the events of recent days. Sunday, the New York Times revealed that Deutsche Bank’s internal investigators raised concerns that the portfolios of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner involved money laundering. Trump is suing Deutsche Bank to block it from complying with congressional investigators. The notion that the president is entitled to engage in red-flagged dealings with money launderers, and conceal it from Congress and the public, is a wild transgression of transparency norms.

The same day, the Times reported Trump is preparing pardons for several American war criminals. Trump has long fantasized about war crimes and human-rights violations as part of his idealized military, from repeating a fantasized historical account of General Pershing shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood to proposing that the United States seize Iraqi oil as spoils of war. His prospective pardoning of war criminals are steps toward institutionalizing this vision as de facto law.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Michael Cohen told a closed House panel that Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, encouraged him to lie to Congress in 2017. Cohen’s lie concerned his handling of a deal to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. The subject of the lie is itself a massive scandal: Vladimir Putin, who habitually corrupts foreign politicians with bribes disguised as lucrative deals, was dangling a contract worth several hundred million dollars, with no financial risk or downside to Trump.

Cohen has testified that Trump encouraged him to lie by repeating, in his characteristic mobster code-- “There’s no Russia”-- a cover story both men knew to be false. (Trump of course signed the letter of intent for the Moscow Project.) The new report shows that Sekulow was involved in crafting his false testimony, and that, far from the president’s lawyer freelance ordering perjury, Cohen understood Trump to be working through Sekulow.

The new disclosure fleshes out more evidence that the president suborned perjury to conceal evidence that he was deeply compromised by Russia during the campaign.

Also yesterday, former White House Counsel Don McGahn refused to appear at a House hearing to testify to yet another serious presidential crime. According to the Mueller report, Trump ordered McGahn to tell Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller, an order McGahn refused. Trump later told McGahn to falsely deny Trump had ever told him this.

Trump has publicly insisted none of this has happened, a denial that makes McGahn’s testimony highly pertinent. There is no basis for refusing to let McGahn testify. It’s not executive privilege, a right McGahn already waived by discussing it with Mueller. Instead, the White House is advancing the novel and extreme argument that Congress can never compel testimony from a senior White House official. That precedent, if accepted, would negate vast swathes of Congress’s long-standing investigative powers.

What’s more, Trump is backstopping his demand with financial blackmail. The AP reports that “Trump has mused about instructing Republicans to cease dealing with the firm” currently employing McGahn, which relies on Republican connections for its business. So Trump, in short, is using financial blackmail in support of a fallacious legal argument in order to cover up a clear instance of obstruction of justice-- a seamless garment of corruption.

What cynics had waved off as Trump’s cartoonish musings is slowly seeping its way into sanctioned government policy. The question of whether or not to impeach Trump has attached itself to the discrete drama of the Mueller report, which contains a large cache of Trumpian misconduct. But the misconduct is also an ongoing process with no clear endpoint. The impeachable offenses just keep coming.

Reporting from Pam and Russ Martens on Monday is even more of a deep drive into the criminal conspiracy that has taken grip of the executive branch of the U.S. government. Foreign money flows is their topic. Trump tweeting that the NY Times bombshell about Deutsche Bank employees having flagged suspicious activity in Trump's and Kushner-in-law's bank accounts involving those aforementioned foreign money flows was par for the course, but... turned out to be not quite enough to gaslight the country with. Their Deutsche Bank superiors stopped them from reporting the suspicious activities to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). But what Trump claimed in his tweets was that the employees being anonymous sources that were fabricated and didn't exist. That was odd since the source wasn't anonymous, but a legitimate whistleblower, Tammy McFadden, one of the five sources for their story. She is described as "a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office," who "found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals," and "concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government-- in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions"-- clearly money laundering. When McFadden wrote up a suspicious Activity Report it was blocked from being sent to FinCEN by Deutsche Bank's Private Bank and McFadden was fired.

