“I think the president can’t single-handedly remember everything, I’m sure, that he’s briefed on” —US Senator John Cornyn, on the news that Russia is paying a bounty on the lives of US soldiers
According to reporting from multiple sources, Russian intelligence units put a bounty on the lives of US soldiers in Afghanistan, paying them to hunt and kill Americans. US intelligence assessments have determined that this bounty scheme did play a role in the deaths of several of our soldiers.
The real outrage is that Trump was personally briefed about this in February. Since then the only significant measure he has taken with regards to Russia, was to attempt to bring them back into the G8, a major boon to Putin.
Adding to that outrage, Senator Cornyn, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has downplayed the seriousness of the situation and provided dishonest cover for the President, rather than holding the President to account or taking action to protect our troops.
Video and Slides from our Live Readings of the Mueller Report at North Door Austin
Over the course of six nights at The North Door in Austin, TX, we read all 448-pages of the Mueller Report, complete with interactive slides (scroll down to download) and celebrity guests.
One outcome of this project is that the organizers who participated are very familiar with the contents of the report. Here is what they had to say:
“Mostly I learned that everyone connected to the trump campaign and admin only cares about how their position can help themselves. Not a one cares about democracy, the constitution, or the situation of US citizens.”
“Mueller laid a road map for congress to impeach.”
“Easier to read and understand than I thought it would be”
Starting later this month, we’re hosting six nights of live readings of the Mueller Report. Most Americans haven’t read the 448-page saga about Russia’s attack on our Democracy and Trump’s fealty to the attackers. Like Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the Mueller Report is better on stage than on paper. So we’re bringing it to the public, in a fun, live-action setting.
Tell your reps that Trump must be rebuked for his comments in Helsinki
But first, here’s Lyin’ Cornyn:
“Nobody disputes the fact that they were unsuccessful in changing a single vote or affecting the outcome.” —Sen. John Cornyn, speaking on the Senate floor after Trump’s abysmal, traitorous performance in Helsinki.
It’s a lie. And a common lie among Republicans unwilling to accept an uncomfortable truth: that Russian information warfare might very well have swung the election to Trump.
Because it seems like a year ago, read the Washington Post’s chronology of the Helsinki debacle to refresh your memory. Then, call your reps!
“Given the additional indictments concerning attempts to hack into our election system, and with November midterms coming up, I would like to know how Secretary Pablos is protecting the integrity of elections in Texas.”
Tell John Cornyn and Ted Cruz that Brett Kavanaugh’s White House records must be released
During Elena Kagan’s nomination process, 11,000 of her emails and 160,000 documents from her tenure in the Clinton White House were released to the public. So why would Brett Kavanaugh—who served in the George W. Bush White House—be treated any differently? That is the question for Senators Cornyn and Cruz, both of whom serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Call and ask them. We have a right to know.
Ryan Bounds' racially-charged college writings convinced Republicans to oppose his nomination to the 9th Circuit. How can Republicans possibly argue that Brett Kavanaugh's records from the WHITE HOUSE aren't relevant to a Supreme Court nomination? #ReleaseTheRecords
— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) July 19, 2018
Our government continues to separate families at the border and putting toddlers on trial—demand a stop to it!
The Russia news overshadowed the ongoing border crisis last week. It’s important to remain focused on the cruelty that the Trump administration continues to inflict on blameless children and their frequently desperate parents. July 26th is the court-ordered deadline to reunite most families. The Texas Tribune has expanded its coverage at the border. Get caught up—and then call your reps.
“The Trump administration has summoned at least 70 infants to immigration court for their own deportation proceedings since Oct. 1, according to Justice Department data provided to Kaiser Health News.”
“On the brink of being released from detention and reunited with children separated from them sometimes months ago, migrant parents are held at a South Texas facility in a sort of limbo — not free to leave, but without access to phones or commissary accounts that regular detainees get.”
#BeATexasVoter Phone Bank with Indivisible founders and co-executive directors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin
Sunday, Jul. 29, 1-3 PM, Austin History Center Come join Indivisible Austin and our special guests, Indivisible founders and co-executive directors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, at our #BeATexasVoter kickoff phone bank! We’ll be just about 100 days out from the November midterms, and we’re celebrating by calling prospective voters to make sure they know why this election is so important, and to get them engaged NOW so they’re ready to go to the polls as soon as early voting starts. There will be snacks and swag for all phone bankers!
