Republicans released their ACA “repeal and replace” plan, and it’s crap, but we knew that. Tell me how this isn’t going to deprive millions of people of health insurance. I’m sure there will be more analysis tomorrow.

However, some Republicans are objecting. They’re going to be in for a fight to pass this thing in the Senate. I haven’t yet heard if the House Freedom Caucus is on board.

Trump put out his new travel ban today. Paul Waldman writes,

…the terrorism that would be stopped by this new ban is virtually nonexistent. That’s for two reasons. First, experts have noted that there have been no fatal terrorist attacks on U.S. soil perpetrated since 9/11 by anyone from those six countries. Second, as an assessment from Trump’s own DHS has concluded, most foreign-born, U.S.-based violent extremists probably were radicalized years after getting here, rendering screening procedures of limited value in preventing the entry of such potential terror plotters.

See also: Hayden: Trump ‘Forgot That He Was President,’ Could See Wiretapping Proof. If only the rest of us could forget he is president. Seriously, this is ridiculous.

So this happened:

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

WaPo‘s fact checker ,Glenn Kessler, is a man who surely will want to retire to a quiet, happy place if he survives the Trump Administration. He tried to determine if the White House has any information about wire taps that it didn’t get from media reports, and came up zilch.

There are credible media reports that intelligence agencies — not President Obama — made a FISA request to investigate connections between Russian banks and a server owned by the Trump organization that may or may not have been in Trump Tower. That’s a far cry from Obama tapping Trump’s Trump Tower phones.

A lot of the reporting on right-wing sites is coming from a British reporter named Louise Mensch. Mensch just reported that there is new evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians, however, so the righties may have to find a new favorite reporter.

Karen Tumulty writes for WaPo,

Donald Trump’s presidency has veered onto a road with no centerlines or guardrails.

The president’s accusation Saturday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had tapped his phone “during the very sacred election process” escalated on Sunday into the White House’s call for a congressional investigation of that evidence-free claim.

The audacious tactic was a familiar one for Trump, who has little regard for norms and conventions. When he wants to change a subject, he often does it by touching a match to the dry tinder of a sketchy conspiracy theory.

But the stakes have gotten higher, and the consequences more real and serious, as questions mount over Moscow’s reported attempts to interfere with last year’s presidential election.

It’s my understanding that if Trump has knowledge of classified information on the wiretaps, he could have that information declassified. One suspects he does not.

Remember all those illegal voters gave Hillary Clinton the popular vote majority? Yeah, nobody but Trump does, either.

It was kind of amusing for private citizen Trump to continue to make stupid allegations about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but he’s not a private citizen any more. Some of the senior Republicans need to sit him down and gently explain to him that a president can’t do crap like this.

It may be that this morning’s Trump tweets about President Obama ordering a wiretap of Trump Tower was meant as a diversion. But it seems to me DJT could have come up with plenty of other diversions that didn’t make him sound crazier than a soup sandwich. I’m inclined to think he’s genuinely getting panicky.

Yesterday we looked at the fact that Michael Flynn lied about conversations he’d had with Russian officials that he must have known had been monitored. It’s hard to imagine he would have done that unless he’d been ordered to do so. Trump may have assumed that as POTUS he could get away with anything he wanted to do, and maybe now it’s starting to dawn on him that he’s being watched as he’s never been watched before.  Other parts of the federal government are not necessarily going to cover his ass because he’s the boss. And his old dodge of threatening to bury people with lawsuits won’t work any more.

And now, as always, it’s not the crime as much as it is the cover up:

The past few days have brought a growing list of confirmed communications between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials, with each new revelation adding to a cloud of suspicion that hangs over the White House as critics demand an independent investigation.

Trump’s team has offered various explanations for the meetings: Some encounters, they have said, were brief, no more than casual, polite introductions. Others involved the routine diplomacy common for officials surrounding a candidate for the nation’s highest office.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was an early Trump campaign adviser, said his two interactions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, first reported this week by The Washington Post, came in his role as a senator, not as a campaign surrogate.

It is unclear why the White House has consistently denied contacts with Russian officials if the meetings that took place were innocuous.

Note that Sessions used campaign funds, not his Senate account, when meeting the Russian ambassador. But yes, I’m sure the Russian ambassador goes about talking to all kinds of people. But any meeting with an innocent purpose could have been on the public record. It’s the sneaking around that’s got people suspicious. Which is why this tweet was particularly pathetic:

We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite! pic.twitter.com/Ik3yqjHzsA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017

And it seems Sessions’s decided to recuse himself without waiting for orders from Trump, which means Sessions is at least a tad shrewder than Trump is about how Washington works.

