Devin Nunes's Laughable Spin to Protect Trump Crashes and Burns

By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post

09 February 18

THE MORNING PLUM:

ne of the most comical — or perhaps deeply troubling — aspects of the massive effort by President Trump and his allies to create an alternate narrative to the Russia probe is that it continues unabated, even as the numerous conspiracy theories created to bolster it have, one after another, fallen like dominoes.

This morning, Post fact checker Glenn Kessler offers a comprehensive look at various threads of this alt-narrative that helps illustrate just how buffoonish this whole effort has become. Kessler takes as his starting point a remarkable statement from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who is perhaps Trump’s staunchest bodyguard against accountability on Capitol Hill. Nunes said this in a radio interview:

“The truth is that they [Democrats] are covering up that Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to get dirt on Trump to feed it to the FBI to open up an investigation into the other campaign.”

In a sense, this is a perfect one-sentence distillation of the whole alt-narrative, because it turns the facts entirely upside down: The story isn’t that the Trump campaign may have conspired with a concerted Russian effort to sabotage our democracy that has been documented by U.S. intelligence services. It’s that Clinton actually colluded with Russia to undermine the Trump candidacy — this is the real sense in which Russia sabotaged our democracy — and that the real role of the Deep State was to assist in that effort to swing the election, which, of course, continues today with the Deep State Plot to Remove Trump.

As Kessler shows, everything about this Nunes statement is a lie. The much-ballyhooed Nunes memo was supposed to illustrate that statement, by showing that Deep State operatives improperly obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on the basis of information in the Democratic-funded “Steele dossier,” which was based on former British spy Christopher Steele’s Russian sources and is supposed to show the whole probe was tainted. In fact, the Nunes memo actually revealed that the genesis of the probe was information gathered earlier by the FBI about former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, which completely gives the lie to Nunes’s claim that dirt on Trump from Clinton is what got the FBI to “open up an investigation.”

What’s more, the Nunes memo also stated that the warrant for surveillance had repeatedly been renewed, which accidentally demonstrates that judges repeatedly saw new evidence that justified continuing that surveillance. As Paul Rosenzweig puts it, this actually “validated the FBI’s investigation,” which further demolishes the Nunes narrative. Meanwhile, as Kessler demonstrates, it’s a huge stretch to claim the Steele dossier represented Clinton-Russia collusion to begin with, since Clinton was far removed from Steele’s reliance on Russian sources.

An ugly pattern

This is part of a pattern, in which one absurd conspiracy theory after another has crashed and burned. Let’s review:

• The Nunes memo actually revealed that the genesis of the FBI probe of Trump-Russia collusion was the activity of a Trump adviser (Papadopoulos) who had been apprised of dirt gathered by Russia on Clinton. It predated the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier, which is at the center of the grand alt-narrative, and showed that the FBI probe had been repeatedly validated by judges.


• Republicans release a September 2016 text between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which said Barack Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.” This is supposed to demonstrate Obama interference in the FBI probe of Clinton. But there was no Clinton probe at the time — it had been resolved in July (and was only reopened in late October). What’s more, associates of Strzok and Page say Obama actually wanted information on Russian meddling. This makes much more sense — and, if true, it shows that this “scandal” is that Obama wanted information on Russian sabotage of our democracy, which Trump still often maintains never happened.


• Republicans darkly said another Strzok-Page text containing the words “secret society” signaled deep FBI corruption. Then the full text was released, and it turned out to be about calendars and appeared to be a joke.


• Congressional GOP investigators are preparing to interview an informant who supposedly has the goods on the Uranium One “scandal,” in which Clinton supposedly authorized a deal in which Russia obtained uranium extraction rights in the United States, in exchange for kickbacks to the Clinton Foundation. But top Oversight and Intelligence committee Democrats just released a letter claiming that the Justice Department privately briefed committee staffers and told them that the Justice Department had actually dismissed the reliability of this informant in a separate investigation. To be fair, this has not been confirmed. But as it is, the idea that the Uranium One deal is a scandal has already been thoroughly debunked. And independent reporting is likely to confirm that account soon enough.

This is just a partial list. To be clear, serious congressional oversight with regard to the intelligence services’ use of surveillance is absolutely appropriate and desirable. But if anything, that only confirms just what a massive abdication we’re seeing here: In GOP hands, this oversight activity is being perverted into a kind of weaponized obfuscation and misdirection campaign designed to guard Trump and his associates from accountability, which is a serious abuse of power and the public trust in its own right. This keeps getting demonstrated again, and again, and again. Yet it continues, unabated and undaunted.

Amazon's Health Care Experiment Shows Exactly Why We Need Medicare for All

By Richard Master, USA TODAY

09 February 18

We have to remove profit from the health care equation, just like Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase intend to do.

mazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced last week that they would be forming a new company aimed at reducing employee health care costs. This decision was a response to what small, mid-sized and large business owners and CEOs have known for a long time: The private insurance system is strangling the U.S. economy.

As the founder and CEO of a mid-sized company that employs 180 people in the United States, I know this well. In 2018, we will pay $2.8 million to insure our workers and their families. Year after year, we have wrestled with the costs of our health care plans. And despite trying every trick in the book, our per-employee costs have tripled over the past 14 years.

A family plan in 2018 will cost us $27,000, which is higher than the annual salary of one-third of all working Americans. To put it another way, we are paying $13.50 per hour per employee just to cover the health care benefit. It’s a model that’s completely unsustainable, and needs to change.

According to their statement, this new health care company will pursue technology solutions to provide health care and lower costs. The real game-changer is that the company will be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.”

They’re inches away from a major revelation: The way to fix health care for all people — not just those who are employed by monolithic corporations — is to de-commercialize the health insurance system. 

In announcing the new partnership, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett called the costs of healthcare “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” He’s right. But, combined, these three companies employ about 1.1 million people. Even accounting for dependents, this new company will, at best, serve 1% of the population. I’m looking for a solution that would help the other 99%: Medicare for All.

In the United States, we rely on private, for-profit insurance companies to finance our health care system. Over 157 million Americans are getting their coverage from employer based plans. Another 21.9 million have purchased insurance individually. 

In theory, an insurance company exists to help negotiate with providers, and minimize the amount that patients and families are paying for healthcare. However, health insurance executives have the same motivation as the leader of any other company: profit.

That motivation is holding patients, workers and every other sector of our economy hostage to high premiums, and large out of pocket expenses. It is no coincidence that while health insurance companies are using hundreds of billions annually for their own sales and marketing, administrative overhead and profits, we are suffering under the most complex and expensive system in the world. 

This is an existential threat to our businesses and our economy.

The high costs of health care, fueled by the profit motivation in the private insurance system, can be directly linked to the decreased take-home pay for workers; businesses not having capital to expand to new markets, create new jobs, or invest in new technologies; and medical bills as the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

While some companies have the resources to do what Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon and JPMorgan Chase are doing, most don’t.

I certainly couldn’t do it for my employees, even though I wish I could. That’s why, if we are going to achieve an improved system for all of our citizens, what we really need is Medicare for all. Whether they know it or not, the leadership of these three companies made a strong case for removing profit from our health care system, and I hope our politicians are listening.