Deutsche Bank settled with U.S. and U.K. authorities over a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme in 2017, paying a combined fine of $630 million.  Deutsche Bank’s offices in Frankfurt, Germany were raided in November of last year by 170 law enforcement officials. The probe involved potential money laundering. The draft report released by Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 13 of last year contained this paragraph:

“Donald Trump’s finances historically have been opaque, but there have long been credible allegations as to the use of Trump properties to launder money by Russian oligarchs, criminals, and regime cronies. There also remain critical unanswered questions about the source of President Trump’s personal and corporate financing. For example, Deutsche Bank, which was fined $630 million in 2017 over its involvement in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme, consistently has been the source of financing for President Trump, his businesses, and his family. We have only begun to explore the relationship between President Trump and Deutsche Bank, and between the bank and Russia.”

Over the years, Deutsche Bank has loaned Trump “a total of well over $2 billion,” according to an earlier report in the New York Times. A significant part of that money was loaned when other major banks would not loan to Trump due to his defaults and business bankruptcies.

The current New York Times article has this to say about bank accounts directly involving Donald Trump:

“After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.

“Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.

“Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.”

Historically, the Justice Department has avoided jailing, or even prosecuting, banksters. Really? Oh yes In 1999 the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations exposed the international money dealings at Citigroup’s commercial bank, Citibank. In his opening remarks, Senator Carl Levin explained how the bank operated:

Today we are looking at the private bank of Citibank. It is the largest bank in the United States, and it has one of the largest private bank operations. It has the most extensive global presence of all U.S. banks, and it had a rogues’ gallery of private bank clients. Citibank has been private banker to:

• Raul Salinas, brother to the former President of Mexico; now in prison in Mexico for murder and under investigation in Mexico for illicit enrichment; [Salinas had his murder conviction overturned on appeal and was released from prison in 2005.]
• Asif Ali Zardari, husband to the former Prime Minister of Pakistan; now in prison in Pakistan for kickbacks and under indictment in Switzerland for money laundering;
• Omar Bongo, President of Gabon; subject of a French criminal investigation into bribery;
• sons of the General Sani Abacha, former military leader of Nigeria; one of whom is now in prison in Nigeria on charges of murder and under investigation in Switzerland and Nigeria for money laundering;
• Jaime Lusinchi, former President of Venezuela; charged with misappropriation of government funds;
• two daughters of Radon Suharto, former President of Indonesia, who has been alleged to have looted billions of dollars from Indonesia…
• General Albert Stroessner, former President of Paraguay and notorious for decades for a dictatorship based on terror and profiteering.

During the hearing the subcommittee's counsel, Robert Roach, explained the services that Citibank had provided to then Mexican President Carlos Salinas' brother Raul:

“The private bank…established a shell company for Mr. Salinas with layers of disguised ownership. It permitted a third party using an alias to deposit funds into the accounts, and it moved the funds out of Mexico through a Citibank concentration account that aided in the obfuscation of the audit trail. Cititrust in the Cayman Islands activated a Cayman Island shell corporation called a PIC, or private investment corporation, called Trocca, Ltd., to serve as the owner of record for the Salinas private bank accounts…

“Cititrust used three Panamanian shell companies to function as Trocca’s Board of Directors. Cititrust also used three Cayman Island shell companies to serve as Trocca’s officers and principal shareholders. Cititrust controls all six of these shell companies and routinely uses them to function as directors and officers of PICs that it makes available to private clients. Later, Citibank established a trust, identified only by a number, to serve as the owner of Trocca, Ltd. Raul Salinas was the secret beneficiary of the trust.

“The result of this elaborate structure was that the Salinas name did not appear anywhere on Trocca’s incorporation papers. The Trocca, Ltd. accounts were established in London and Switzerland…

“To accommodate Mr. Salinas’ desire to conceal the fact that he was moving money out of Mexico, Ms. [Amy] Elliott [a Relationship Manager at Citibank] introduced Mr. Salinas’ then-fiancee Paulina Castanon as Patricia Rios to a service officer at the Mexico City branch of Citibank. Operating under that alias, Ms. Castanon would deliver cashiers checks to the branch where they would be converted into dollars and wired into a concentration account in New York. The concentration account is a business account established by Citibank to hold funds from various destinations prior to depositing them into the proper accounts. Transferring funds through this account enables a client’s name and account number to be removed from the transaction, thereby clouding the audit trail. From there, the money would be transferred to the Trocca, Ltd. accounts in London and Switzerland…

“Between October 1992 and October 1994, more than $67 million was moved from Mexico to New York and then on to London and Switzerland by way of this system…Yet no one questioned Mr. Salinas about the origin of these funds. Far from inquiring about the sources of the funds, Ms. Elliott wrote to her colleagues in June 1993 that the Salinas account ‘is turning into an exciting, profitable one for us all. Many thanks for making me look good.'"

