Institutional decay

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The Trump administration has been accused of attempting to pressure another foreign country into helping Trump’s reelection prospects, according to a letter from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That letter cites Brazilian news articles that report US ambassador to Brazil Todd Chapman pressured members of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to lower ethanol tariffs in order to support President Donald Trump’s reelection efforts. In the letter, Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Rep. Eliot Engel demands Chapman explain an article in which the ambassador is said to have asked for the tariffs to be lowered as a “favor” from the Brazilian government to the Trump reelection campaign. “Iowa is the largest ethanol producer in the United States…and could be a key player in Trump’s election,” an article in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo reads, according to the letter. “Hence the importance – according to Chapman – for the Bolsonaro government to do the U.S. a favor.”

The US ambassador to Brazil reportedly asked Brazilian officials to help Trump’s reelection - Vox

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reassigned a senior official who led the agency's Intelligence & Analysis Office after reports surfaced that the office had been creating intelligence reports on journalists covering the protests in Portland, Ore., The Washington Post reported Saturday. The Post, citing three people familiar with the situation, reported that Brian Murphy, the acting undersecretary of the office, was removed from his post and reassigned to a different, undisclosed position within the department. The Hill has reached out to DHS for comment. The existence of the reports — known as Open Source Intelligence Reports — was reported on by multiple news outlets earlier this week.

Senior DHS official reassigned after office compiled intel reports on journalists, protesters | TheHill

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Donald Trump has had a vendetta against the U.S. Postal Service throughout his time in office, but it only took center stage after he realized that the Postal Service would be an essential part of the elections because voting by mail is more important during the coronavirus pandemic. But while Trump’s efforts to destroy the Postal Service have only ramped up in the past couple months, destroying things is one of his areas of greatest competence, so there’s very real worry about voting by mail in November, and, as a result, about the elections as a whole. “It seems like they’re just trying to turn customers away from the post office,” the president of the Cincinnati American Postal Workers Union local told The New York Times. A West Virginia American Postal Workers Union (APWU) local president had a related view, saying: “It’s like they’re setting us up for failure.”

Trump is sabotaging the mail — and it threatens to undermine the election – Alternet.org

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President Trump on Thursday painted Democratic nominee Joe Biden as weak on crime and a danger to the U.S. economy, while again suggesting supporters attempt to vote twice in the November election to ensure their ballot is counted. Speaking to a crowd during a campaign stop in Latrobe, Pa., Trump expanded on remarks that caused a firestorm on Wednesday, when he urged supporters to vote by mail and then attempt to vote in person. The president reiterated that this is necessary to ensure that their vote is tabulated.

Trump skewers Biden, suggests again supporters vote twice in Pennsylvania | TheHill

• Attempting to vote twice is illegal
  
• Yet another institution under attack, the elections..
  

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Barely a month after Barr was sworn in, he released his misleading spin on special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings a month before the report itself. His Justice Department decided Trump’s request that Ukraine’s president investigate the Bidens wasn’t worth investigating, and other federal investigations into Trumpworld appear to have fizzled out. Barr personally instructed prosecutors to weaken their sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, and he is trying to have the case against Michael Flynn dismissed entirely. He instituted a new rule requiring his personal approval for any investigations into presidential candidates or campaigns. And he’s attempted to place loyalists into key US attorney posts, such as the Southern District of New York and the District of Columbia..

Bill Barr’s interview on CNN was a train wreck - Vox

• Much more in the article..
  

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This is not a normal election. I don’t say that because it is now clear that, against some stiff competition, Donald Trump is the most repellent individual ever to have sought, let alone won, the presidency of the United States. The latest proof comes in a quadruple-sourced account of Trump describing US troops who died for their country as “losers” and “suckers”, and demanding that a military parade exclude wounded veterans, lest spectators glimpse an amputee. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

There was a time when the Atlantic’s jaw-dropping report, later corroborated “in its entirety” by the Associated Press, would have proved terminal for a politician in a country where respect for the military supposedly has the status of a religious obligation. But that time is long past. It ended in 2015 when Trump branded John McCain – who had spent more than five years in a Hanoi cell as a prisoner of war – a “loser”, though of course now Trump swears blind that he never said any such thing, despite the existence of video showing him saying exactly that.

In a normal election, you’d be running the numbers on the harm this would do to Trump among his avowedly patriotic base. But wiser heads have learned to give up on such calculations. Trump’s supporters will write this off as more fake news, and stick with their man even as he tramples on everything they claim to hold dear. Like he always said, he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and they’d still vote for him.

Which is why it will similarly make no difference that this week he spouted conspiracist garbage about Joe Biden being controlled by people “in the dark shadows”, or reheated a Facebook-spread fantasy about black-clad looters boarding planes to fly around the country causing trouble – think of it as RiotAir – offering no evidence. Of course that won’t move the needle.

Remember, this is a country where close to 200,000 people are dead thanks to a pandemic that Trump refused to admit was happening, and for which his proposed remedy was self-injected bleach. The US economy lies in tatters, racked by mass unemployment. And yet, despite that record of lethal failure, this inadequate, malignant man still has the support of 42% of the American people.

That fact alone makes this an abnormal election. But that’s not the exceptional circumstance I have in mind. Rather, it is that the critical contest on 3 November is not so much between Democrat and Republican as between democrat and anti-democrat. It is that nothing less than the US’s standing as a democracy is at stake. Consider the evidence. This week, the president urged his supporters to vote twice. It wasn’t a joke. It was a message delivered in earnest.

