Wednesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

By Christopher Denise

I’m still struggling to recover from the shock of the election results. At first I kept paying close attention to the news, but now I find that I just want to avoid the horror of current events. I wish there was some way I could regress to childhood and be blissfully free of the pain and anxiety that comes with greater knowledge of the outside world. Right now, I’m really having a great deal of resistance to reading the news, and watching it on TV is out of the question.

I forced myself to check current events today so I could write this post. Here are some stories that caught my attention. Trump is talking to foreign leaders on insecure phones. He is still naming stunningly inappropriate people to important government posts. He’s threatening neighboring countries with ridiculous tariffs. He’s threatening to end civil service protection for government employees. He has given Elon Musk free rein to create chaos. And he appears to have gotten away with all the crimes he was indicted for. Is it any wonder that I want to go back in time and escape real life?

Today’s reads:

Michael Collins at USA Today: ‘Dangerous territory’: Trump’s unsecured calls with world leaders concern foreign policy experts.

Donald Trump had been the president-elect for just two days when he reportedly spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov. 7.

On the call, Trump advised the Russian president not to escalate the war with Ukraine and reminded him of the U.S.’s military presence in Europe, according to an account first published by The Washington Post, which cited multiple sources familiar with the conversation.

The Kremlin, however, denied that meeting had ever taken place. “Pure fiction,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov insisted.

Normally, the U.S. would be able to document that the call had happened. But not this time.

That’s because the State Department, which traditionally helps coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and world leaders, has been shut out of Trump’s calls with foreign dignitaries.

That means the conversations were not held over secure phone lines, no State Department staff were available to offer guidance on the nuances on foreign policy and no official interpreters were on hand to overcome language barriers that can sometimes lead to confusion or misunderstandings about exactly what was said.

For U.S. foreign policy analysts, Trump’s calls with Putin and other world leaders after his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election are cause for alarm.

“We’re entering a dangerous territory of telephone games, where Trump is going to have private chats with foreign leaders, and they’re going to tell their teams one thing, and Trump is going to tell our national security team another,” said Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who worked in the White House under President Barack Obama

Different interpretations of private conversations stemming from translation difficulties or misunderstandings could not only sow confusion, Bruen said, but also could trigger an international crisis.

Trump’s transition team did not respond to questions about why he has not involved the State Department in his calls with foreign leaders….

Historically, the State Department has helped coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and foreign leaders because it’s important to ensure during the transition that the government is always speaking with one voice, particularly on matters of national security and foreign policy, according to the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.

But since his first term as president, Trump has openly expressed suspicion and resentment of what he derisively calls “the Deep State,” the government bureaucrats who he argues worked secretly behind the scenes to sabotage his agenda.

By Kajsa Hallström

Read more details at the USA Today link. Trump is behaving like an enemy of the U.S., so why does he have the right to be president? This is so fucked up.

Trump has now partially agreed to some of the transition rules. The Washington Post: Trump signs transition agreement with Biden, but it lacks key guardrails.

The Trump transition team said Tuesday it had reached an agreement with the Biden White House to start coordinating the handoff of federal agencies to the new administration.

But the Trump team is still refusing to accept several typical trappings of the presidential transition process,including federal funding, equipment and office space — as well as official government background and security checks for his transition staff. The agreement does not include an ethics pledge for the president-elect, required by the Presidential Transition Act, stating that Trump will avoid conflicts of interest while in office.

An ethics plan covering the transition staff was signed by the Trump team and posted on the website of the General Services Administration, which coordinates the handover of hundreds of agencies.

The agreement clears the way for Trump-appointed “landing teams” to start entering government offices to receive briefings from career staff about the operations of hundreds of federal agencies, a ritual of presidential transitions. By turning down about $7 million in federal funding for the transition, Trump will be able to raise unlimited privatedonations for his transition.

The long delay in signing the transition deal — which was signed by Vice President Kamala Harris before the election in September — does not mean that Trump’s transition will now conform to those of his predecessors. The president-elect refused to abide by key requirements aimed at transparency and security.

The limited agreement also reflects a deep distrust the president-elect holds toward the federal governmentfor stymieing his first-term agenda or in some cases bolstering legal cases against him. Trump and his political alliespledged during the campaign to radically downsize and restructure the federal workforce of 2.2 million.

Trump’s transition team has not signed a memorandum of understanding with the Justice Department, for instance, that would allow the agency to conduct background checks and intensive reviews for the security clearances that many of Trump’s landing teams need for the Biden administration to legally share classified intelligence and national defense briefings. The briefings will only be given to Trump transition officials who have a proper security clearance and have signed a nondisclosure agreement, according to the White House.

