Will The Greatest Liar In American History Get Away With It?

A few days ago I saw a Morning Consult poll that showed that even among Republicans-- among whom 63% think honesty is a word that describes Señor Trumpanzee accurately-- there has been a 9% drop since January among those who believe he is honest. And, off course, normal Americans are veery aware that Trump is the biggest liar in the history of public figures. Last night, he did one of his trained seal rallies at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa, where he declared himself the most popular Republican in the history of America, just another Trump big lie. The lying daughter-- as big a liar as daddy but smoother-- introduced the orange ape as someone "who keeps his promise and who will always deliver for America's workers."

One new element of this Trump was the widespread presence of people wearing T-shirts or carrying signs touting the fringe "QAnon" conspiracy theorist. Among other things QAnon promotes is the notion that leading political and Hollywood elites are involved in a pedophilia ring and that leaders of the federal government's "deep state" have tried to kill President Trump.

Not so long ago, Republicans talked of making their party a big tent party that would welcome moderates into the fold, said Republican former U.S. Rep. David Jolly of Pinellas County, who attended the rally despite being a vocal critic of the president.

"Now we're a big tent party where extremists are welcome."

...Trump said thousands who couldn't get in were watching outside on TV screens. But there were no massive TV screens outside. He lied his way through his whole speech. I checked in with Politifact, which is based in Tampa. They tend not to call True a liar... but they get the point across anyway: "During the rally, Trump made several statements-- many misleading or flat-out wrong-- about Republican tax cuts, his popularity, progress on the U.S. border wall with Mexico, and trade. Here’s our rundown.


• "They just came out with a poll, did you hear? The most popular person (in) the history of the Republican party is Trump! ... So I said, does that include Honest Abe Lincoln?"

To his credit, Trump is very popular among Republicans: His approval rating within his own party has ranged from 84 percent to 90 percent since mid April 2018. The latest Gallup data shows Trump currently enjoys an 87 percent approval rating from Republicans.

However, his claim is misleading on two grounds.

First, scientific opinion polls were first designed and deployed in 1935. That’s 70 years after Honest Abe’s assassination, so Trump’s name-check of Lincoln is spurious.

Second, as we noted in a previous fact-check, Trump’s approval rating at this point in his presidency ranks roughly in the middle of the post-World War II Republican presidents. Using alternative measurements-- including his highest rating during his entire tenure-- his support among Republicans was actually worse than every post-war Republican president except for Gerald Ford.

• "In some states, Democrats are even trying to give illegal immigrants the right to vote."

...Currently no states allow non-citizens to vote in state elections. There are a handful of localities that allow it for local elections or even more specifically school board elections, including San Francisco, Chicago (school board), and a handful of Maryland cities, said University of Kentucky law professor Joshua A. Douglas.

...The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 states it’s unlawful for noncitizens to vote for candidates seeking federal offices, such as the presidency or a seat in Congress. But it’s not illegal for noncitizens to vote for local offices if it’s allowed by a state constitution, statute or local ordinance.

• "By the way, outside, if you want to go, we set up for the first time a tremendous movie screen, because we have thousands and thousands of people outside that couldn’t get in."

Trump’s claim is not true, per a reporter stationed outside the venue... The president’s claim that there were "thousands and thousands of people outside that couldn’t get in" also appears to exaggerate things. The Times placed the figure in the hundreds. It also noted the presence of some "150 protesters and counter protesters."

• "We’ve taken the toughest ever actions in response to China’s abusive trade practices. ... This has been too many years of abuse. $500 billion a year, $500 billion."

Trump overstated the United States’ trade deficit with China-- by no small sum.

A country’s trade balance is the difference between the value of its imports and exports. When imports outstrip exports, a trade deficit results.

In 2017, the value of Chinese goods imported to the United States exceeded American goods exports to China by roughly $375 billion. Over that same period, the United States actually ran a $38.5 billion surplus on services trade with China.

Overall, in terms of both goods and services, the United States trade deficit with China in 2017 was around $336 billion. So Trump is off by roughly $164 billion.

• "We've already started the wall. We've got $1.6 billion and we've started large portions of the wall."

It is misleading to state that the work has already started on the type of wall he promised during the campaign.

