Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Democrat representing Texas’s 30th Congressional District and an early supporter of Hillary Clinton, told supporters in a district meeting something interesting…
She told them, based on what she claims to be frequent phone conversations with the candidate, that Clinton’s current opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership – which represented such a dramatic reversal of her earlier enthusiasm for it as the “gold standard” of trade agreements – was only to get “labor off her back” until after the election.
The labor leaders who heard about this shared their… concerns with Clinton’s Labor Outreach Director Nikki Budzinski. Budzinski then prepared a memo for our old friend John Podesta to equip him for a meeting with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
Then that horrible Julian Assange had to come along and… well, you can guess the rest.
—–
From:mfisher@hillaryclinton.com
To: john.podesta@gmail.com
Date: 2015-11-02 23:35
Subject: MEMO re: Trumka Mtg from NikkiJohn- Nikki pulled together a great memo for your meeting with Trumka tomorrow. Attached! Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks, Milia
http://wikileaks.com/podesta-emails/emailid/41714
For anyone reluctant to the open the Wikileaks .docx copy of the memo, I have put a copy on Google Drive here:
http://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1Gty6AJsT83RkpsNDF1ZklZRGM/view?usp=sharing
The money quote:
* Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson
I have received four calls from labor about a district meeting that Congresswoman Johnson (a HRC public supporter) held in Dallas, Texas where she discussed TPP. She claimed in the meeting that she speaks with HRC 2-3 times a week and that she was told by the Secretary that the only reason she opposes TPP is to get “labor off her back” and that once she is elected President she will reverse position. I have worked with our Western Political Director Jessica Meija, and she has connected with the Congresswoman’s COS to clarify the inaccuracy of what she said and push back on her comments. This was not helpful with labor.
We can only wonder what the “inaccuracy” consists of.
Perhaps she didn’t say “get labor off my back”. Perhaps she said “keep labor quiet”.
Already baked in.
I haven’t yet encountered a Clinton booster honest enough to admit that her reversal on TPP was a transparent, cynical ploy to ward off the threat from the Sanders wing until she can afford to tell them to go fuck themselves.
However, I think some of the usual suspects here might be shameless enough. I expect they would insist that “all politicians lie” and that Clinton is only defrauding voters so she can do wonderful things for us as President. (Because she cares, you see.) Why they think she would scruple to keep her word on any other policy position when she wouldn’t on this one is beyond my fathoming.
Frankie Boyle tweet
Greenwald response tweet
Don’t get why some people seem to think that they can strenuously object to X, Y, and Z based on claimed principles and then support a politician that has a long record of supporting X, Y, and Z and not own that they too are now supporting X, Y, and Z.
It’s absolutely uncanny how unpopular Greenwald became among Democrats after Obama was elected.
From popular to loathed developed over a few years. Completed with his association with Snowden. Apparently because while they railed about government spying on citizens during the reign of Bush/Cheney, when a Democrat does it, it’s fine.
They have since developed the mental capacity to more quickly turn on a dime like the fictional people in 1984. July 2016 — Comey a hero. October 2016 — Comey a bum that needs to be locked up.
November 2016 — Slow motion electoral coup d’etat.
Not buying it. There’s no love lost between the NYPD and NY-FBI. Not a secret that Trump appeals to a high proportion of cops (fascism is consonant with the profession as it has come to be militarized in this country) or that FBI agents lean in the same direction. And while the latter may have no love for HRC, that doesn’t equal support for Trump. Such a binary perspective is what leads team Clinton operatives to allege that those that aren’t with HER are Trumpsters. No different from way back when an opponent of the Vietnam War was by default a Kremlin stooge.
Independent, rational thought is the enemy of TPTB that thrive on “the people” swallowing whatever propaganda their pitching this week.
Really? In 2012 the FBI barely contained the Petraeus scandal to election day plus one:
Very similar context and methodology.
