Sunday School 8/23/20

I'm only visiting two classrooms today -- Jake Tapper's CNN State of the Union, and Margaret Brennan's Face the Nation on CBS.

I'm trying to save some appetite for the Biden/Harris interview later tonight on ABC, which will be the subject of your Extra Credit this week.

Let's get started with Tapper and Chad Wolf, the perhaps not legally acting head of the Department of Homeland Security. Here are the highlights:

The president "absolutely has not" discussed deploying any DHS folks as part of the team of law enforcement officers he threatened to send to be poll watchers.

We have law enforcement authorities and law enforcement officers at the department. We have express authorities given to us by Congress. And this is not one of them.

Wolf has no intelligence that supports the presidents claim that other countries - Russia, China, Iran, North Korea among them - might forge ballots and send them in, or that they are "attacking election infrastructure."

And we want to make sure, at the end of the day, that voters, American voters, are deciding American elections. And we will continue to do that to make sure, again, that secretaries of state -- again, states run elections -- that they have all the information, that they have the intelligence, and they have a number of no-cost services that the department provides to them to make sure that their election systems are safe and secure.

On comments from Miles Taylor, former DHS Chief of Staff, Wolf said

...while Mr. Taylor was at the department, he was a fierce advocate for the policies that we pursued at DHS every day, left there 14 months ago, and decided 75, 80 days before an election to start speaking out. So, I think most reasonable Americans understand what that is. It's politics, and nothing more.

They batted around some of Taylor's comments, including that Trump told top DHS officials to "listen to Lou Dobbs" and "what Lou says is what I want to do."

... no, I have never been told to watch Lou Dobbs or any other news show, even yours, to get what we want to do at the Department of Homeland Security. 

And on Tapper's noting that Taylor is not the first former DHS person to question Trump's judgment and ability to lead the country? 

...All of the individuals that you just discussed were strong proponents of what the department's doing, and the president, while in office. A number of them have left, some on their own, some not on their own... So, again, I think people understand what this is about. This is about politics, first and foremost. And it's unfortunate.

Speed round stuff: 

• He believes the GAO used the wrong policy to come up with its assertion that he's not legally qualified to hold his position, and that DHS "vehemently disagree" with the finding.
• Yes, he did visit the part of the border wall built by the charity at the heart of the Bannon arrest;  he said then, and still, that "he welcomes all that want to be part of the solution," but was not an endorsement of 'We Build the Wall'  and statements to the contrary are false.
• He doesn't have "any reason to believe anything different from the FBI" on QAnon being a domestic terror threat - but it's not a significant threat. And, he absolutely condemns any illegal activity associated with the group.
• He believes that some local officials, a governor, and others are "fostering an environment in Portland, 90 days straight of violent clashes with law enforcement, assaults, arrests, and injuries. And it's got to stop."

Brennan had former FBI Director James Comey in her classroom, noting that he was a long-time Republican, but will speak at the Convention on Founding Principles (as will Christine Todd Whitman, I discovered, who spoke at the #DemConvention last week.)  

Brennan started with the arrest of Steve Bannon, wondering what Comey thought about it, and he didn't mince words.

Well, it's another reminder of the kind of people this president surrounds himself with. At this point, they could almost start their own crime family. 

He explained it's a "very serious fraud case" and the indictment is very detailed, and that if he were Bannon, he'd be thinking "I'm going down, here." He said he's not aware of that else the Southern District of NY might be working on related to the president's former Chief Strategist, including allegations of lying to Congress.

She asked him what he sees "as the biggest threat to the rule of law right now;" he said

That even-handed law enforcement has disappeared from the Justice Department under Bill Barr and Donald Trump. It shouldn't matter whether Trump likes you or not. Everybody should get a fair shake. And that the truth is under attack-- both by the attorney general and the president. Those things matter. That's why I'm speaking for the first time ever at a political event this week.

Regarding the Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusion that Paul Manafort represented a "grave counterintelligence threat" to the US, a stronger conclusion than the Mueller report, she wondered why this was all just coming out now. Comey said Mueller approached it as a prosecutor, while the Committee was "looking at all information they could gather." And, he added,

Let that sink in and then ask yourself, so there was nothing to investigate here, as Bill Barr says, it was a hoax? The Republicans have exploded that nonsense.

Pointing to criticism of the FBI, she wondered why he didn't do more "to alert DNC officials that Russian hackers had accessed their servers." Comey said the criticism was fair, but added

...part of what may have led to a lack of urgency at the DNC and at the FBI is that nobody anticipated this wasn't normal intelligence gathering by the Russians, this was an effort to weaponize. And if anybody had seen that, I think they would have yelled a little bit more loudly.