Trump has secured $1.57 billion for barriers along the southwest border-- advancing his promise to secure the border but falling significantly short of his desired $25 billion for a promised border wall.

The $1.6 billion authorized by Congress allows for the replacement of the old fencing, but not for the construction of any sort of concrete wall prototype as Trump requested.

The projects underway include arrays of steel posts, between 18 and 30 feet high, that allow border patrol agents to see through. The planning for at least some of these projects, which will replace shorter scrap metal fencing, started long before Trump ran for office. Congress agreed to pay for them under Trump’s administration.

• "Every day, the brave men and women of ICE are liberating communities and towns from savage gangs, like MS-13, that are occupying our country like another nation would."

Trump’s far-reaching assertion lacks evidence.

The use of "liberating" suggests that communities had been under the rule or full control of the MS-13 gang. But neither the White House or ICE have named such towns. Experts on sociology and gang research have told PolitiFact they were unaware of U.S. towns that have been wholly controlled by the gang. They said Trump’s wording sounded like politically charged hyperbole.

MS-13 targets immigrant communities and has a large presence in New York, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. ICE investigators have arrested hundreds of MS-13 gang members.

• Trump said that prior to a June 2017 law, "if somebody treated our veterans badly ... we couldn't do anything about it. ... Now you can say you're fired."

Trump’s claim greatly exaggerates the impact of the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, a bipartisan bill he signed into law in June 2017.

The measure is designed to make it easier to fire underperforming workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs. It created new protections to shield whistleblowers from retaliation, and quickens the process for removing problem employees.

But the notion that it was impossible to fire VA workers prior to the legislation is simply wrong.

An analysis of federal government employment data by our friends at FactCheck.org found a 27 percent increase in the number of firings after the law’s passage. However, that analysis also showed that the VA fired an average of 2,300 employees annually prior to Trump taking office.

• "We passed the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history. Biggest cuts in history."

There’s no question that the tax bill Trump signed is a significant piece of legislation. But even by estimates most favorable to the president, we found the Trump tax cut is exceeded in size by other historical examples.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the recent tax bill is the fourth-largest since 1940. And as a percentage of GDP, it ranks seventh.

• "You know if you go out and you want to buy groceries you need a picture on a card-- you need ID... In this country, the only time you don’t need it, in many cases, is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman."

Trump used the example of buying groceries to call for mandatory voter ID at the polls. But the scenario is an exaggeration.

A photo ID isn’t necessary to buy food at a grocery store with cash, but retailers can ask to see a photo ID when customers purchase items with a credit card. Laws also require retailers to ask to see ID when customers purchase certain items such as alcohol or cigarettes which are available at many grocery stores.

Hey, as long as we're talking about lying... Murray Waas' essay, Flynn, Comey, and Mueller: What Trump Knew and When He Knew It was published by the New York Review of Books this week. Teaser: "Previously undisclosed evidence in the possession of Special Counsel Robert Mueller-- including highly confidential White House records and testimony by some of President Trump’s own top aides-- provides some of the strongest evidence to date implicating the president of the United States in an obstruction of justice. Several people who have reviewed a portion of this evidence say that, based on what they know, they believe it is now all but inevitable that the special counsel will complete a confidential report presenting evidence that President Trump violated the law. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel’s work, would then decide on turning over that report to Congress for the House of Representatives to consider whether to instigate impeachment proceedings."

I have learned that a confidential White House memorandum, which is in the special counsel’s possession, explicitly states that when Trump pressured Comey he had just been told by two of his top aides-- his then chief of staff Reince Priebus and his White House counsel Don McGahn-- that Flynn was under criminal investigation. This memo, the existence of which I first disclosed in December in Foreign Policy, was, as one source described it to me, “a timeline of events [in the White House] leading up to Flynn’s resignation.” It was dated February 15, 2017, and was prepared by McGahn two days after Flynn’s forced resignation and one day after Trump’s meeting with Comey. As I reported, research for the memo was “primarily conducted by John Eisenberg, the deputy counsel to the president and legal adviser to the National Security Council,” who, in turn, was “assisted by James Burnham, another White House counsel staff member.”