If we’re objective and honest, the DOJ did postpone acting on the Petraeus case until after the election. However, there wasn’t a split among FBI agents on that one. It was a pursuit by a single FBI agent against a man who happened to be a darling of the right. Reichert and Cantor didn’t want to touch it either. The GOP and Republican FBI agents didn’t want to “get Petraeus” and Obama, understandably, didn’t want to be seen as having gone after Petraeus because he hadn’t. Charging Petraeus before the election may well have given the GOP an issue to politicize and could have changed the outcome, but not for a legitimate or authentic reason. This really was an instance when it’s appropriate not to act shortly before election day. It wasn’t as if the delay meant the case was going to be buried and the DOJ wasn’t going to act on it. It wasn’t as if candidate Obama was covering up something he had done or some conspiracy in his administration to harm the country, and therefore, being dishonest with the electorate.
It was bad enough in that pre-election month that Romney and the GOP were running on a fake Benghazi scandal. Why hand them an opportunity to exploit another fake scandal?
IMO not similar in context or methodology at all.
I see a trend emerging; one (visible) agent then, who knows now, a dozen? I’m guessing a dozen FBI agents could cause a lot of trouble.
Yes, a dozen or fewer could manage this low level degree of ratfucking. (Although I suspect that the numbers of like-minded folks in their ranks is higher.) Much more than that and the risk to them of being outed increases. Also they aren’t willing to risk getting themselves locked up.
For example:
Read on. The ghosts of 9/11 still haunt us.
Guiliani is an ass. Like Trump, he talks big and then delivers little, if anything at all. He couldn’t even manage his own presidential run well enough to make it out of NH. Wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that he has a pipeline into the NY-FBI and/or NY AG and got a heads up from them. However, describing it as Donald’s surprise or “We’ve got a couple things …” is an attempt to take credit for something neither of them is participating in, much less controlling.
At least as far back as the spring of this year, there were some vague whispers that the FBI was investigating the CF along with HRC’s emails. So vague that it sounded like wishful thinking on the part of lefties. The noises of late suggests that it was more than that. However, it might be wise to be cautious in interpreting this because there could be some smoke and mirrors in play. It’s being described as a rogue investigation by the NY office but with HQ’s McCabe supporting it. Odd because McCabe is under a bit of fire himself and it was suspected that he was involved in going easy on HRC. So, what the hell are we supposed to make of that?
Some damage control for McCabe and overstating the extent of a rogue FBI CF investigation which they know is going nowhere and therefore, will die shortly on its own lack of merit? With lots of tinfoil is it possible that it’s far more than a rogue operation and they have something really big but very incomplete and to keep it going without being detected and shutdown by the admin., it was best to let the smaller email issue slide? Nothing tangible enough to go on either way and foolish to make a blind guess.
Note: ABC News on a PodestaFile email – Comey Considered a ‘Bad Choice’ for FBI Post by Clinton Aide
Poor write-up on this matter from ABC, but other news sites have yet to get around to this one.
The simple fact we are discussing the political motivations for multiple FBI investigations should be a warning bell to us all.
Maybe it’s a good thing that such a discussion has surfaced. In the past, except for a brief period in the mid-late seventies, politics was assumed not to exist in the FBI and anyone that suggested otherwise was quickly demonized. Given the FBI financial crimes department how could anyone assume that politics didn’t play a huge role in their inability to find any WS crooks after the financial meltdown?
I’ll mention that one of my favorite people in the whole world is a recently retired FBI special agent. Top drawer. We agree on practically everything, except he’s a Republican, but disagrees with practically all Republican policy issues.
It is good to hear that kind of anti-intuitive anecdotal endorsement; as an institution it seems already wounded.
We should always keep in mind that there are good, decent, and competent people working in all institutions. Most often middle tier positions bc they’re too competent waste and rarely at the top bc the personal compromises one has to make to get there are usually too great and rips away one’s basic decency.
Over the years most of the people I worked with (superiors, peers, and subordinates) were Republicans. That was never a barrier to forging good and respectful working relations and friendship. They could roll their eyes at my leftiness and I could do the same with their moderate Republicanism. Same with my British Tory bud. Not once did any of them treat me with the disrespect or precipitate arguments for sport with me that I’ve experience here of late.
I recall the time when Bob, my boss, arrived at work and immediately launched into a report the show he’d seen the night before. (He wasn’t a theater goer; so, the experience was novel for him.) He’d seen Jame Whitmore in “Give Em Hell, Harry.! He went on and on about Whitmore’s great performance and on and on about how great Truman had been. Since I’ve always been a bit of a smart-ass, when he seemed to have exhausted everything he could say about Truman and the show, I sweetly said, “So, tell me Bob, did you vote for Harry?” I knew the answer and he knew that I knew even though it had never come up in any conversation between us. He said, “If I’d known then, I would have voted for him.”
