With Republicans facing the growing prospect of a landslide defeat that could return control of the Senate and potentially the House to Democrats, 50 leading GOP national security figures announced on Monday that they refuse to vote for Donald Trump because they consider him a danger to American national security.

For many months I have written in The Hill that Trump, now the GOP nominee, has a strange and disquieting habit of offering sympathy and praise to foreign dictators who wish America ill. He has favorably tweeted the words of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist from darker days. He has had kind words for Kim Jong Il, the mass murdering dictator of North Korea. And the words of mutual praise exchanged between Trump and former KGB officer and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin will someday be legendary in the history of presidential politics.

Republicans, independents, swing voters and GOP members of the House and Senate who are staking their reelection campaigns on their support for Trump to be president and commander in chief should thoughtfully reflect on the recent op-ed in The New York Times by former acting CIA Director Michael Morell.

The op-ed is titled “I ran the CIA. Now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton.” Morell, who has spent decades protecting our security in the intelligence business, offered high praise for the Democratic nominee and former secretary of State based on his years of working closely with her in the high councils of government. But Morell went even further than praising and endorsing Clinton.
(more)

In June, I warned in my column in The Hill that if the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives, there would be a wave McCarthyite abuses of Congressional committees through abuse of subpoenas and abuse of the Congressional investigative process.

~~
~~

This is the arrogance of power by those who do not have power, who are so consumedby the politics of persecution and character assassination and so dependent on the support of extremist political forces that they are bragging about the abuses of power they will pursue if they get said power.

The Republican plan is to abuse the power of multiple Congressional committees, abuse the power and the process of subpoena, by hiring a fleet of partisan Republican lawyers and partisan Republican staff at taxpayer expense to pursue a politics of vendetta and persecution.

Remember the abuses of power of Republicans in Congress when they launched bogus attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton during the Clinton presidency, culminating in a de facto attempted coup d'etat through an abuse of process that culminated in an attempt to impeach President Clinton while he was creating jobs and balancing the budget?

Make no mistake, the party of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy is planning a new era of Nixonian and McCarthyite abuses to repeat the politics of persecution it attempted against the Clintons when Republicans had control of Congress.
(more)

CNN commentator and former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was paid $20,000 in August by the campaign for what it described as “strategy consulting,” raising anew the conflict of interest issue that has dogged the cable network’s hiring of Lewandowski.

CNN has said previously that Trump’s payments to Lewandowski and his consulting firm were “severance” for his employment by Trump. It began introducing his appearances on the air last month by mentioning that he receives severance from Trump.

But the payments continued in August, according to Trump’s campaign expenditure filing released Tuesday night. The description used by Trump’s campaign in the filing — “strategy consulting” — also suggested that Lewandowski is playing a more active and current role in the campaign than “severance” would suggest.

If so, it would put CNN in the position of employing a person who is also compensated by the campaign and the candidate he comments on — a conflict that most journalistic organizations prohibit.
(more)

Donald Trump's campaign website implores voters to "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!" by signing up as observers. He warned people at an August 12 campaign event in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Clinton could win the state only by cheating, and he asked supporters to "go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don't come in and vote five times." Less than a week later, Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, encouraged a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, to help ensure a fair election by serving as poll watchers because "you are the greatest vanguard for integrity in voting."

No one knows how many of the Republican nominee's supporters will heed his call to stand in polling places on November 8 and challenge some voters' credentials—but past experience suggests that a wave of partisan poll watchers could create confusion and discourage people who have a right to cast ballots.

The potential impact of poll observers varies by state, depending on each state's rules about who can monitor voting, what credentials a voter needs to get a ballot, and what a citizen must do if challenged. Adam Gitlin, counsel for the Democracy Program of New York University School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice, said an influx of inexperienced watchers could create bottlenecks, particularly if they raise systematic challenges based on voters' race, religion, or ethnicity.

"There's actually a risk that, in a more disorganized way, people are going to be showing up to the polls, they won't know the law, and they'll be engaging in discriminatory challenges," Gitlin said. "That can create the potential for a lot of disruption, longer lines because each voter takes longer to vote, and potentially discouraging and intimidating voters from coming to the polls."

(more)

(all emphases my own)[font size="+1"]

“Throughout his career, Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies, and thousands of lawsuits and angry shareholders, and contractors who feel cheated, and disillusioned customers who feel they've been ripped off,” said Bloomberg, who became a billionaire building his eponymous financial news service -- without, he pointedly noted, the $1-million stake Trump received from his father.

“Trump says he wants to run the nation like he runs his business. God help us! I'm a New Yorker and I know a con when I see one," Bloomberg said, drawing a thunderous roar from the crowd.

~~
~~

"Whatever our differences may be, I have come here to say we must put them aside for the good of our country. And we must unite around the candidate who can defeat a dangerous demagogue."

~~
~~

"Together, let's elect a sane, competent person," Bloomberg concluded, an ad lib that drew a thunderous did-he-just-say-that roar inside the convention hall. "Let's elect Hillary Clinton."
(more)

For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.
(more)