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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused on Tuesday to intercede in a mysterious fight over a sealed grand jury subpoena to a foreign corporation issued by a federal prosecutor who may or may not be Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia affair.
The court’s action means the corporation, which has not been identified, must provide information to the prosecutor or face financial penalties. The court’s two-sentence order gave no reasons and provided no details.
Almost everything about the case has been cloaked in secrecy, but a three-page ruling issued on Dec. 18 by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit provided a few hints.
An unnamed foreign government, referred to in the ruling as Country A, owns the corporation, an unsigned order from a unanimous three-judge panel of the appeals court said. The panel was made up of Judges David S. Tatel, Thomas B. Griffith and Stephen F. Williams.
The panel rejected the corporation’s argument that it could not be forced to comply with the subpoena under a federal law that provides immunity from lawsuits to foreign governments in some circumstances. Even if that law applied to cases concerning grand jury subpoenas, the panel ruled, the law makes an exception for foreign governments’ commercial activities.
The panel also rejected the corporation’s argument that the subpoena was “unreasonable and oppressive” because complying with it would require the corporation to violate one of its home country’s law.
“The text of the foreign law provision the corporation relies on does not support its position,” the panel wrote, adding that explanations from the corporation’s lawyers and “a regulator from Country A” were unpersuasive.
“Consequently,” the panel wrote, “we are unconvinced that Country A’s law truly prohibits the Corporation from complying with the subpoena.”
The appeals court’s decision affirmed a sealed ruling by Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court in Washington that had held the corporation in contempt and imposed, as the appeals court put it, “a fixed monetary penalty to increase each day the corporation fails to comply.”
President Donald Trump made several false or misleading statements about illegal immigration and border security in a nationally televised speech Tuesday evening.
"Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl.”
Misleading. Most fentanyl comes from China. Although most heroin enters the U.S. through the border with Mexico, most of that is intercepted at legal ports of entry, according to a 2018 report by the Drug Enforcement Administration. "A small percentage of all heroin seized by CBP along the land border was between Ports of Entry,” the report reads. A separate DEA report published three years earlier said Mexican cartels move “the bulk of their drugs” over the border using passenger vehicles or tractor trailers. “The drugs are typically secreted in hidden compartments when transported in passenger vehicles or comingled with legitimate goods when transported in tractor trailers,” the report reads.
"The wall would also be paid for indirectly by the great new trade deal we made with Mexico."
That’s not true. Trump vowed during his presidential campaign that Mexico would pay for the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, but Mexico has refused to pay. The president now insists that Mexico will pay for the project through a renegotiated NAFTA agreement known as the USMCA. The deal still needs congressional approval and isn’t yet in effect, but even if it were in effect, any economic gains from the deal would go to private individuals and companies, not the U.S. Treasury.
"The federal government remains shut down for one reason and one reason only: because Democrats will not fund border security."
That’s not true. Democrats have refused Trump’s demand of $5.7 billion for a border wall (which evolved into a demand for “steel slats”). But they have backedbills to reopen the government and proposed more than $1 billion for border security.
“I bring you a message, a message few of you will be able to believe. A message of great importance. A message I alone was able to read in the fires of the universe.”
It’s funny that we’re still talking about the physical features of what President Trump wants or will settle for on our country’s southern border — about whether it will be concrete or steel, solid or slatted, a fancied-up fence or, in Nancy Pelosi’s hilariously acerbic dig, a “beaded curtain.” Because it’s not really a wall that Trump is after, if indeed it ever was. It’s a victory for victory’s sake. It’s a show of his might. It’s proof of his potency.
Of course he discussed it in a much different manner on Tuesday night, when, for the first time during his presidency, he formally addressed Americans from the Oval Office in prime time. He spoke of a “crisis of the heart” on the border. He spoke of a “crisis of the soul.” He mentioned drugs, crime, Americans who have lost their lives because of undocumented immigrants and Americans who have lost their jobs to them. It was an epic threat that he painted — and a grossly exaggerated one. Whatever it takes to deliver on a promise that he should never have made.
Whatever it takes to salvage his pride.
The longer his stalemate with Democrats in Congress grinds on, the clearer that becomes. Seldom has a president’s ego been this tender, and seldom has it required so much shoring up. There’s not enough concrete in creation for that job.
A president only gets one chance to make his first Oval Office address—making Donald Trump’s reiteration of familiar talking points in a short speech Tuesday night all the more puzzling.
Over the course of roughly 10 minutes, Trump brought his case for more spending on border security directly to the American people, saying there is “a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our Southern border.” Trump argued that crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants are a serious danger to the American people, and called on Democrats to give him $5.7 billion to fund a wall on the border. But the president didn’t offer any new arguments. Nor did he declare a national emergency, a step he has said he is considering.
The speech was bewildering. Was this stiff oration given by the same man who captured the nation’s attention—and elicited outrage—with his descent down a gold escalator in June 2015, his vow that “I alone can fix it” in summer 2016, or his invocation of “American carnage” in January 2017? It’s hard to believe that master showman was the same person who sat behind the Resolute Desk on Tuesday.