Brennan asked if he thought it was a mistake on his part that he "never imagined this scenario" when he was the Director. He said "I sure think it was a miss- a mistake, I'm not going to quibble on words. Yeah, it was a miss" and that

look, looking back in hindsight, it seems obvious. I don't know the answer as to why nobody in the intelligence community, none of the analysts, saw this coming. And it ought to be something that we're asking ourselves.

He said we're still vulnerable, but in a different way, noting the Russians will probably use different tactics this time, because

They achieved their objectives in the last election. They've done incredibly well under President Trump. They want him to stay in office. They'll be coming again. And the problem for us as Americans is you can't effectively stop a threat that the president won't even acknowledge exists. And so, sure, they're going to be in our house again, messing with us. The only way we're going to kick Putin out of our elections is to elect Joe Biden president so someone finally puts real pain on the Russians.

Speed round stuff:

• He trusts "state, local and federal law enforcement to honor their oath to the rule of law and to not be part of suppressing votes." so thinks LEOS and US attorneys and the like will not be present suppressing votes in November.
• He "can't imagine" that he's a target of US Attorney John Durham's investigation and he's "not worried at all about that investigation of the investigation. Next, I'm sure will be an investigation of the investigation of the investigation..."
• On his 'more women should be elected' t-shirt, and any regrets about 2016, he only regrets "being involved in the 2016 election. We were stuck, and I think we made the right decisions choosing between terrible options...I wasn't trying, nor was anybody else in the FBI trying to elect or not elect anyone." He's proud of the shirt, a gift from his wife and daughters, and stands by it, saying "we'll all be better off" if it came true.

Back to Tapper, and his conversation with former White House Comms Director Anthony Scaramucci - why he was on, I'm not sure but he was. Tapper opened with a quote from Trump's sister Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, and wondered what Mooch thought.

This goddamn tweet and the lying, oh, my God. I'm talking too freely, but you know. It is the change of stories, the lack of preparation, the lying, the - holy (EXPLETIVE DELETED).

He said he thinks there's "anxiety in that family" related to what Trump is doing, and "what he's perpetrating on the nation and the world."

And so they're expressing that anxiety. And Mary has done a service to the electorate by at least explaining in a clinical way the manifestation of the president's personality and why we're in such a bad state. He can't manage things. He only cares about himself. He will be on stage for four days in the upcoming convention. It's a one-man Broadway show running the presidency.

Tapper mentioned reporting from the NY Times that Trump plans to "speak all four nights of the...convention, during the 10 PM hour..." and wondered if that was smart, if that was the right way for him to do things. That's a no.

He thinks it's all about him, him all the time. The classic narcissism is to annihilate everybody around you and then show everybody that you can do it all alone, you can do it by yourself. That's why his campaign is having a hard time with him. That's why the executive branch is having a hard time with him. That's a classic move. It's all about me and watch me. I'm going to win this without your help. I'm sure he was advised by some smart, somewhat courageous people inside the campaign not to do that. That level of saturation is beyond ridiculous.

Traditional Republicans, the "luminaries" in the part won't be participating, although pretty much every Trump family member absent his sister, his niece Mary, and Barron will be participating.

Speed round stuff:

• Scaramucci said 3-5% of Rs will either not vote at all or vote for Biden, which hopefully will "put the nail in the coffin of Trumpism" for good. He's a Biden voter, it seems.
• Trump's strategy to make Biden seem more progressive, to radicalize Biden may hurt but "we have to make sure that the vice president tacks to his center. I understand what the president is going to do, because we are in a great culture war. But you got to think about what the president does to people. He wants to divide people, cares less about the unity of the country, and more about his political survival."
• He was surprised by Bannon's arrest, and considers him innocent until proven guilty, but then, he was "not surprised by this. I thought Steve Bannon was a bad guy. I have said it publicly. And I think there will be more ruing for Steve Bannon over the several years."
• The "great irony, the president tweets out law and order, but he's probably the least lawless person ever to hold that office." And, he also said part of the post-Trump world is about restoring confidence in our societal norms.

I'm sure he's just the guy to do it... 

That's your Sunday School for today; remember, your Extra Credit tomorrow is the Papa Joe/Kamala interview on ABC.  

Be safe - wear your mask - social distance - and whatever you do, don't let me see you getting suspended! 

See you around the virtual campus.