Before heading off to his so-called “winter White House” in Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday, President Donald Trump summoned some of his senior staff to the Oval Office and went “ballistic,” senior White House sources told ABC News.

The president erupted with anger over the latest slew of news reports connecting Russia with the new administration — specifically the abrupt decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.

Sources said the president felt Sessions’ recusal was unnecessary and only served to embolden Trump’s political opponents.

Sessions knew recusing himself would take some of the pressure off, and that seems to have worked.

There’s a breaking story about how, last summer, the RNC tabled a proposed platform plank that called for providing arms to the Ukrainian army. A Trump ally has blabbed that this was done on the orders of Trump himself. But I’ll get back to this later.

The scandal brewing about secret ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin is a serious matter, but not for reasons most people think.

I run into people who to this day sincerely believe the election results should be overturned in Clinton’s favor because of Russian hacking. And I run into other people who weren’t Clinton supporters who think the whole thing is just the Democrats being overwrought because they lost the election. But it’s not about the election. The election was just a sideshow.

It’s noteworthy that the Russian hacking scandal didn’t blow up into a big bleeping deal until after Clinton had lost, even though the Washington Post had reported on the hacking of the DNC in June and the first Wikileaks release was in July. Everybody paying attention to politics had heard about the allegations that Assange was working with the Russians long before the election, in other words.

But the Clinton faction pooh-poohed the Wikileaks releases and were silent on Russian hackers until Clinton lost. Then they started screaming about Russian hacking.

However, an analysis of the timing of Wikileaks releases shows no significant impact on opinion polls. Further, the November election was something like a perfect storm of many factors that worked against Hillary Clinton, and of all those factors Wikileaks falls pretty far down the list. IMO it’s probable the election results would have been about the same without the Russian hacks.

It’s entirely possible the Kremlin did hope to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, but that’s no longer the central issue. Wikileaks was a sideshow.

The real issue is spelled out in this op ed by Susan Craig, an adjunct professor of international affairs at Washington University, St. Louis, and former intelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

As any intelligence professional knows, being truthful about your transgressions is the only way through the clearance process. Pirating music, falling behind on your debt payments or even smoking pot will not prevent you from getting a security clearance. But lying about those things most certainly will. Not being truthful about past misbehaviors opens you up to the possibility of blackmail by determined adversaries looking for access to our nation’s secrets.

Flynn most certainly knows this, and Russia is notoriously good at identifying such vulnerabilities. So why would Flynn engage in conversations with the Russian ambassador and then misrepresent the content of those calls to Vice President Mike Pence? In doing so, he could not have made it easier for the Russians to identify an opening.

Another thing all intelligence professionals — including Flynn — know is that the conversations of foreign officials are monitored. Surely Flynn read transcripts of similar conversations when he was the Defense Intelligence Agency director. So why would he deny the content of his conversation, while knowing that conversation was tapped by our nation’s own intelligence agencies (and most likely Russia’s intelligence services)?

This leads me to the following conclusion: Either Flynn knew he was exposing himself to the Russians for exploitation or he already was compromised. The recent revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions exhibited the same behavior — engaging in conversations with the Russian ambassador and then denying their very existence — leads me to the same conclusion about him. Which begs the question: Who else at the highest level of our government is facilitating Russian access and influence? What about the president? [emphasis added]

That, my dears, is why all these secret and lied-about communications with the Russians are a big bleeping deal. The word for today, boys and girls, is blackmail. 

Josh Marshall, today:

In the late 90s and early aughts, Donald Trump ran out of lenders. A string of bankruptcies on top of numerous ventures where he walked away unscathed and lenders lost their shirts convinced every major US bank to stop lending to him. The only exception is DeutscheBank, which of course is not a US bank. This put Trump’s whole family business under great strain. In response he increasingly took capital from abroad, especially from Russia and other post-Soviet successor states. … None of this is speculation. All of this happened. What we don’t know is quite the degree of his dependence on money from the former Soviet Union, both for investment capital and for the purchase the numerous apartment units which make up his ubiquitous high-rises.

If Trump had released his complete tax returns, we would know to whom he owes money. Obviously, he’s not going to release that information voluntarily. And I’ll re-link to this article I linked to yesterday, What The CIA and FBI Knew About Trump Before 2016.

And then there’s the infamous Trump dossier, allegedly held by Russians, that allegedly has compromising personal and financial information about Trump. Some of the stories about it do seem silly. But given Trump’s known history — which includes stiffing vendors and investors, ties to the mob, and outright fraud in the case of his “university” — does anyone actually doubt that the Russians have a dossier on him of stuff he’d rather not be made public? It might not be any worse than what’s already known, but of course there’s a dossier.