If only he had known, eh? That’s all it takes. Very timely comment.
If I was doing the game theory on this I would choose to fix the FBI after the leaked CIA investigation into a mole in the Bureau. Would be less heavy lifting.
???
Kidding. Well, not really but this is the problem with duelling security organs in a managed state.
It’s a checks and balance of a sort. Gives them something to do other than wreaking havoc on the people at home and abroad.
That’s pretty cynical but you made me laugh.
Cynical or realistic?
IMO, a bit of messiness in institutions is overall preferable to highly efficient. That latter tends towards a single mind set and becomes coldly rigid and incapable of admitting error, change, or the new.
The Hatch Act.
Get-out-of-jail hurdle. Must be able to prove intent in their mind.
Good one. Hill-Fans loved it when Comey cited lack of intent evidence last July when the statute the case fell under doesn’t include an intent provision.
CNN –
Reid, et. al. are just playing politics — in asserting a Hatch Act violation, he knows damn well that 1) evidence of intent doesn’t exist and would be virtually impossible to find and 2) Hatch Act sounds scary but it’s an administrative and not a criminal statute.
“…when the statute the case fell under doesn’t include an intent provision.”
He was very fortunate in his creativity, no?
He’s very fortunate that the law is nothing but legal mumbo-jumbo to almost all citizens and therefore, they they rely on their partisan legal experts of choice to tell them what to believe. Except in the very rare instances (like Kelo v. the City of New London) where they can’t wrap their brains around why those they correctly accept as being on their side could all be on the side they disagree with and Rhenquist, Scalia, Thomas, and O’Connor supported their position. That one was such a clear divide on the SC that I still find it shocking that Democrats/liberals didn’t see it as a powerful clue that they didn’t understand the case and decision.
LOL You and I will never agree on Kelo, I suspect. I think a lot of states did some corrective legislating, but would the SC respect it?
In today’s environment, it is an invitation to corrupt abuses.
Pipeline routes have found it very useful. Downstreamers have no rights.
Of course the SC would respect it. All Kelo said was that land use policies are a matter of local decision making, power, and control. With but one Constitutional protection — fair market value must be paid to appropriate real property.
See below — you’re just repeating Democratic Party BS with no apparent knowledge of the Hatch Act.
Read that. You perhaps assume too much. Intent is not an insurmountable barrier; it all depends on the quality of the investigation.
Let’s review this in future; I think the problem has metastasised significantly; that it’s worse than you think.
Of course it’s worse. And entirely predictable by militarizing police departments which has been bipartisan, but with one party sending a coherent message — we’re giving you more lethal weaponry and you can use it — and the other sending an incoherent message — we’re giving you more lethal weaponry but if you dare use it we’ll be on your ass. Not so different from building a huge military force and then not expecting that a way to use it won’t be found.
Agree. And not just equipment or even doctrine; this whole ‘civil forfeiture’ paradigm has created a cargo cult of warlordism. But the worst of it is the culture, the returned veterans with ‘Fort Apache’ syndrome.
It’s always been in the sheriff’s department. But in the FBI? You have to be shitting me. Those are the only guys who can face down the sheriff.
Very perceptive of you. Warlordism is already here on the interstates. Don’t take an expensive car through Louisiana.
Smaller scale is well-represented in Ferguson.
Mad Max repackaged so as not to upset the china.
Not only that but an alternate source of funding that is not answerable to a higher authority.
That’s been my read from way out west.
Personality/partisanship trumps policy for the “I’m with HER” gang.
Run through all the policies that HRC and WJC supported/voted for/signed during their respective terms in office and there’s not much that many Hillfans even today say they supported then or now.
Boston Globe (normally considered an acceptable and reliable source, but might get trashed here for this report) Law firm `bonuses’ tied to political donations
SOP for a looooong time in US politics. Don’t think they even bother to prosecute that any longer. SC probably made it one of those “read their minds for intent” get-out-of-jail exceptions.