Some ethics guardrails were put in place with the White House. Transition officials are prohibited, for instance, from using information they learn in their new roles for their personal benefit.

But the plan does not include language about the president-elect’s own ethical conduct during the transition, a new provision of the Presidential Transition Act added by Congress after ethical issues dogged the first Trump administration.

Again, why was this evil man even allowed to run for office? Read more excuses at the WaPo link.

The New York Times: Trump Picks Stanford Doctor Who Opposed Lockdowns to Head N.I.H.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday evening that he had selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist whose authorship of an anti-lockdown treatise during the coronavirus pandemic made him a central figure in a bitter public health debate, to be the director of the National Institutes of Health.

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the N.I.H.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Bhattacharya would lead the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, each with its own research agenda, focusing on different diseases like cancer and diabetes. Dr. Bhattacharya, who is not a practicing physician, has called for overhauling the N.I.H. and limiting the power of civil servants who, he believes, played too prominent a role in shaping federal policy during the pandemic.

He is the latest in a series of Trump health picks who came to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and who hold views on medicine and public health that are at times outside the mainstream. The president-elect’s health choices, experts agree, suggest a shake-up is coming to the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment.

Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto issued in 2020 that contended that the virus should be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were “at minimal risk of death” and could thus develop natural immunity, while prevention efforts were targeted to older people and the vulnerable.

Through a connection with a Stanford colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, who was advising Mr. Trump during his first term, Dr. Bhattacharya presented his views to Alex M. Azar II, Mr. Trump’s health secretary. The condemnation from the public health establishment was swift. Dr. Bhattacharya and his fellow authors were promptly dismissed as cranks whose “fringe” policy prescriptions would lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.

Read more about this awful person at the NYT link.

By Christopher “Denise

Politico: Trump taps financier and donor Phelan to be Navy secretary.

President-elect Donald Trump has selected businessman John Phelan as his nominee to lead the Navy, according to a statement released on Tuesday night.

“It is my great honor to announce John Phelan as our next United States Secretary of the Navy! John will be a tremendous force for our Naval Servicemembers, and a steadfast leader in advancing my America First vision,” Trump wrote. “He will put the business of the U.S. Navy above all else.”

Trump’s pick of Phelan, after choosing Army National Guard Veteran and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Defense Department, is a sign that the incoming administration could prioritize disruptors coming into the agency instead of long-tenured bureaucrats. Trump is also eyeing businessman Steve Feinberg and defense investor Trae Stephens as the Pentagon’s No. 2, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Phelan, who leads the private investment firm Rugger Management and once handled Michael Dell’s investments, was a major donor to the Trump campaign and reportedly hosted the president-elect at his Aspen, Colorado, home this summer where Trump went on a profanity-laced tirade about immigration and warned that the election could be the last the United States ever had if Vice President Kamala Harris had won.

And get this: Phelan has no military experience. Trump also consider Ronny Jackson for the job!

Politico: Kash Patel and Cliff Sims are jostling for the deputy director gig at the CIA.

Two Trump transition insiders, Cliff Sims and Kash Patel, are angling to be deputy director of the CIA — and angering others who feel they’re using their roles on the transition to undermine any would-be contenders, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The No. 2 position at the powerful spy agency is one of the most sought-after national security posts that remains unfilled. It does not require Senate confirmation — a concern for other roles, like FBI director, Patel is said to be interested in — but wields enormous influence inside the U.S. intelligence community.

The frustration toward Sims, the former White House and ODNI communications strategist, and Patel, the firebrand former House Intelligence Committee staffer and Pentagon official, stems from the fact that both are helping the transition interview candidates for the CIA role, said the three people, all of whom were granted anonymity to share details on the transition.

“The issue that a lot of us have is that these people are involved in staffing national security jobs, and at the same time they’re also promoting themselves for the same roles,” said one of the people.

There is also a concern that Patel in particular is fighting dirty. A second person said there was suspicion Patel was leaking damaging stories on Sims, citing a recent story on a blow-up Trump had after being reminded Sims wrote a tell-all memoir in 2019 after leaving the White House.

Trump has also put Elon Musk in a prominent position in his transition, and now we are hearing from Musk’s mother, who seems even stupider than her son. 

CNN: Elon Musk publicized the names of government employees he wants to cut. It’s terrifying federal workers.

When President-elect Donald Trump said Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would recommend major cuts to the federal government in his administration, many public employees knew that their jobs could be on the line.

Now they have a new fear: becoming the personal targets of the world’s richest man – and his legions of followers.

By Anna Matveeva

Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts.

Although the information he posted on those government positions is available through public online databases, these posts target otherwise unknown government employees in roles that do not deal directly with the public.