Roach further expounded on how the Relationship Manager’s need to “please the client” trumped their responsibilities under the law, stating that “After Mr. Salinas was arrested, Hubertus Rukavina, the head of Citibank Private Bank at the time, suggested that the Salinas accounts in London be transferred back to Switzerland because they would be afforded more secrecy there.”

Amy Elliott, according to Roach, even advised Mrs. Salinas “that it might be wise to move the Trocca, Ltd. account out of Citibank because it might be more difficult for Mexican authorities to obtain account information from a non-U.S. bank.”

At one point during the hearing, Senator Levin questioned Amy Elliott on the transcript of a phone conversation she had with a colleague:

Senator Levin: “On another matter, the day after Mr. Salinas was arrested, you said the following: ‘Everybody was on board on this.’ Later, in the same conversation, you said, ‘I mean, this goes in the very, very top of the corporation this was known, Okay? On the very top.’ Then you said, ‘We are little pawns in this whole thing, Okay?’ Who were you referring to when you said ‘this goes in the very top of the corporation this was known’? Who are you referring to at the very top of the corporation?”

Amy Elliott: “Bill Rhodes…I am sitting four or five down from the chairman, and Bill Rhodes was and is the vice chairman of the bank. To me, that’s pretty top.”

The Martens made it clear to their readers what I hope you have already figured out on your own: "It should be crystal clear that the U.S. Department of Justice can’t be in charge of this new investigation if America expects to ever extricate itself from this unprecedented era of corruption." A new poll released by Monmouth today found the highest percentage yet of registered voters saying they do not think Trump deserves a second term-- 60%. Just 37% say he should be reelected in 2020.

Hey Trumpanzee, How's That Chaos Thing Working Out For You Now?

Today President Obama spoke at the Anaheim Convention Center in Orange County on behalf of Southern California candidates Katie Porter, Harley Rouda, Mike Levin, Katie Hill, and Gil Cisneros (AKA- the Lottery Winner). I offered Ammar Campa-Najjar, a former Obama Labor Department official who is running against Drunken Hunter (CA-50) but who the DCCC is not behind and has continued to sabotage (please contribute to his campaign here or, if you hate the DCCC as much as I do, here) a ticket but Obama's office sent him one. [The DCCC staff is made up of such utter jerks. Who hires them?]

His manner and presence alone were a kind of reassurance that no matter how horrific you see Trump as being, he's just a temporary mistake that somehow happened to our country. Aside from making the point that these are "extraordinary" and "dangerous" times he seemed genuinely disturbed by the "crazy stuff" coming out of the Trump Regime, particularly the way Trump has been trying to politicize the Justice Department and the courts. "It should not be a partisan issue," said the President, "to say that we do not pressure the attorney general or the FBI to use the criminal justice system as a cudgel to punish our political opponents. Or to explicitly call on the attorney general to protect members of our own party from prosecution."

Not mentioning Trump rubber-stamps Mimi Walters, Steve Knight and Dana Rohrabacher by name, he obviously found it shocking and disturbing that congressional Republicans have been "utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make our democracy work."

The kind of the thing Obama was so upset about was demonstrated by Trump again yesterday when he started babbling again about how the Department of Justice should try to identify the anonymous member of his own White House who wrote the incendiary NY Times OpEd about Trump's glaring and dangerous shortcomings. In an interview on Air Force One, Trump again tried to pass his problem off as a threat to national security and demanded that Sessions find out who betrayed him and punish The Times for running the OpEd. "Jeff," he insisted, "should be investigating who the author of that piece was because I really believe it's national security." His point is that if the person he hired and gave top security clearance doesn't belong in meetings where security clearance is required, even though there wasn't anything classified in the OpEd.

On Fox News, Trump claimed that whoever wrote the piece "may not be a Republican; it may not be a conservative, it may be a deep state person who has been there for a long time." Members of Congress, as well as members of the press, claim that Trump staffers tell them this same stuff about Trump, albeit off the record, constantly.