The danger is now clear: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight | Opinion | The Guardian

• The evidence that follows isn't pretty..
  

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A top aide to U.S. Attorney John Durham has reportedly resigned from the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation amid worries over political pressure from Attorney General William Barr. Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, who has worked with Durham for decades, resigned Thursday evening, sources told the Hartford Courant in a story published Friday. Her resignation email did not include mention of political pressure.

Durham aide resigns from Russia probe amid concerns over pressure from Barr: report | TheHill

• Pressure to get the report out before the election while the norm is the opposite, politically sensitive inquiries are usually not published just before an election.
  
• That happened with the investigation into Trump's Russian ties, which wasn't made public before the 2016 election which makes this doubly cynical.
  
• Or triply cynical as Hillary's emails made a comeback just before the election when the then FBI boss went public again, likely to have cost Hillary the elections.
  

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A former Trump campaign official now spokesman for the US health department sought to change key reports on the coronavirus pandemic, in some cases “openly complaining” that they “would undermine the president’s optimistic messages about the outbreak”, according to internal emails seen by Politico. The official, Michael Caputo, told the website he was attempting to stymie “ulterior deep state motives in the bowels” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. The news comes after reports that a whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security said he was told to stop making Donald Trump “look bad”, via reports on Russian election interference.

Caputo, who became spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services in April, is a Republican consultant who worked on the Trump campaign in 2015 and 2016. He has links to Russia, having worked in the country’s energy industry, and to Roger Stone, a Trump ally whose sentence arising from the Russia investigation was commuted by the president. Politico reported that under Caputo’s direction, CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports were subject to “substantial efforts to align … with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether”.

“Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings,” the website said, “including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior.” One report Caputo’s team tried to stop, the website said, concerned hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug which Trump and key aides pushed for use in treatment of Covid-19 but which studies have said can be dangerous. The report was published last week, reportedly after being held for a month because its authors’ political views were in question.

Trump ally who sought to change CDC Covid reports claims he was fighting 'deep state' | US news | The Guardian

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Top Trump administration officials at the Department of Homeland Security repeatedly ordered subordinates to suppress or change US intelligence reports on critical national security issues — including election interference by Russia — so they wouldn’t contradict the president or make him look bad.

That’s according to an explosive new whistleblower complaint released by the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday afternoon. The complaint was filed by Brian Murphy, who until recently headed intelligence and analysis at DHS.
In the 24-page report and a seven-page supplement, Murphy alleges four main incidents of wrongdoing by his superiors at the agency:

1. That then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen repeatedly, and perhaps knowingly, exaggerated the number of suspected terrorists crossing the southern border into the US in official documents and sessions with lawmakers — despite having been briefed numerous times by Murphy that the numbers she was citing were not accurate.
   
2. That DHS acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told Murphy to alter an intelligence report detailing the high levels of corruption, violence, and economic problems in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to make those countries look like safe destinations for migrants, a judgment that would aid Trump’s restrictive asylum policy.
   
3. That DHS acting Secretary Chad Wolf, at the request of White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, ordered Murphy to “cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”
   
4. That Cuccinelli and Wolf at different times instructed Murphy to modify domestic terrorism threat assessments to downplay the threat from white supremacists and add information on the prominence of violent left-wing groups like antifa “to ensure [the assessments] matched up with the public comments by President Trump.”
   

The DHS whistleblower’s shocking complaint, and what to make of it, explained - Vox

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The most alarming move from the Justice Department lately came from a surprising source: the US attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, David Freed. Many details about the underlying situation here are still murky. But on Monday, Freed’s office and the FBI began “an inquiry into reports of potential issues with a small number of mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections,” Freed said in a statement. If there are reports of issues with ballots, the Justice Department should naturally investigate. But the way this information was dribbled out seemed designed to bolster President Trump’s baseless claims that mail voting is deeply flawed — when Freed’s actual findings have so far revealed no such thing.

The first public indications that something was up came when Trump himself told a Fox host in a radio interview that “Trump ballots” in “a trash can” were found in “a certain state,” and when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany mentioned at a press briefing that “ballots for the president were found in Pennsylvania.” Then Freed released his first statement on the matter. The brief, vague statement said he could confirm that “a small number of military ballots” — nine — were “discarded.” It didn’t explain how or why, or whether there was intentional malfeasance. But the statement made sure to point out that “all nine ballots were cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump.” (This statement turned out to be wrong. Freed corrected it to say that seven of the nine were cast for Trump, the other two were resealed and their candidate preference is unknown.)

The past 48 hours of Justice Department political shenanigans, explained - Vox

Bill Barr is at it again:

• Releasing select info about the Steele dossier and the Michael Flynn case while it's custom not to do that right before an election.
  
• Indeed, lest we forget, Comey violated that custom by re-opening Hillary's email case, but went out of his way not to tell the public about the Trump-Russia investigation.
  
• Worse, what seem like a routine error (7 dumped ballots by a novice employee in Pensylvania) has been blown-up by Barr as "evidence' of mail-in voter fraud (and stressing the ballots were for Trump) before even an investigation has been concluded.
  
• Further disturbing details in the linked article.