  ...The February 15 memo, combined with accounts given to the special counsel by Priebus and McGahn, constitutes the most compelling evidence we yet know of that Donald Trump may have obstructed justice. In an effort to persuade the American people that the president has done nothing wrong, Trump and his supporters have blamed those they identify as their political adversaries—from President Barack Obama to Jim Comey, and including entire institutions such as the FBI and CIA, and an ill-defined “Deep State.” But the most compelling evidence that the president may have obstructed justice appears to come from his own most senior and loyal aides. The greatest threat to his presidency is not from his enemies, real or perceived, but from his allies within the White House.

The clock is ticking. Is there anything we can do about the criminals Chimpy the Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney? (Tick-tock, tick-tock.)

"That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to [NYT reporter Judith] Miller [Valerie] Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.

"This new information adds to a growing body of evidence that Cheney may have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to reporters and that Libby acted to protect Cheney by lying to federal investigators and a federal grand jury about the matter."

-- investigative reporter Murray Waas,
in a report this week on Crooks and LIars

by Ken

At least the lords of Ruddigore, under the term of their Witch's Curse, only had to do one crime a day, once every day, forever. (Okay, to be technical, the terms of the curse were "one crime or more," but a mere onespot would get the job done.) Whereas the Bush regimista have spent night onto eight years now committing every war crime they could wrap their heads around and shredding the Constitution.

I would include "shredding the economy," but again, to be technical, this was done under the terms of "Republican governance," much of which is not -- astonishingly enough -- strictly speaking illegal. Of course that still leaves a goodly amount of plundering and profiteering that clearly falls on the far side of the law, and should certainly be available for inclusion on anyone's master list of "high crimes and misdemeanors" -- the constitutional specification for impeachment, of course.

Is there anything we can do here?

It's not a matter of retribution or "getting even." There's an important principle at stake. Because while the judgment of history on these people is likely to be fierce, that really isn't enough. The principle is that when you allow crimes to go unpunished, that tends not only to legitimize the behavior but to encourage the criminals and the people who follow them to do even worse stuff.

I'm not smart enough to know in what form the perpetrators of the Bush regime's crimes can still be held to account. In retrospect it becomes ever clearer that both Chimpy the Prez and his master, "Big Dick" Cheney, should have been impeached. Now we know that hindsight is 20/20, but this isn't just retrospective wisdom. Since it became clear the kind of extremist, law-be-damned regime this was going to be, there have been plenty of people shouting for impeachment, both before and after then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously declared it "off the table."

But hold on before jumping all over Speaker Pelosi. I am not at all saying that her political calculation was necessarily wrong. The fact is that a movement for impeachment against the president and vice president (and it would have crucial to do both, ideally in the same time frame, not only as a matter of basic criminal justice, but as an assurance that in the admittedly unlikely event that the president was actually removed from office, that office wouldn't simply have been turned over to that spawn of Satan . . . I mean to the vice president) wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

Even in the regime's second term, as it began falling apart, and then starting in 2007 with the Democrats in nominal control of both houses of Congress, there would have been no support from Republicans (and remember that what drove Richard Nixon out of office was growing Republican support for impeachment and almost surely, if he had allowed it to come to that, for conviction) and probably not all that much support from congressional Democrats, among whom impeachment was considered risky, dirty-fucking-hippie-type behavior.

Some observers said, "So what? It's important to get some kind of official condemnation of the regime's high crimes and misdemeanors on the record. And perhaps so. But consider, might it not have been worse to have an impeachment movement flicked off, for permanent dismissal as a partisan witchhunt? In other words, a larger version of the charge routinely hurled at the hardy band of Democratic House and Senate committee chairmen who actually tried to investigate even a tiny bit of the regime's rampant lawlessness after the congressional takeover?

Which hasn't entirely prevented additional investigations and revelations from materializing. And in just the last couple of weeks we've had Big Dick's almost certainly legally self-incriminating statements about his role in making possible the regime's use of waterboarding, which got Rachel Maddow all excited, and which Sen. Carl Levin for one agreed needed to be investigated to get the information on the record.

And just a few days ago crackerjack reporter Murray Waas dropped the bombshell on Crooks and Liars from which I've quoted above. Drawing on "a still-highly confidential FBI report," Waas reports that Big Dick admitted to federal investigators "that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light," acknowledging "that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer."

I don't know what to do about this, but I have a pretty good idea of the consequences of doing nothing. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

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Confidential to the Reverend Huckabee: Aren't you beginning to get the message that you should have quit while you were only a little bit behind?

We made a big deal Wednesday of Murray Waas's thorough, exhaustively documented Tuesday HuffPost flaying of the Rev. Mike Huckabee's involvement, as governor of Arkansas, in the freeing of convicted rapist and future murderer Wayne Dumond (right) and the years of lies the governor and his people invested, first, in that original involvement and, then, in the furious cover-up that persists to this day.

Naturally the Huckster (come on, how can we not?) responded to the original HuffPost piece the way he does best: with more lies. In response, Murray Waas provided a HuffPost follow-up presenting substantive corroboration from former top Huckabee aide Butch Reeves.

And naturally the Huckster escalated the lies and threw around some wild accusations, which brought forth a HuffPost reply from Arianna Huffington herself, "Huckabee Tries to Shoot the Messenger, but Winds Up Wounding His Campaign Instead."

Arianna comes out with guns blazing:

The way that Mike Huckabee has handled the furor caused by the Huffington Post's coverage of his role in the release of Wayne Dumond, a serial rapist who went on to rape and kill at least one other woman, has been very revealing. And troubling.

It has exposed the dissembling reality behind the charming, articulate, more-preacher-than-politician facade - and has called into question both his judgment and his integrity.

Huckabee's response has been to fudge the truth, point the finger at everyone in sight, and -- that old standby -- blame the messenger.

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning, Huckabee said of our story: "there are factual errors in what they have printed, some of it is outrageously incorrect." As an example of our factual errors, he cited... well, nothing. Not one.

He also claimed "the Huffington Post just doesn't want to give the whole story of what was going on." Really? Our original story on the Dumond case was over 4,000 words long and offered what even the American Spectator deemed a "detailed, convincingly irrefutable" presentation of the evidence in which HuffPost "backs up every single word." What's more, we included links to a number of never before published documents from the governor's own files.

Huckabee also claimed that in a follow up story "the Huffington Post totally misrepresented and just utterly distorted" the statements of Butch Reeves, his former top aide, who told us that, contrary to his former boss's claims, Huckabee had indeed influenced the parole board to reverse its previous rejection of Dumond's release. Huckabee described Reeves as "outraged," and promised that a statement from Reeves to that effect would be posted on mikehuckabee.com today. It just went up, ten hours later.

In the statement, Huckabee's campaign acknowledges the accuracy of the quotes attributed to Reeves in our story, but splits hairs over whether Huckabee's claims that Dumond's conviction was "outlandish" and "way out of bounds for his crime" (brutally raping a 17 year old cheerleader) were in the context of a discussion about "paroling" the rapist or in the context of a discussion about granting him "clemency" or "a pardon."

She goes on to note the apparently careful selectivity of the Huckster's mudslinging:

Tellingly, the Huckabee campaign chose to attack only the Huffington Post for our interpretation of Reeves' comments, even though our reporter was joined on the phone call with Reeves by Brian Ross [right], ABC News' Chief Investigative Correspondent, who filed a report offering the same interpretation. Yet there is no mention of ABC or Ross in the Huckabee campaign's press release. Why? Is it harder to dismiss ABC as "left-wing," and the charges as part of a partisan agenda?

But none of Huckabee's finger pointing (he mentioned Bill Clinton 12 times while discussing the Dumond case in his press conference on Tuesday) addresses the key questions raised by this tragic story: why Huckabee continued to favor the rapist's release, even after being sent police reports and wrenching letters from several of his victims detailing his horrific crimes (which included raping a woman while her 3 year old daughter lay beside her in bed); and why Huckabee, to this day, continues to insist "No one could have predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out" when we can read for ourselves the words of his victims predicting that the man would rape again - and perhaps murder - if released.

"Dear Wayne," Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond, after having read the victims' letters. "My desire is that you be released from prison." And no amount of spinning can change that, or the conclusion that Huckabee allowed his judgment to be swayed by the bleating of a collection of right-wing zealots who put their hatred of Bill Clinton over the well being of the public (Dumond's victim was a distant relative of Clinton, and the daughter of a major Clinton donor).

In interviews, Huckabee claims that his stand on Dumond was clouded by a surfeit of compassion. In reality, it was clouded by a surfeit of cynical pandering to a group whose support he felt he needed.

And no amount of denials and mudslinging by Huckabee can make the devastating evidence -- and what that evidence reveals about him -- go away.

Um, er, Mikey, we might point out, in your own best interests, that you're not in Arkansas anymore.

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Oh sure, there are lots and lots of reasons why Mike Huckabee should never be president. But this one by itself is quite good enough for me

"The files had to be disappeared because there just wasn't a plausible explanation for the governor's stance," the former [Huckabee] staffer said. "I mean, what could the governor say? That he believes these women made up their stories? That women lie when they say they are raped?"
--from Murray Waas's "Documents Expose Huckabee's Role In Serial Rapist's Release" on HuffPost

Not that anybody you or I know is likely to be considering supporting Mike Huckabee for president, but in case you should encounter someone who might be contemplating doing so, make sure they read this HuffPost piece of Murray Waas's, a grimly thorough documentation of the preacherly scumbag's sordid involvement in the 1999 freeing of convicted rapist Wayne Dumond, who proceeded to rape and murder two women.

Since the New Right apparently lives on an unvarying diet of all lies all the time, it's not surprising that the story consists of a more or less unbroken chain of lies spewed by the Right-Wing Filth Machine, with then-Gov. Mike Huckabee at the center.

First there was the batch of lies spread like a nasty virus by a bunch of the usual suspects (including the New York Post's Steve Dunleavy, who may never in his life have knowingly written a word of truth), indulging in one of their ritual orgies of Clinton-hating. The thugs claimed that there was no rape, that it was all a put-up job because the victim had ties to the Clintons. (And no, we don't have to refer to her as the "alleged" victim. Her rapist was, after all, tried and convicted.)

Later, after the released Dumond moved to Missouri and was arrested for rape and murder (he died in 2005 while serving a life sentence in prison, as Missouri authorities were preparing a capital case against him for the murder of another woman, this one pregnant, the day before his arrest for the murder for which he was convicted), there was the batch of cover-up lies spewed by Governor Huckabee and his people, working frantically to conceal the extent of the governor's involvement in the case.

At the time that Huckabee interceded on Dumond's behalf--which he now pretends he never did, though the record makes clear that he did quite a lot--there was abundant evidence that the convict had already committed not one but a series of rapes. Among the documents were letters from several of his victims, which Waas (with their consent) has now released publicly for the first time. There was every reason to believe that Dumond, if released from prison, would go right on raping--and possibly worse.

In one of the letters, which Waas establishes conclusively Governor Huckabee's office had received at the time (naturally they lied about this as long as they could get away with it) they were busy freeing a rapist, the victim wrote, "I feel that if he is released it is only a matter of time before he commits another crime and fear that he will not leave a witness to testify against him the next time."

Inevitably mention of the Wayne Dumond matter calls to mind the Massachusetts case of Willie Horton. In 1988 the late Lee Atwater, mentor to Karl Rove, used Willie Horton to make sure that Gov. Michael Dukakis would never become president. But the cases really aren't similar. The Horton case was tragic, of course; the Dumond case is inexcusable.

Even now former Governor Huckabee, who I'm sure would have been the first in line to advocate lynching Mike Dukakis for allowing the parole of Willie Horton, makes believe that the post-release history of Wayne Dumond was, gosh, just one of those horrible cases of bad luck you just have to live with--horrible, of course, but there's nothing to be done.

More lies, of course. It's only in the demented minds of delusional right-wingers that there was ever the slightest question about who and what Wayne Dumond was. Governor Huckabee had all the information and evidence at his disposal. Instead he cast his lot with the mob of Clinton-hating psychos. And he's spent a portion of every day since then lying about the whole thing.

At the very least, Waas's exhaustive HuffPost piece should protect Americans from ever having to extend the respect of an elective office to the Rev. Mike Huckabee.

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