May be common but prosecuting “straw donor” schemes hasn’t gone away. The number of prosecutions is kept low because so few of them are blatant enough to prove.
OT, but you might remember this program–New Markets–that BC signed in 2000, just in time for all those new financial products to begin proliferating. (https:/www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-poverty-tour-hillary-new-markets)
Pure coincydink, I am sure, but around that time bond issues in small to mid-sized towns began to attract some new players, no? (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-banks-cheat-taxpayers-20111227)
With the billions that Chucky S anticipates getting in his bargain (and I do mean bargain) settlement from those offshore tax scofflaws, don’t you think more public/private economic strip mining is to be expected in those areas of opportunity–rural/naif–and besides…deplorable? Quite a few horror stories on what went on.
Sorry, forgot…. Jacobin link Bill Clinton’s New Markets initiative tried to fight poverty by showering incentives on the private sector. And now Hillary has embraced it.
Labor is going to have a difficult time with Dems of the future, imo. Some sectors are going to be anti-environmental till it plows up their back yard.
Dems will be going to all lengths to keep gas cheap–image the damage to our limping economy. So Sierra Club might have to go in the basket.
Hard to know whether Dems can keep both onboard–With enthusiasm, not resignation.
No they won’t. Democrats have been giving “labor” the shaft for decades which is why organized manual labor unions have shrunk almost to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. The replacement organized workers is white collar labor that has been captured by the Dem party with nothing more than appealing to the ego of white collar workers that they are better/smarter/more deserving than manual labor workers.
“appealing to the ego of white collar workers that they are better/smarter/more deserving than manual labor workers”
Basis for this claim?
An opinion with a dash of hyperbole. That’s allowed. And anyone with a 10th grade reading comprehension level can easily discriminate between an opinion and a statement of fact.
However, my opinion isn’t fact free. For example:
Unionized public school teachers oppose the privatization of public schools.
The Obama administration has supported public school privatization.
Public school teacher’s unions endorsed Obama. And contrary to the majority preference of their members, those unions endorsed HRC in the 2016 Democratic primaries.
Sure looks like union labor capture to me.
“And anyone with a 10th grade reading comprehension level can easily discriminate between an opinion and a statement of fact.”
You just can’t help yourself, can you, Marie3? No opportunity to insult people who ask you a question, no opportunity to tell us how much more intelligent you are than the rest of us dumb schmucks, ever passes you by.
I recall that one of the first comment threads I ever read at Booman Tribune included you writing “FUCK YOU”, just like that, in all capital letters, to someone with whom you had been locking horns. I’m sure you recall this, too.
Well, go fuck yourself, Marie3. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
It’s amusing to think what these comment threads would have been like had Bernie won. Probably very similar in tone with different people doing the ankle-biting in their attempts to treat Bernie like some treat Jeremy Corbyn.
Now the Obamabots are Hillfans. Same old story but the bitterness lingers.
I suspect it all comes to a head in 2020.
Assuming we’re all still here.
Your assuming they are Sanders supporters. The most egregious are not. They are republicans and if Sanders had won they would be doing diaries on how he looks tired and how his wife is a crook.
.
Yep. We would have dealt with much concern trolling about Sanders’ health and his wife’s tenure as President of Burlington College would have been the subject of much scrutiny.
Don’t forget that Bernie’s dirty fucking commie past and current professional associations and policy advocacies would have been “revealed” and turned into the scourge of the Republic.
Bernie’s behavior and rhetoric also would have been the target of ridicule, ridicule which would have successfully undermined his support.
I always knew that either Bernie or Hillary would have their own sets of adverse circumstances to fight off.
Sarcasm alert on the “dirty fucking commie” statement, of course.
I suspect that phrases like “Anglo-Saxon liberalism”, “cultural dimension” and “Russia ‘personifies’ the idea that the US is losing its status as world hegemon.” are more likely to drop effortlessly from the mouth of a Surkovite than a Republican.
Well, some folks are just going to ignore anything you have to say if you mention Putin or Russia.
That being said, I don’t think anyone here is a Russian troll although I’ve seen a few twist themselves into knots defending Putin and Russian foreign policy.
“Anglo-Saxon liberalism”? I reckon your typical Trumpkin would have a lockjaw seizure before saying those three words; it’s not in their DNA. Little eugenics pun there.
I have no doubt that Bernie’s supporters would be getting reamed. And since my intention this season was to support the nominee against Trump regardless of who won between Sanders and Clinton, I suspect I and several others be getting abuse – perhaps from a few of the same suspects and perhaps from a different set of suspects. We could play with the various alternative scenarios, I suppose, but to what end? What I do know is that the events of this past year have left me so deeply disillusioned with the left that I have essentially decided to abandon what’s left of the “left” even as I maintain my beliefs. Other than that, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that this will all come to a head far sooner than 2020.
Odd that Sanders supporters don’t remember the diary Booman posted after the primaries were over that insinuated those very things about the couple. Maybe you missed it?
Have been mentions here that DNC has a target on Sanders’ back, via Al Giordano in 2018. He will be well funded. An old friend of Booman’s. DNC has no fondness for him on Budget Committee you can bet. Can’t be any surprise to that.
Totally false accusation based on zero evidence. I’ve never voted for a Republican, or a third party candidate for that matter, in my life. You can go back and look at every blog comment and diary I’ve written since 2002 and not find a single instance where I advocated for a Republican candidate. Not even for Lincoln Chafee in his 2006 Senate race even though he was a better and more progressive Senator than most Democrats these days.
With one exception (when Bush expanded funding for CHCs), you’ll struggle to find anything from me that is remotely complimentary towards a Republican candidate or politician. On maybe up to three public policy issues, there have been Republican politicians that deviate from the position of Democrats and on which I agree with the position of a specific Republican politician, but as they always come packaged with numerous other odious positions on other issues, I’d never consider supporting them for a second. That doesn’t actually matter much because those Republicans are fringe candidates anyway and don’t make it to general elections, but if one did, I still wouldn’t vote for him/her.
It’s not my fault that in this presidential election the Democratic nominee is struggling against what IMO is worst GOP nominee in over a hundred years. I and others tried to raise the alarm that while we found Trump to be without any merit and quite repulsive, it was stupid to dismiss and laugh at such a savvy con-man. That he was pushing many of the right buttons for those that long for ReaganII. We also forewarned that HRC was a deeply flawed candidate and that Americans aren’t kindly disposed towards dynasty candidates without a personal resume of accomplishments, particularly when they run to succeed an eight year incumbent in their own party.
You’re not very astute in your perceptions of others, are you?
No.
He’s not.
But…he’s got a lot of company.
Yes.
We did.
And here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
5 days to go.
Scylla ands Charybdis.
And the Dem naysayers.
Still saying “Nay!!”
Tough shit, centrists.
Whatever you get…Trump or HRC, an ongoing partisan battle or merely the virtual reality version of same…you earned it.
Thanks loads.
AG
You were right. I think we all hope she squeaks through but it is shaping up to be exactly the disaster movie you predicted. We’ll see.
Thanks for your carefully considered and prescient warning! Too bad we ignored it.
Thank you.
We do keep on trying.
As Winston Churchill said of the pains and rigors of old age:
Like dat.
AG
P.S. I personally have now totally surrendered to the will of the people (and of course their controllers)…the will of the universe as some people truly understand…regarding which set of disasters will be visited upon us by the eventual results of this latest (
s)election. I did what I could given my own position in the universe. Then i signed off. So it goes.As the great radio comedy team Bob and Ray used to say in their sign off:
Like dat.
I’l be hanging right next to you.
As will we all.
So that goes as well.
AG
Still waiting for a response from you in your censorious diary.
Feel better?
So, you admit that you weren’t here and didn’t see everything that preceded by lashing out? (The first and only time I’ve ever written those two words on a blog and I’m not sure that I’ve ever said to anyone either.)
I’d tried to be nice, didn’t work. Politely requested she/he leave me alone because I’m not interested in wasting time with a pest. A pest that dropped nasty responses to my comments when I tried to ignore him/her. Leaving me with a choice of letting the nasty remarks hanging out there as if there was some truth in them or wasting my time to respond. I did both — but the pest didn’t stop. Actually the FU was effective for a while.
Color me surprised. I always figured that changing an “a” to a “the” after she gets elected would change TPP from something she couldn’t support in its current form back to the gold standard of trade deals. I guess Bernice Johnson isn’t going to be on Hillary’s White House dinner invitation list anytime soon.
Of course Trump is lying too on trade. Except he doesn’t have the brains to make any coherent policies and might end up throwing darts and accidentally picking the right answer.
LOL — Except he doesn’t have the brains to make any coherent policies and might end up throwing darts and accidentally picking the right answer.
Better still — a dart throwing monkey. Cheaper to feed, house, protect, etc. than what a human POTUS costs these days.
Say what one will about Trump’s foreign policy he is the “madman theory” writ large.
I think you disagree about the involvement of the Russians in this election but I think they have done all of it, but not to elect Trump. Just to cripple Hillary. I think a Trump election would be just as chaotic for Putin as anyone; I’m guessing Putin knows Trump is unpredictable, uncontrollable and irrational. This is a problem for Putin; he has big plans but they assumed a Hillary distracted by a domestic political crisis not a bumptious Il Douche.
Trump has a “foreign policy,” or a policy on any public issue for that matter? He’s a rambling carney barker saying what flits across his awareness that he thinks will sell the product, Trump, to the masses of ignorant people in this country,
wrt “Putin did it” — combining the quality of the sources with the “evidence” they have presented and the media sources promulgating all of it, strikes me as being on the same level as the great WMD hoax. My CT analytical standards don’t vary regardless of whether it’s being promulgated by rightwinger, leftwingers, no definable political woo-woo folks, political parties, the USG, or any other government. IOW — on this I’m a conservative skeptic of all CTs and to date haven’t yet been wrong.
Motive and opportunity, Marie. Cui bono?; not infallible but best shot for a simple, rigorous test. It answers both cases; Putin and WMDs.
heh? If Russia were installing the latest high tach weapons in Canada and Mexico and the US responded by building up it’s arsenal, which one would be the horrible fascist in your mind? And if you don’t say the US, then you are not being consistent in you analyses.
I don’t think even she has the audacity to trot out “gold standard” again.
But after a cosmetic touch up, we can probably count on an Obama-esque “Nothing is perfect. But on the whole…”
Apart from the playfully manipulative reference to gold–why not diamonds?–a gold standard let alone THE gold standard hasn’t been operative since Hillary Clinton’s early 20s under Nixon. So what is she yapping about anyway. Of course she’ll support the pact which she recently only objected to because of certain details which she had no intention of stipulation. ‘See, it’s been all shined up and now I support it.’ Maybe she’s thinking we should back to the gold standard?
Wikileaks – PodestaFiles
February 21, 2016 – Joel Johnson (team Hillary)
From email chain on the need to crush Bernie like an annoying gnat.
Comrade Stalin is displeased.
That’s for after SHE wins. Erase all memory that there was anyone in between the reigns of a Clinton or a Bush.
Hmm, you might have the wrong end of the stick as regards the Houston Congresswoman–she was one of the House Dems that voted with Republicans to fast-track TTP. She must have been reassuring her constituents that it would get passed by HC, if Obama did not manage it. HC will still be taking her calls though she might become more circumspect.
Meanwhile, things have gotten trickier for Lame Duck passage as BLM has come out against it. I don’t know if they carry much weight with elected folks, though. Gauis Publius at NC recaps the ins and outs of TTP fast track passage and explores the new wrinkle.
BLM Comes Out Against TTP
Text has a link to the BLM article, but it’s subscription.
Reuters, Jonathan Allen – Clinton’s charity confirms Qatar’s $1 million gift while she was at State Dept
Peter Baker tweet:
Glenn responds
More Glenn:
The “explainer” should appear here at any moment.
NY Daily News Top Democrats demand investigation into FBI leaks to Rudy Giuliani about Clinton email investigation .
Totally appropriate demand. Rudy was bragging that he had a pipeline into the NY-FBI and could say “we have some surprises up our sleeve.” He’s now trying to walk that back. Would like to see this jerk indicted, convicted, and locked up.
OTOH, the DC-FBI and AG has been leaking like a sieve to HRC and her team. Allowing her/them to stay a step ahead of the investigation as to what they said to the FBI and public. That too requires and investigation.
How did the layout of this thread get so messed up. Too bad, I’d like to go through it.