Trump seems to have demanded letters from his top officials claiming to have not written the OpEd and he's gotten them from Mike Pence, DNI Dan Coats (both of whom were immediate suspects), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and from and other Cabinet members. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman was also a suspect and he also wrote Trump a letter saying it wasn't him. What about Chief of Staff Kelly (who Ivanka and Jared say wrote the OpEd) and Jared Kushner? Are they "members of a secret Resistance?" Ex-Libertarian Rand Paul and Rudy Giuliani want them all to take lie detector tests. "Let's assume it's a person with a security clearance," said Giuliani. "If they feel writing this is appropriate, maybe they feel it would be appropriate to disclose national security secrets, too." Why? That makes no sense at all.

You can understand why the last patriot in the Oval office just said "A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further. They appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all." Meanwhile, no one is doing any work in the White House, unless you count sleuthing for Trump's latest enemy "work." Trump also wants Congress to get involved with the hunt for what he refers to as a "traitor." Ryan just rolled his eyes and thought about how he only has a few more months to go before he's out of this horror, but the neo-fascists in Congress, like fringe lunatic Mark Meadows (NC) want a go at it. This is what a Trump government looks like. Putin:

Pam and Russ Martens over at Wall Street on Parade made a good case that whoever wrote the OpEd was a Koch loyalist.

Parsing the phrasing in the OpEd, there is a clear pattern of right-wing ideology-- the kind that comes from Charles Koch, CEO of the fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, and the sprawling network of tax-exempt front groups that are funded with Koch foundation money. There is this telling phrase in the OpEd: “…the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” This is the jargon of the Koch-brand of the libertarian movement which tortuously attempts to equate freedom with the right to pollute the environment with fossil fuels without government interference.

Then there is this sentence in the OpEd: “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.” The Koch manifesto is that gutting regulations makes America more “prosperous” thus its heavy funding of the front group Americans for Prosperity. This is how the Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch describes Americans for Prosperity: “Americans for Prosperity is a right-wing political advocacy group founded by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, the owners of Koch Industries. AFP serves as the Kochs’ ‘grassroots’ operation, also known as astroturf. AFP spends millions on TV ads in election cycles.”

Embedded in the writer’s effort to sell the idea that “many” of the Trump administrations’ policies have “made America safer and more prosperous” is the fact that Koch money, operating through its front group, Freedom Partners, dictated in writing what it wanted the Trump administration to accomplish and got many of those demands met. Repeal the Paris Climate Accord-- done. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy-- done. Gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency-- much accomplished.

There is one other telling word in the OpEd: the word “republic” as used in this sentence: “But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” A person operating separate and apart from the Koch network might have said the “health of our democracy” or the “health of our nation” but a libertarian would have chosen the word “republic.”

There’s another reason why we believe this is the handiwork of a Koch-connected “senior official.” Numbers are simply on our side. In November of last year, the watchdog group, Public Citizen, reported that 44 Trump administration officials have been plucked from the Koch network. As of April of this year, SourceWatch reports that 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners are working in the Trump administration. Until last month when he stepped down, that included Marc Short, who went from being President of Freedom Partners to Director of Legislative Affairs for Trump, pushing through many items on that list of written demands from Freedom Partners. (As of July, eight of the nine Board Members of Freedom Partners is a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners is Mark Holden, the General Counsel of Koch Industries: this at a taxpayer subsidized organization.)

Then there is the fact that Koch Industries’ long-time law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its lawyers to the Trump administration all on the same day-- January 20, 2017, the day Trump was inaugurated. That includes White House Counsel Don McGahn (who will be leaving this Fall) and his Chief of Staff, Ann Donaldson. Both McGahn and Donaldson previously represented Freedom Partners.

...It is now just 61 days until the midterm election. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week showed that “more than 6 in 10 Americans say Trump and the Republican Party are out of touch with most people in the country,” and that “registered voters say they favor the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate in their district by 52 percent to 38 percent.”

That poll had to set off fire alarms within the Koch network. How can they complete the dismantling of Federal regulations and Federal agencies if their hand-picked Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate.

This is the kind of thing that drives the Kochs and their destructive network off the wall-- and this ad just started running this week in southeast Wisconsin. They won't be able to fulfill their dreams without puppets like Bryan Steil and this isn't some ineffective DCCC ad; this is the Bryce campaign's own work. Watch closely: