Will "legitimate political discourse" be a tipping point?

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/13/trump-politics-weakness/

A weakened Trump? As some voters edge away, he battles parts of the Republican Party he once ran.

By Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey
Today at 6:00 a.m. EST


EAST TAWAS, Mich. — Donald Trump’s pick to become Michigan’s next attorney general has a problem with the leaders of the party Trump once ran.
At a recent pizza-fueled meeting with activists overlooking the ice fields of Lake Huron, Kalamazoo attorney Matthew DePerno described the top Republicans in his state as a crew of corrupt self-dealers, more interested in their own power than the Constitution.

“We’re going 100 miles per hour off the socialist cliff. The state party wants to slow that down to go 50,” he told the crowd, after describing private conversations in which state party leaders told him they could not support him. “I want to turn this around and go exactly in the opposite direction.”
Much of the Michigan party’s leadership is as disdainful of DePerno, who rose to prominence for his involvement in a widely debunked, Trump-embraced report that claimed Michigan’s electronic voting machines had rigged the 2020 election. A subsequent Republican-led review by the state Senate described his work as “demonstrably false” and based on “illogical conclusions,” and it referred those reporting the misleading claims for investigation by Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), whom DePerno is trying to defeat in November.

Similar clashes between Republican leaders and the candidates Trump has embraced have been playing out across the country with growing ferocity in recent months, a chaotic sign that Trump’s once unchallenged hold on the party and rank-and-file supporters is waning, even if by degrees.
The former president’s power within the party and his continued focus on personal grievances is increasingly questioned behind closed doors at Republican gatherings, according to interviews with more than a dozen prominent Republicans in Washington and across the country, including some Trump advisers. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because there remains significant fear of attracting Trump’s public wrath.

The growing split is rooted in diverging priorities: Trump has pursued a narrow effort to punish those who challenged his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, while also working to put people in power who would be more sympathetic to him should he try the same thing again. Other Republicans are more focused on finding palatable candidates most able to win in November.

As a result, Trump and his endorsees now find themselves fighting against some elected GOP leaders, donors and party officers intent on navigating the party slowly away from him and his false election claims. Among voters, polls have shown Republican-leaning independents turning from Trump.
“It’s Trump versus the establishment again,” DePerno explained. “There are a lot of people in the state party who — they don’t like Donald Trump. They never liked him.”


In states such as Alabama, North Carolina and Alaska, Trump’s endorsed Senate candidates trail in fundraising or have been challenged in early polls. An increasingly emboldened minority of Republican senators in Washington have bucked Trump’s direct commands, first by supporting a bipartisan infrastructure bill and now by working on a bipartisan effort that would make it harder for a future president to overturn a federal election result.
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said that Trump has remade the party, and that candidates the former president endorsed who can “successfully articulate his agenda” will win in November and beyond. He said Trump is “all in” when it comes to ensuring that “the MAGA ticket wins up and down the ballot.”

“The RINOs who want to ignore election integrity and the 2020 Elections are the same ones who have embarrassed the Republican Party by getting rolled by Democrats in redistricting, have spent decades lining their own pockets at the expense of GOP victories, and fear President Trump’s commitment to drain the swamp,” he said, employing the acronym for “Republicans in name only.”

Yet even major Republican donors are becoming increasingly bold about suggesting Trump step aside to let someone else run for president in 2024.

Art Pope, a prominent North Carolina donor who opposed Trump in 2016 but said he came to support much of his presidency, said he constantly hears in donor circles that a new nominee is needed in 2024, even if there is general support of Trump. “My preference would be he not run again for a variety of reasons and let there be a good primary going forward,” Pope said.

“The longer he’s not president, the more he’s going to realize he can be a kingmaker, and can still be the lead in the Republican Party even if he’s not president,” said Doug Deason, a Texas donor with close ties to the Trump family who said he doesn’t expect Trump to run. “I just think he’s going to realize the freedom that he has.”

The growing dissent and ebbing support has undercut the former president’s efforts to portray himself as an unassailable figure, and thrown suspense into the upcoming primary season.

Behind the scenes Trump has pushed back on aides, and even screamed at advisers, who have told him not to focus so much on re-litigating the last election, according to three people familiar with the matter. One adviser recalled a recent phone call in which Trump started shouting that he won the election after a person started discussing some of the reasons he lost — and how he could improve in 2024. Trump has also complained to advisers about the new limits on his megaphone, as cable news networks shun live coverage of his mass rallies and his social media accounts lie dormant, two of his advisers said.

Tracking of online search terms, social media interactions and television news mentions have all fallen sharply since he left office.
“People aren’t necessarily seeing his messaging as much. They just say he’s not on Twitter, they don’t really know what he’s doing,” said a senior Republican, reflecting private conversations with donors and operatives. “A lot of people now say to me: 'He did great things, he was a great president, but it’s time for something new.’”

Frustrations in the party have also grown about Trump spending less than $1.5 million in the second half of last year to help other Republicans, according to federal reports. Trump advisers say he wants to remain tightfisted with his political action committee outlays, though he will likely spend more ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“As opposed to being out there and to try to help the party, he is trying to help himself,” said one prominent Republican activist in Michigan. “He is completely focused on himself, and it is getting tiring.”

On Friday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee held a fundraiser for major donors at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida. Trump spoke to some of the committee’s top donors over lunch and, while ticking through races, vowed to help the Republican Party win back the majority. But he later falsely told guests the election was stolen and insulted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), according to a person with knowledge of his comments.

In recent months, he has repeatedly attacked McConnell, former vice president Mike Pence and a range of other senators and lawmakers from his own party. At the same time, McConnell has boasted that not a single Republican senator has publicly supported removing him as leader, an oft-repeated Trump demand.

Polls also have begun to show some weakening among Trump’s electoral coalition, even as Republicans appear poised for huge gains in the midterm election.

Trump’s favorability remains high among registered Republicans, at just under 80 percent in an Economist-YouGov tracking poll this month. But the same poll found 54 percent of Republicans saying they viewed him “very favorably,” compared with 68 percent right before the Jan. 6 insurrection last year and 74 percent in the month before the riot.

A Trump adviser who has frequently spoken with the former president said voters are drawing a distinction between him and his agenda. “They needed a break from him,” the adviser said. “They’re not sure they want him back in their lives, even if they loved the policies.”
The share of Republican and Republican-leaning voters who consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than the party dropped to 36 percent in January’s NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, down 10 points from a year ago. An October Pew poll found two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents wanted Trump to remain a major political figure. Only 44 percent wanted to see him run again for president.

“He is still God among Republicans, but independents don’t want him to run again. They have had enough,” said Frank Luntz, a pollster who has previously advised Republican leaders. “They aren’t happy with Biden and they weren’t happy with Trump, and they want something new.”
Trump remains helpful to the dozens of candidates he has endorsed — and has more assets than other Republicans, including $122 million in his war chest, high popularity among the party’s base and ability to draw bigger crowds, according to donors and operatives.

In North Carolina, for example, Rep. Ted Budd has benefited from Trump’s endorsement in a Senate race, according to Jonathan Felts, an adviser. When Trump endorsed Budd, Felts said, online contributions “skyrocketed,” and their ability to attract grass-roots volunteers surged.

“If you’re in North Carolina and you’re saying Donald Trump doesn’t have an influence, that means you’re not endorsed by Donald Trump,” Felts said.
But Trump has not been able to clear the field for his chosen candidate. Pope, the major Republican donor, is supporting former governor Pat McCrory (R) in the race. “His endorsement is viewed as favorable, but it’s certainly not the decisive or determinative factor,” Pope said.

The shift against Trump among independents has been especially sharp in Michigan, a pivotal swing state in presidential elections. Trump continues to get the support of 79 percent of registered Republican voters there, according to a recent poll by WDIV and the Detroit News.
The same poll found Trump is viewed favorably by 31 percent of all voters, the lowest level since 2016. That includes only 1 in 5 independent voters and only 38 percent of independent voters who say they lean Republican.

That hasn’t stopped Trump from becoming deeply involved. He has endorsed in 15 down-ballot races in the state, including 10 state legislative contests. He is also publicly supporting a long-shot effort to elevate state Rep. Matt Maddock (R), who was part of a legal challenge to block Biden’s win in Michigan, as the next Republican speaker of the state House.

His wife, Meshawn Maddock, the co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, has become a regular adviser to Trump, according to people familiar with her role. She is helping to engineer some of his endorsements in the state, which include the father-in-law of the Maddocks’ daughter. People close to Trump say he would prefer that she run the state party.

Requests from others for Trump to stay out of races in the state have been rejected because Trump has only cared about the “election fraud issue,” according to a senior Republican with knowledge of the conversations.

“He’s doing endorsements for candidates he doesn’t know in races he shouldn’t care about,” another prominent Republican close to him said. “He’s going to end up losing some of these.”

That has made DePerno’s candidacy a target for many in the state party. A rival for the nomination, Tom Leonard, is a former Michigan House speaker, statewide candidate and state party official, who ended the year with $665,968 in cash for his campaign, compared with $61,179 for DePerno.

Just days after Trump endorsed DePerno in September, a survey by the Detroit News of 740 attendees at a state party leadership retreat on Mackinac Island found Leonard had the support of 48 percent of the crowd, while DePerno was supported by 11 percent.

At the same event, Betsy DeVos, a major Michigan Republican donor, spoke publicly for one of the first times since she resigned her post as Trump’s secretary of education because of the role his rhetoric played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I worry that principles have been overtaken by personalities today,” she told the crowd, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Some Republicans in the state worry that if DePerno is the nominee, the attorney general race will turn into a debate about election conspiracy theories, potentially chasing away independent voters and donors.

“The challenge that Matt DePerno has is if he is the nominee it is not a referendum on Dana Nessel. It is a referendum on Matt DePerno,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan GOP.

DePerno, whose advisers dismiss such suggestions as a misreading of the electoral environment, has found a niche in rural counties like Iosco, which includes the sparsely populated vacation community of East Tawas on Michigan’s eastern shore. The county GOP chairman, David Chandler, described the state party’s leadership as “a bunch of corporate folks that are more interested in making money than the integrity of this country.”
“We all hate the state party,” said Maureen Rudel, another organizer for the Iosco County GOP who hosted the recent gathering and said she had no doubt Trump won Michigan.

DePerno still argues, despite multiple investigations that found otherwise, that there was an intentional effort to program machines to flip votes to Biden in Michigan, allowing Democrats to steal the election. But at times during his talk, he pushed back on other conspiracy theories that were circulating through the crowd.

The important thing, he told them, was that they travel in April to Lansing for the state convention meeting, where delegates will choose whether Trump gets his way and DePerno wins the attorney general nomination.

“We need real patriots to get involved and to take back the way the party is run,” he told them. “And then you’d control those rules.”

McConnell vs Trump. I despise both of them but it will be interesting to see who comes out ahead. Personally, I kind of hope they tear the Republican Party apart, then others rebuild it from the ground up

www.npr.org/2022/02/15/1080407022/trump-vs-mcconnell-latest-round-between-gop-heavyweights-has-the-highest-stakes-

She has an interesting perspective about how Trump's statement yesterday was a distraction from the letter from his accountants

heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-14-2022

Let's say there is some truth to Hillary spying on Trump. Why? How does that benefit her? She lost the election and is no longer in politics.  Sounds like typical Republican strategy of projection - accuse others of actions that you are guilty of doing.  In this case, Trump would want revenge if he lost, so he assumes Hillary would want revenge and jumps to the conclusion that she's spying on him.  Another projection - Trump calling her crooked Hillary is interesting in light of the letter from his accounting firm.  Which one is the crooked one?

And here's the run down referenced in the previous opinion

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/15/heres-why-trump-once-again-is-claiming-spying-by-democrats/

By Glenn Kessler
Staff writer
Today at 3:00 a.m. EST

“The latest pleading from Special Counsel Robert [sic] Durham provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia. … In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a statement, Feb. 12
“I was proven right about the spying, and I will be proven right about 2020!”
— Trump, in a statement, Feb. 14
It’s not every day that a former president suggests that his political opponents should be executed. But ever since Trump in early 2017 falsely accused former president Barack Obama of spying on him, based on sketchy, anonymously sourced reports, he and his allies have sought to somehow make the claim come true. (Never mind that now the claim is against the Clinton campaign.)

The latest “evidence” comes via a court filing by special counsel John Durham, who was tasked by former attorney general William P. Barr to investigate the roots of the FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Since being appointed special counsel 16 months ago, after a preliminary investigation lasting 17 months, Durham has filed two indictments. Every subsequent court filing is scrutinized carefully by right-leaning media, sometimes in misleading ways.
For instance, Fox News has reported that Durham alleged that Clinton’s “presidential campaign in 2016 had paid to ‘infiltrate’ servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House.” But the word “infiltrate,” even though it is in quotes, appears nowhere in Durham’s filing. Instead that word comes via Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official who offered his own spin on the document.
The Durham filing says much less than what Trump claims. Thus far, Durham has not charged anyone with spying on Trump. In fact, the statute of limitations has already expired for a key meeting cited in the filing.

Here’s a guide for the perplexed.
What’s this about?
In September, Durham charged Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor with expertise in computer cases, with lying to the FBI during a meeting in 2016. The indictment alleged that he told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of clients when in fact, the indictment said, he was secretly acting on behalf of Clinton’s political team. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have denied he ever said he had no clients.
Why did Sussmann meet with the FBI?
On Sept. 19, 2016, Sussmann told James Baker, general counsel at the FBI, that cybersecurity researchers had found possible evidence of a secret communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. The researchers allegedly had been enlisted by someone identified in the indictment as Tech Executive-1 and was later revealed to be Rodney Joffe, an Internet entrepreneur who founded the world’s first commercial Internet hosting company. Joffe, who has not been charged, had hired Sussmann in February 2015 “in connection with a matter involving an agency of the U.S. government,” according to the indictment.

The FBI investigated Sussmann’s tip but concluded that it was not suspicious at all. The indictment said agents found that the computer in question “was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization, but, rather, had been administered by a mass marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients.”
What is the connection to the Clinton campaign?
Sussmann worked for Perkins Coie, which was employed by the Clinton presidential campaign. The indictment claims that in Perkins Coie internal paperwork, Sussmann billed his time with Baker to the Clinton campaign. He also billed much of his time on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment. But Sussmann’s lawyers have said the billing records are misleading because the Clinton campaign received a flat retainer so the hours did not result in additional charges.

In a later filing in October, Durham appeared to acknowledge that he did not have evidence that Sussmann ever spoke directly to the Clinton campaign about Alfa Bank. Instead, he suggests that such communications took place via another Perkins Coie lawyer who was general counsel for the Clinton campaign. (At one point, for instance, the lawyer sent an email about the Alfa Bank matter to Clinton campaign officials, including current national security adviser Jake Sullivan.) A Durham spokesman declined to comment.
Why does this matter?
Trump and his allies have charged that the Clinton campaign ginned up allegations of connections between Trump and Russia in the months before the election, leading to negative news stories and improper federal investigations.
Multiple investigations have found clear evidence of the Russian government’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump. But special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could not find evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin; he merely concluded that the campaign was opportunistic about apparent assistance from Russia.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign has been connected to negative media reports during the campaign about Trump and Russia. A former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, working under contract for a private investigation firm at the behest of Clinton’s campaign, actively pitched his findings to news reporters, even though his reports later turned out to be poorly sourced.
So far, there is no evidence that the Clinton campaign directly managed the Steele reporting or leaks about it to the media.
The alleged Alfa Bank connection was also pursued by reporters, though only one publication published an article before the election. The indictment of Sussmann says that he disseminated the Alfa Bank allegations to the media, even before he met with the FBI. The Clinton campaign tried to exploit the story, but it was pretty quickly dismissed and largely ignored.
Where does the ‘spying’ claim come from?
Durham on Feb. 11 asked the court to examine what he called were potential conflicts of interest regarding Sussmann’s counsel, Latham & Watkins. As part of that document, he took the opportunity to raise new allegations, though no new crimes were claimed.

One claim — the source of the “spying” allegation — is that Durham has evidence that Joffe and his associates “exploited” domain name system (DNS) Internet traffic at an unnamed health-care provider, Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and “the Executive Office of the President of the United States.”
DNS information shows what a person has been doing on the Internet, such as browsing activity. Companies and government offices use special-purpose DNS providers that might monitor for suspicious traffic or filter out potentially dangerous web addresses that include typos.
The indictment added that Joffe’s employer “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP. Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

The indictment does not make clear the circumstances of the White House contract, but Durham appears to be claiming the company kept track of the web addresses that Internet users at the White House were visiting. It is unclear whether such monitoring might have been part of the original contract. If so, that’s somewhat like hiring a security guard at the front gate to run a badge-scanning system, and then being shocked the security guard is keeping track of your comings and goings from the office. That’s not really the same as eavesdropping.
Moreover, contrary to much of the reporting in right-wing media, Durham does not specifically say the alleged monitoring of EOP took place while Trump was president — and the circumstances suggest it took place in 2016.
“The Special Counsel has again made a filing in this case that unnecessarily includes prejudicial — and false — allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool,” Sussmann’s lawyers charged in a response filed with the court Monday night that noted a number of reports that appeared in conservative media. The team, headed by Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, requested that the court strike “factual background” of the Durham filing that made these allegations.

A spokesperson for Joffe also denied any nefarious intent in a statement to the Fact Checker.
“Contrary to the allegations in this recent filing, Mr. Joffe is an apolitical Internet security expert with decades of service to the U.S. Government who has never worked for a political party, and who legally provided access to DNS data obtained from a private client that separately was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Under the terms of the contract, the data could be accessed to identify and analyze any security breaches or threats,” the statement said. “As a result of the hacks of EOP and DNC [Democratic National Committee] servers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election. Upon identifying DNS queries from Russian-made Yota phones in proximity to the Trump campaign and the EOP, respected cybersecurity researchers were deeply concerned about the anomalies they found in the data and prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the CIA.”
In any case, Trump’s original claim in 2017 was that Obama had wiretapped him, not that web searches had been tracked by the Clinton campaign. Trump relied on a report by a British journalist that a “FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant was granted in connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the server [in Trump Tower] and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank.”
The FBI did obtain a secret court order to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. But as we noted, the FBI had quickly dismissed the Alfa Bank tip.
What else is new?
Durham mentions a meeting Sussmann had on Feb. 9, 2017, with “a second agency of the U.S. government,” previously identified in congressional testimony as the CIA. Durham alleges that Sussmann made new allegations against Trump, relying on the DNS traffic that had been collected, including that “Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other location.” Durham’s filing said that his office found “no support” for these claims.
What is noteworthy about the date is that the meeting took place after Trump had already assumed the presidency. But that may be less nefarious than it seems. Sussmann, in December 2017, had previously explained to congressional investigators that he had tried to set up the meeting during Obama’s review of Russian involvement in the election.
“For reasons known and unknown to me, it took a long time to — or it took — you know, it took a while to have a meeting, and so it ended up being after the change in administration,” he said. He said he reported to the CIA “information that was reported to me [from a client] about possible contacts, covert or at least nonpublic, between Russian entities and various entities in the United States associated with the — or potentially associated with the Trump Organization.”
If Sussmann had planned to provide this material before Trump became president, that suggests any possible DNS monitoring took place in 2016 — as both the statement from Joffe’s spokesperson and the response from Sussmann’s legal team said.

“Although the special counsel implies that in Mr. Sussmann’s February 9, 2017 meeting, he provided [the CIA] with EOP data from after Mr. Trump took office, the special counsel is well aware that the data provided to [the CIA] pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President,” Sussmann’s legal team said in its filing. “Further — and contrary to the special counsel’s alleged theory that Mr. Sussmann was acting in concert with the Clinton campaign — the motion conveniently overlooks the fact that Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with [the CIA] happened well after the 2016 presidential election, at a time when the Clinton campaign had effectively ceased to exist.” The filing added that it is “false” that Sussmann billed the Clinton campaign for the September 2016 meeting with the FBI.

What is also noteworthy is that Durham raised this allegation in a filing dated Feb. 11. That means, as national security writer Marcy Wheeler first noted, the five-year statute of limitations for charging a crime in connection with the CIA meeting had expired two days earlier.