Democrats Please Don't Mess This Up

By Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept

27 September 19

re Democrats preparing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement on Tuesday that the House of Representatives would hold an “official impeachment inquiry” over Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine, and his request for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, was a welcome one. But on Wednesday, according to several reports, “Pelosi and senior House Democrats agreed in a private meeting … that they should narrow their impeachment investigation of President Trump to his dealings with the president of Ukraine.”

To be clear: There is now a majority in the House for impeachment, especially with the publication of the whistleblower complaint on Thursday, which reveals how “the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” House Democrats — even in swing seats — have united on this issue and see Trump as a clear threat to national security. It looks like a slam dunk.

So how then might this end up as a defeat, and not a victory? Think about it. For House Democrats to wait this long and then impeach a reckless, lawless, racist, tax-dodging president only over his interactions with the president of Ukraine would be to effectively give Trump a clean bill of health on everything else. Going into an election year, Democrats would be unilaterally disarming — unable to offer further substantive criticisms of Trump’s crimes and abuses of power across the board. “Why didn’t you impeach him for it?” Republicans will ask.

Forgive me if I have no faith in the House Democratic leadership, which has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The same political geniuses who dragged their feet on impeachment until 48 hours ago, after ridiculously having suggested the president was “goading” his opponents into impeaching him, are now telling us to trust them, that they know best, that Ukraine is the be-all and end-all of this impeachment inquiry.

Thankfully, not all Democrats agree. On Deconstructed this week, Julián Castro — who in April became the first Democratic presidential candidate to call for Trump’s impeachment — told me he wants to see congressional Democrats go for a broad impeachment inquiry because of “clear evidence that there may be other violations of the law.” As Castro explains, the ultimate goal of impeachment is not to score a political or partisan point but to “show the American people that nobody is above the law.”

So what’s the reason to narrow the scope of what should be a historic inquiry? “I think we need to focus on what this very clear threat to national security and to our Constitution is,” Rep. Debbie Dingell, a close ally of Pelosi, told the Washington Post, referring to the Ukraine angle. “I think we need to focus on something that everybody understands.”

“We are going to focus on this particular matter,” announced House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, adding that it’s “not hard to understand.”

Do these Democrats take the public for fools? Few would dispute the uniqueness or seriousness of these Ukraine revelations. But are they really saying “everybody understands” Trump’s quid pro quo with the president of a foreign country, and the details of the specific case involving Hunter Biden, but not the illegal payment of hush money to a porn star? Or all of the corrupt behavior on display in front of their eyes? The brazen self-dealing? The daily violation of the emoluments clause?

Read a poll. A majority of Americans happen to agree with (literally) 1,000 former federal prosecutors that the president obstructed justice and don’t believe the Mueller report exonerated Trump. A majority also agree that Trump is a racist and a liar, and that corruption has increased on his watch. Trump is a historically unpopular and disliked president — and for a variety of reasons.

Read a history book. In 1868, Andrew Johnson became the first president to be impeached and, in his case, the House of Representatives adopted 11 articles of impeachment, ranging from his violation of the Tenure of Office Act to his attempt to “disgrace” Congress. A little over a century later, in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee passed three lengthy and detailed articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, covering obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. The first of those articles even cited Nixon’s “false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States” and his efforts “to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favored treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.” (Sound familiar?)

Read Trump’s tweets. Since Tuesday afternoon, the president who was supposedly going to “self-impeach” has been ranting and raving online, calling Pelosi’s announcement a “total witch hunt,” “scam,” “garbage,” and “presidential harassment.” Trump, who was 17 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, even claimed, “There has been no President in the history of our Country who has been treated so badly as I have.”

Does this sound like a president who wants to be impeached? Or, rather, a president who is (rightly) concerned that a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry could uncover a wide range of new scandals and crimes?

“He looks hunted,” wrote MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. So why hold back now? Why put all the impeachment eggs in the Ukraine basket? Why not make the strongest case possible and dig deep into Trump’s record over the past 2 1/2 years as a whole? Did Democrats learn no lessons from the Russia investigation? “We’re here in the first place because the exclusive approach failed with Mueller,” tweeted the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu.

And what’s with the rush to get this done “by the end of the year or even sooner,” as Politico reports? Is there somewhere else that House Democrats need to be? Are they in a hurry to get back to passing bills that then get blocked by the same Republican-controlled Senate that will be voting down their articles of impeachment? Why not take a lesson from the GOP playbook? During the Obama presidency, the Republican-led Benghazi Select Committee held “33 hearings over more than two years into a topic that had already been investigated by seven other Congressional committees.”

The point of impeachment, remember, is for the House of Representatives to loudly and publicly indict Trump for his agglomeration of high crimes and misdemeanors. Whether or not he is removed from office is beside the point; the point is for Congress to hold the president to account by demanding documents and scheduling televised hearings on a range of potentially impeachable offenses — and winning over public opinion in the process.