So today we learn that Trump ordered language about providing arms to Ukraine for defense against Russia be removed from the Republican platform. The original story was that Trump had had nothing to do with that.

Whatever was and is going on, the cover-up is unraveling. And it’s unraveling pretty durn fast.

Update: See also Jeff Sessions and the September 8th Meeting by Martin Longman

Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, although he’s still the head of the Justice Department, so his underlings will still be involved. May I express skepticism that the recusal means all that much?

But even weirder, this afternoon the White House volunteered the information that Michael Flynnn and Jared Kushner met the Russian ambassador in December at Trump Tower. This makes me suspect the White House is hiding a whole lot more and is trying to get ahead of it.

Josh Marshall just published a post titled What The CIA and FBI Knew About Trump Before 2016 that needs to be read. It appears the Russians meddling in elections is just a side show.

So last night the Washington Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress under oath.

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race. …

… At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.

“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.

“There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’s spokeswoman.

No, not “misleading” at all. It was a flat-out lie.

There are widespread calls for Sessions to recuse himself from any investigations involving the Trump Administration and Russia. But since he’s the head of the Justice Department and FBI, I’m not sure how that could work or be inforced. No, for once, I’m siding with Chuck Schumer — Sessions should bleeping resign.

Chris Cillizza wrote that it’s now political suicide for the Republicans to stonewall a deeper investigation into the Russian connection, but I predict they will continue to stonewall. Certainly the Trumpettes will continue to deny anybody did anything wrong, because that’s all they know how to do.

This morning the Trumpettes are arguing that Sessions met with the Russians in his capacity as senator, not as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. However,

Sessions was clearly identified as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign ahead of the first of his meetings with the ambassador, and his ties to Trump world are deep and far-reaching. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump; served as chairman of his national security advisory committee; is seen as an intellectual godfather of key Trump administration policies, like the travel ban against citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries; was a frequent presence at Trump Tower during the post-election transition to the White House; and loaned key members of his senior staff to the Trump campaign, several of whom ended up with plum roles in the administration.

Greg Sargent:

The news is breaking that two prominent Republicans — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz — are now calling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from ongoing FBI investigations into Russian meddling in the election. This comes after The Post reported that Sessions twice spoke with the Russian ambassador during the campaign, after having claimed under oath that he had not had contact with Russian officials.

The latest moves by two senior Republicans amount to a sign that, little by little, the protective wall the GOP has built around President Trump is beginning to erode, though there is still a long, long way to go before we can expect any serious oversight.

Josh Marshall:

My biggest takeaway is that this scandal has all the attributes of the vast and shattering scandals in which people who at least appear to have only indirect or limited roles themselves keep getting pulled under or compromised by it. I know “vast and shattering” is a pretty portentous phrase. Certainly, this revelation itself doesn’t shake anything to its foundations. But why did Sessions have this meeting at all? It seems at best ill-conceived, coming in the heat of allegations of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia last Fall.

Far more baffling, why did he choose to conceal it?

See also Charles Pierce.

It’s bad enough that headlines are calling last night’s speech “presidential” and even “hopeful.” I read the thing this morning. It seemed to me to be the same old hateful crap, with some conciliatory bleats tacked on to the beginning and end to make it more palatable. It was a true shit sandwich.

Josh Marshall:

I think purely as a speech, its crafting, the thematic cadence and delivery, it was pretty average to unremarkable. It wasn’t a very good speech. Having said that, I think Trump may pick up a few points of support from the public because he seemed like a fairly normal person delivering it. This is admittedly an extremely low standard. But when you compare this Trump to the meltdown press conference Trump or the rageful, spewing Twitter Trump, he can’t help but seem more balanced and less threatening by comparison. Low bar. SAD! But there it is.

I think that’s exactly what happened. He’s being praised for managing to not crap on the lecturn.

Karen Tumulty:

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, Trump declared Tuesday that he had come to the House chamber to deliver “a message of unity and strength.”

Though Trump’s rhetoric took him to a new and loftier plane, however, the goals he spelled out were the familiar and divisive ones that have left little room for compromise and conciliation — as evidenced by the fact that the Democratic side of the chamber sat largely silent and stone-faced throughout his speech.

Nor did the president give his Republican allies in Congress what they had wanted to hear, which was a sense of clarity on how he plans to achieve the ambitious agenda he promised. There were few detail offered and no nod to the complexity of the issues nor the fact that achieving his goals will require navigating deep fissures within his own party.

The whole sorry thing left me sputtering in outrage, although most of it was generic Republican drivel. This is the part where he colored way outside the old lines:

I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims.  The office is called VOICE –- Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement.  We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.