YOU WILL NEED TO BRING:
a laptop or tablet
your cellphone
earbuds
If you’ve never participated in a phone bank, it’s easy! We’ll teach you!
Without a doubt, and this is saying something, @JohnCornyn is the worst member of the U.S. Senate. Sniveling, cowardly and stupid as an addled coyote. https://t.co/F0QJWU65VA
It’s record-breakingly hot in Austin this week. Elsewhere, Buttercup the bulldog enjoyed a kiddie pool of ice:
Funding the Fight
You made it! You’re all the way at the bottom of the email, but if you look back at the top you’ll see something very important: Help Lead Indivisible Austin’s GOTV Work.
We have to knock on doors, call, text, mail, organize and build community throughout Central Texas to do our part to bring some accountability and decency to DC and to our own capitol here in Austin.
You know how important this is. Be a part of the solution by supporting our efforts NOW so we can bring change in November.
How Your Voices Are Making a Difference: Another One Bites the Dust
The Republican Governors Association cut all ties with former RNC chairman and accused harasser Steve Wynn and returned money he had donated to the organization, and the University of Iowa, which had named one of its institutes after him in exchange for his $25 million commitment to the school, is retracting the honor.
Donald’s release of cherry-picked facts from the memo House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes carefully and selectively edited regarding the Russian investigation and the FBI’s surveillance of people in the Trump campaign has resulted in a firestorm of controversy, but it’s not just the FBI and Democratic lawmakers speaking out against the irresponsible, propagandized, potentially national-security-threatening memo.
Republican John McCain says, “The American people deserve to know all the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the lens of politics and manufacturing political sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”
And former CIA head John Brennan (under both Bush and Obama) accused Nunes (who, let’s remember, tried to secretly share confidential House Intelligence Committee info with the White House last year before he even briefed his bipartisan committee colleagues) and the GOP of “reckless partisan behavior” pointedly adding that “Absence of moral and ethical leadership in [White House] is fueling this government crisis.”
And a former FBI special agent and counterterrorism investigator spoke out in a NYTimes op-ed about why he’s leaving the bureau in the interest of being free to protect it and our institutions, sharply calling out “political operatives” trying to shake the public’s trust in the FBI in order to undermine the findings of the Russia investigation—“operatives” he doesn’t call out by name, but by using direct quotes from Donald’s tweets, makes his subject entirely clear.
Lawyers for Donald’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s codefendant in Mueller’s fraud and money-laundering prosecution, Rick Gates, have asked the federal judge in the case to let them leave the case—the third shift in legal representation since Gates was indicted. The attorney’s declined to offer a reason, citing a gag order. Meanwhile, TIME magazine discovered that in 2013, Donald’s former campaign adviser Carter Page bragged of his Kremlin contacts in a letter to a publisher—not only adding fuel to Mueller’s investigation of him, but lending credence to the FBI’s decision to surveil him that Nunes’s memo glosses over as probable cause.
Another one bites the dust—Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight Committee (and he who relentlessly dragged out the Benghazi investigation, racking up millions of dollars in cost to taxpayers despite repeatedly finding no evidence of wrongdoing), has announced he won’t seek reelection, calling himself “a lousy politician” (we can’t help but agree). GOP lawmakers are being picked off like carnival ducks—do they know something we don’t know (like that a new conservative party is forming?) or are they simply leaving the field in disgrace?
The White House has withdrawn Kathleen Harnett White, Donald’s nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality, after loud public and congressional outcry against the climate-change denier—including a letter signed by more than 300 scientists across the country.
Need a palate cleanse for the week? Stream the inaugural episode of David Letterman’s new Netflix show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, featuring Barack Obama and John Lewis. Here’s a clip—but don’t miss the whole one-hour show. It will remind you why we’re fighting and how far we’ve come—and how hard those before us have fought, and how much there is to be gained.
How Your Voices Made a Difference: The Tide is Turning
The head of the parent company of Henry Holt—the publisher that recently released Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury with eyebrow-raisingly candid comments from White House intimates about Donald’s fitness (or lack thereof)—defended itself against Donald’s cease-and-desist lawsuit, citing it as a breach of the Constitution: “a clear effort by the President of the United States to intimidate a publisher into halting publication of an important book on the workings of the government… This is an underlying principle of our democracy. We cannot stand silent,” the CEO wrote in his memo. “We will not allow any president to achieve by intimidation what our Constitution precludes him or her from achieving in court. We need to respond strongly for Michael Wolff and his book, but also for all authors and all their books, now and in the future. And as citizens we must demand that President Trump understand and abide by the First Amendment of our Constitution.”
Dianne Feinstein, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, overruled Republican committee head Chuck Grassley’s efforts to suppress the testimony to the committee by the former British spy who helped assemble the infamous Trump dossier for Fusion DPS. On Tuesday she released transcripts of all ten hours of testimony by Christopher Steele, which indicates the FBI believed the information Steele had given them, and that the bureau had had an informant from within the Trump camp.
Donald’s announcement that oil drilling would be allowed in all U.S. waters immediately met with opposition from Florida’s Republican governor, and the White House quickly excluded the state’s waters from the order. It’s likely a move to appease voters in his key state in advance of the 2018 elections, and is having bipartisan repercussions from voters and other governors across the country.
New, wide-net, demographically detailed survey results by Survey Monkey reveal that Donald is not doing so well, even among his base. The tide is turning, slowly but inexorably, reminding us once again that America is great because America is good…and goodness will prevail as long as good people refuse to be silent.
How Your Voices Made a Difference: Inexorable Progress
Donald abruptly shut down his sham voting fraud commission, formed after his false claims that it was voter fraud that resulted in his losing the popular vote by 3 million. The commission had been beset by problems since its inception, from its illegal requests of states to provide voter information to lawsuits to its exclusion of Democrats in its functions—and hasn’t produced a scrap of evidence to support its assertions of widespread voter fraud.
Mike Pence and his family were greeted by their neighbors on their Colorado ski vacation with Make America Gay Again banners.
Alabama senator Doug Jones was sworn into the Senate, closing the GOP majority to 51-49…a narrow margin that may shift entirely away from Republicans in 2018.
Washington State’s attorney general has filed suit against Motel 6 for routinely handing over to federal immigration agents info about registered guestswithout any reasonable suspicion, probable cause or search warrants, including circling names that sounded Latino.
Fusion GPS published this op-ed in the New York Times defending their investigation that yielded the infamous dossier on Donald (you know the one…complete with golden showers). In it the company discusses the 21 hours of testimony they gave to three congressional committees that the GOP-led committees stifled, and they share some of their testimony the congressional committees have refused to release about the dossier that was funded by Republicans as well as the Clinton campaign.
Our feature story: The Crimson Tide turned blue this week as Alabama decided to send demagogue, scofflaw, and accused child molester Roy Moore packing (and the horse he rode to the polls on), handing the win to Democrat Doug Jones, a man who made his mark defending a little girl against the KKK in 1963. While we might hope that the spread between decency and depravity had been greater than 1.5 points—even in Alabama—it’s a positive sign: the victory narrows the GOP majority in the Senate to just 2, and sends the first Democrat to Congress from Alabama since 1992.
Two of Donald’s more controversial federal judge nominees—and that’s saying something—will not be confirmed, says Chuck Grassley, head of the committee responsible for confirming them. Jeff Mateer—who called a transgender first grader part of “Satan’s plan”—and Brett Talley have made public comments that were racially and gender discriminatory, and Talley—who has practiced law for just three years and never tried a case—was nominated in a party-line vote despite being rated as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. Donny, who hates it when he is doing so much losing, pulled his nominees—and may wind up pulling another, who couldn’t answer even the most basic legal questions in his nomination hearing.
Donald’s campaign adviser (and conspiracy theorist) Roger Stone is working on a book called The Fall of Trump, predicting that Mueller and the many (17 at last count) sexual-harassment allegations against Donald will bring him down.
His popularity might be summed up by the normally neutral USA Today, who joined the chorus of voices declaring Donald is unfit for office, but went even further in an editorial, saying he is “uniquely awful. His sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed…. A president who’d all but call a senator a whore is unfit to clean toilets in Obama’s presidential library or to shine George W. Bush’s shoes.”
And with that, happy holidays to you all, and may Robert Mueller bring us something we all really, really want this year.
Since the Cornyn Stakeout in May 2017, and the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor in the Russia investigation, we have shied away from Russia-related calls to action. Our movement is built on empowering individuals to make a difference, and it’s hard to see where we can make a difference on this front.
We’ll be sure to post updates here, on social media, to our email list, etc.
In case you missed it, our John Cornyn seems pretty comfortable with the prospect of Mueller getting fired.
Firing Mueller is a third rail that cannot be touched. Call your Senators and House representatives. Tell them that you support the Mueller investigation, wherever the facts lead, and that it must be protected by Congress. Senators on both sides of the aisle have introduced bills to protect Mueller, but so far, the GOP doesn’t think it’s necessary.
“Robert Mueller is perhaps the single-most qualified individual to lead such an investigation, in my view, and he’s certainly independent. As a former F.B.I. Director, the longest-serving F.B.I. Director since J. Edgar Hoover, he, by any measure, has the experience and the credibility and the credentials to conduct a nonpartisan investigation and come to a conclusion based on the facts alone.”
We’ll update this post as new information comes in.
How Your Voices Are Making a Difference: There is more good in the world than evil
This was a rough week, and it made me want to add a feature to this list to remind all of us of who we are as human beings, and that there is more good in the world than evil. This incredibly inspiring story is about a police officer who answered a robbery call and found a pregnant heroin addict. When he told her, “You’re going to kill your baby,” the woman began to sob, and the officer said he learned how badly she wanted her child to go to a good family—so he adopted the baby when she was born a month later, as well as helping the birth mother with rehabilitation. This story is about a homeless man who used his own $20 to help a woman who had broken down by the side of the road…and as a gesture of gratitude she started a GoFundMe campaign and has raised $300,000 for him to date. There are so many good and decent people out there. That’s why we keep fighting.
Now on to the battlefront. On the Russia front, Robert Mueller—or, as some like to call him, Our Lord and Savior—has subpoenaed Donald’s Deutsche Bank banking records. Deutsche Bank, you may recall, has been petitioned by Democrats for months to release information about the $300 million in loans it made to Donald to determine whether any of the loans were tied to Russia.
Michael Flynn’s charges of lying to the FBI in testimony about his contacts with Russia have thrown into question testimony by Donald’s former deputy national security adviser (K.T. McFarland, but why would you remember that with the ever-revolving door of White House staff?) that she was unaware of such contact, after emails revealed she most certainly was aware of at least one phone call between Flynn and then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
Donald’s defense for his incriminating tweet suggesting that he knew Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI—before he asked Comey to let his investigation of Flynn go—seems to be that a president can’t obstruct justice, a perspective refuted—on the record—in the past by sixteen GOP senators, as well as Donald’s own attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
In Don Jr.’s seven-hour testimony to House Intelligence Committee, and following his father’s school of questionable legal justifications, he cited attorney-client privilege as his excuse for refusing to answer questions about a phone call he had with Donny Sr. about how to handle his gaffe with the meeting with the Russian lawyer where he eagerly sought dirt on Hillary Clinton: because their lawyers were present for the call…despite that at the time there was no legal matter at issue that would actually invoke attorney-client privilege.
Rep. Devin Nunes spoke with Blackwater founder Erik Prince about the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the FBI’s unmasking of identities in U.S. intelligence reports—problematic given that Nunes had been forced to recuse himself from that committee’s investigation after briefing Donald and the press on classified intelligence without telling the rest of his committee, and because Prince was a witness in that investigation.
Sunday, Jul. 29, 1-3 PM, Austin History Center Come join Indivisible Austin and our special guests, Indivisible founders and co-executive directors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, at our #BeATexasVoter kickoff phone bank! We’ll be just about 100 days out from the November midterms, and we’re celebrating by calling prospective voters to make sure they know why this election is so important, and to get them engaged NOW so they’re ready to go to the polls as soon as early voting starts. There will be snacks and swag for all phone bankers!