For House Democrats to try and hive off Trump’s corrupt, lawless, and authoritarian behavior over Ukraine and Biden from his corrupt, lawless, and authoritarian behavior over his taxes, or Mueller, or Stormy Daniels, or Puerto Rico, or the Squad, or Amazon — I could go on and on — is madness. To quote Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler: “IT’S ALL ONE FUCKING STORY!”

The Democrats only get one chance at impeachment. One chance to remind the public there is a criminal sitting in the Oval Office. They can’t afford to rush it — or blow it.

No, James Murdoch Doesn't Watch "Succession"

By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

27 September 19

After leaving the family empire, Rupert Murdoch’s son is investing in comics, championing Pete Buttigieg, and fighting threats to democracy that sound an awful lot like Fox News.

f you’re wondering how “Succession,” the HBO series about siblings fighting for control of a family empire—thought to be inspired by Rupert Murdoch’s family—ends, James Murdoch can tell you, despite never having watched the show. James, Rupert’s younger son, often referred to as “the smart one” in the clan, walked away last March with some two billion dollars—but no job—after his father merged most of the Murdochs’ Twenty-first Century Fox media empire with Disney. James’s brother, Lachlan, was chosen by their father to run the corporate bits that remained after the merger (chiefly, Fox News and Fox Sports). But no role had been carved out for James, who for years was the C.E.O. of Twenty-first Century Fox and Sky, P.L.C., and the deputy C.O.O. of News Corp, the publisher of papers such as the Post.

“It’s all good,” James, who is forty-six, said. “I just feel very lucky to have the opportunity at this point to make a clean break, and literally have an empty slate.” He was sitting in an upper floor of a modern office building in the West Village, the new headquarters of his private-investment company, Lupa Systems. (It is named for the mythical wolf who suckled the founders of Rome, one of James’s favorite cities, where he worked as an archeologist’s assistant before attending Harvard.) The only newsprint publication on display was a copy of The New York Review of Books.

In May, James delivered a commencement address at the American University of Rome, and his remarks seemed as fitted to his own new life as to those of the graduates. “The outcomes in our lives are never predestined,” he said. He urged the students not to “let others define what your success will be,” and to “fly your freak flag high.”

So far, for James, this has meant investing in a smattering of tech and media enterprises and defying his family’s conservative politics. The challenge of waking up two billion dollars richer, as he described it, is figuring out “How can you spend your time and your resources trying to be useful?” He has bought a controlling stake in the Tribeca Film Festival; invested in Artists, Writers & Artisans, a company that produces comics and graphic novels; and put twenty million dollars into the Void, a virtual-reality-entertainment company, among other ventures.

He has also donated to the Democratic Presidential candidates John Hickenlooper and Pete Buttigieg. Of the latter, he said, “It’s clear to anyone who hears him speak that he has an extraordinary mind.” The 2020 election, he said, is “a really crucial moment” for liberal democratic values.

Having spent years working for his family’s company in the Far East and Europe, James said that he has grown worried about rising threats to democratic societies around the world. “There’d been a bet for a long time that economic liberalization would inevitably lead to political liberalization,” he said, “but it didn’t work out that way.” Instead, he said, authoritarian regimes are using digital disinformation tactics and other high-tech weapons to undermine democracies. “The connective tissue of our society is being manipulated to make us fight with each other, making us the worst versions of ourselves,” he said, sounding an awful lot like a person describing Fox News.

Is James taking aim at his father? “There are views I really disagree with on Fox,” he said. “But I wouldn’t cast it as some reaction to that.” He is also backing a program at the Center for New American Security, a bipartisan think tank. The aim of the program, called Countering High-Tech Illiberalism, as it’s described on the Web site for the Quadrivium foundation, founded by James and his wife, Kathryn, is “to craft effective, practical, actionable, and ambitious policies domestically and abroad” that impair illiberal populism, such as fighting disinformation and electoral interference. (Fox News hosts have downplayed Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.)

Quadrivium also supports nonprofit groups seeking to increase American voter turnout by making it easier to register to vote and safeguarding voting rights—steps that could help defeat Trump. “But this is not just a Trumpian problem,” James said. “Generally, Western liberalism is up against an enormous amount of opposition everywhere.”

James did not want to comment on his relationship with his father, but said that they’d seen each other recently at a corporate board meeting. Asked whether the two talk, he said, “There are periods of time when we do not.”

Like his five siblings, James is the beneficiary of a family trust that holds the remaining News Corp and Fox stock, but it is unclear whether he will ever exercise any control over the companies. “Succession” offers no clues. “I don’t watch ‘Succession,’ ” he said. “Not even a peek. Why would I?”

He also hasn’t seen “Ink,” the Broadway play about his father’s London tabloid, the Sun, or “The Loudest Voice,” the Showtime series based on Gabriel Sherman’s book about Roger Ailes, the disgraced former head of Fox News. “There are only so many things you can watch,” he said, shrugging.