Joining us in the audience tonight are four very brave Americans whose government failed them.

Their names are Jamiel Shaw, Susan Oliver, Jenna Oliver, and Jessica Davis.

Jamiel’s 17-year-old son was viciously murdered by an illegal immigrant gang member, who had just been released from prison.  Jamiel Shaw Jr. was an incredible young man, with unlimited potential who was getting ready to go to college where he would have excelled as a great quarterback.  But he never got the chance.  His father, who is in the audience tonight, has become a good friend of mine.

Also with us are Susan Oliver and Jessica Davis.  Their husbands –- Deputy Sheriff Danny Oliver and Detective Michael Davis –- were slain in the line of duty in California.  They were pillars of their community.  These brave men were viciously gunned down by an illegal immigrant with a criminal record and two prior deportations.

Sitting with Susan is her daughter, Jenna.  Jenna:  I want you to know that your father was a hero, and that tonight you have the love of an entire country supporting you and praying for you.

To Jamiel, Jenna, Susan and Jessica:  I want you to know –- we will never stop fighting for justice.  Your loved ones will never be forgotten, we will always honor their memory.

Certainly, anyone who has lost a loved one to violence deserves sympathy. But losing a loved one to violence hardly makes one a “hero.” And the scapegoating of undocumented people as a violent, criminal element in our midst is both inaccurate and unjust. In saying this, Trump has planted a flag firmly in neo-fascist territory.

First, let us be clear there is absolutely no data to suggest that immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, are commiting violent crimes at a higher rate than natural-born citizens. Just the opposite, in fact. So where is the special cocmmission for victims of natural-born citizens? How are such people not just as “heroic”?

Please see:

The Cato Institute: Immigration and Crime – What the Research Says “With few exceptions, immigrants are less crime prone than natives or have no effect on crime rates. ”

The Police Foundation: Undocumented Immigration and Rates of Crime and Imprisonment:
Popular Myths and Empirical Realities. (PDF) Here’s a quote:

“Both contemporary and historical studies, including official crime statistics and victimization surveys since the early 1990s, data from the last three decennial censuses, national and regional surveys in areas of immigrant concentration, and investigations carried out by major government commissions over the past century, have shown instead that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and lower incarceration rates.”

The Anti-Defamation League: Myths and Facts About Immigrants and Immigration

“Recently, public figures have claimed that immigrants are “killers” and “rapists,” bringing crime to the U.S. Study after study has shown, however, that immigrants—regardless of where they are from, what immigration status they hold, and how much education they have completed—are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes or become incarcerated. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while the overall percentage of immigrants and the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. both increased sharply between 1990 and 2010, the violent crime rate in the U.S. during that time plummeted 45 percent and the property crime rate dropped by 42 percent. Studies have consistently found that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans and that there was no correlation between crime rates and levels of immigration. Other studies have in fact found that crime rates are lowest in states with the highest immigration growth rates.”

I could go on. There is copious data from research organizations across the political spectrum telling us that immigration is not causing a crime problem. The perception that there’s a particular problem with immigrant crime, as opposed to regular old human-on-human crime, is coming purely from bigotry, not data.

Neo-fascism is widely defined as “a political movement arising in Europe after World War II and characterized by policies designed to incorporate the basic principles of fascism (as nationalism and opposition to democracy) into existing political systems.”  Britannica says,

Like earlier fascist movements, neofascism advocated extreme nationalism, opposed liberal individualism, attacked Marxist and other left-wing ideologies, indulged in racist and xenophobic scapegoating, and promoted populist right-wing economic programs. Unlike the fascists, however, neofascists placed more blame for their countries’ problems on non-European immigrants than on leftists and Jews, displayed little interest in taking lebensraum (German: “living space”) through the military conquest of other states, and made concerted efforts to portray themselves as democratic and “mainstream.” The National Front in France, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the Liberal-Democratic Party in Russia, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, are often cited as neofascist.

The scapegoating of immigrants is a prominent feature in European neofascism, so it should be no surprise to see it here. And certainly, ugly nativist movements have sprung up before. The purpose of this is, as it has always been, to divide us; to absolve the genuinely guilty of blame; to establish power and authority through fear. As Giles Fraser wrote at The Guardian, scapegoating immigrants is the oldest trick in the book. Scapegoating any vulnerable minority — whether immigrants, blacks, Jews, Latinos, or anyone else — is a hallmark of fascism. And it’s hardly speaking to the better angels of our natures.

I’m very discouraged to see that nearly all the media are giving Trump a pass on this and instead praised him for mouthing cliches about “the dreams that fill our hearts.” The dream that fills my heart is that his monster and all of his enablers will be removed from office, sooner rather than later.