Several current federal employees told CNN they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed – including physically threatened – as Musk makes behind-the-scenes bureaucrats into personal targets. Others told CNN that the threat of being in Musk’s crosshairs might even drive them from their jobs entirely – achieving Musk’s smaller government goals without so much as a proper review.

“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”

This isn’t new behavior for Musk, who has often singled out individuals who he claims have made mistakes or stand in his way. One former federal employee, previously targeted by Musk, said she experienced something very similar.

“It’s his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next’,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who drew Musk’s ire because of her criticisms of Tesla when she was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Read the rest at the link.

The Independent: Elon Musk’s mom says it’s ‘degrading’ to call her son ‘wealthy’: He’s ‘the genius of the world.’

The mother of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, stopped by Fox Business on Monday to scold those who call her son “wealthy,” claiming it was “degrading” and that she would prefer he be referred to as the “genius of the world.”

With her son now president-elect Donald Trump’s “First Buddy” and in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Maye Musk sat down with Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney to gush over her 53-year-old child’s accomplishments.

Besides talking about the younger Musk’s companies SpaceX, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter), she also dished on how well her son and Trump get along, especially since the election.

“I’ve seen them together, but very shortly. I live in New York, and they’re in Mar-a-Lago or at a SpaceX launch, and they just seem to be having fun. A lot of fun,” she declared, adding: “And it’s nice for both of them to have fun, and [Elon] really respects him a lot and is really happy that there’s a future for America now.”

She also claimed that it would be “very easy” for her son and DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy to slash the federal workforce and cut spending, citing Elon Musk’s severe and immediate layoffs when he purchased Twitter in 2022.

Seemingly parroting her son’s talking points, she absolutely trashed the press. “What they call mainstream media, but I call them dishonest Democrat media, they will be trying to break up the relationship. They will be hating everything,” she said. “And I told that to Elon, he said he expects that because they were dishonest before the election.”

Whatever.

Artist unknown

There’s just a tiny bit of possible good news from former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade at MSNBC: How Jack Smith quietly ensured Trump’s Jan. 6 case isn’t actually going anywhere.

Special counsel Jack Smith filed a motion with the trial court in the District of Columbia to dismiss the Jan. 6 election interference case against President-elect Donald Trump on Monday, kicking up a flurry of questions — namely, why would the special counsel pull the plug? Smith later filed a motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the appeal of the government documents case against Trump. While Trump has vowed to fire Smith, why would the special counsel do something to make it easy for Trump, by dismissing the cases himself before Trump is sworn in to office in January? Is this simply an example of what historian Timothy Snyder calls “obeying” an authoritarian in advance?

Not at all. In fact, this move could be an effort to keep the cases alive in the long term. An interesting tell in each motion is Smith’s request to dismiss the cases “without prejudice.” That means that the cases can be filed again. By dismissing the cases now on his own terms, Smith blocks Trump’s attorney general from dismissing the cases for all time.

In addition, by filing his motions pre-emptively, Smith was able to explain his reasons for dismissing the case, rather than allowing Trump’s future AG to mischaracterize them. According to Smith, he was dismissing the case not because of the merits or strength of the cases, but because he had to. As Smith explains, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are “binding” on the special counsel, has concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or criminally prosecuted under the Constitution. OLC reasoned that criminal charges would make it impossible for a president to carry out his constitutional duties in light of the distraction of preparing a criminal defense, the public stigma that would hamper his leadership role and the obstacles prison would impose on his ability to perform his duties.

But Smith was careful to note that this relief from criminal prosecution is “temporary,” and ends when the president leaves office. Smith cites OLC as concluding that this form of immunity for a sitting president “would generally result in the delay, but not the forbearance, of any criminal trial” That is, Trump gets a reprieve, but only during his term in office.

Of course, as in most criminal cases, the statute of limitations here is five years from the date of the last act alleged in the indictments. In the Jan. 6 case, the last alleged conduct occurred in January 2021, so the deadline for filing new charges would typically be January 2026. In the documents case, in which the last act occurred in August 2022, the statute will expire in August 2027. Both dates will arrive well before Trump’s term ends. But Smith’s brief contains another tell when he writes that OLC has “noted the possibility that a court might equitably toll the statute of limitations to permit proceeding against the President once out of office.” That is, a court could call a timeout, pausing it on Trump’s inauguration day on Jan. 21, 2025, and then restarting the clock when Trump leaves office in 2029. That would give prosecutors plenty of time to refile charges. Certainly, the tolling issue would be litigated, but by dismissing the case now, Smith preserves this issue for future prosecutors to argue.

Read the rest at MSNBC.

That’s it for me today. I don’t know how I even got through those articles. I’m going back into hibernation now.