Bob and the Heap

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

So, Rachel Maddow is having something of a week, and in her latest scoop we might note an aspect about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation we probably don’t take enough time to appreciate:

“The ‘Documents and Responsive Materials’ covered by the request include but are not limited to”—I love this—”both in draft and final form, all emails, voicemails, documents, photos, text messages, instant messages, electronic handwritten and/or hard copy records, databases, telephone records, correspondence, transcripts, audio recordings, analyses, briefings, assessments, banner entries, user agreements, audit records, metadata, storage devices, notes, memoranda, diary and calorie entries, excuse me, calorie entries, calendar entries, visitor logs, meeting attendance records, meeting room reservations, meeting agendas, badge records records of entry or exit to any building, room or security facility, safe access records, video surveillance of public and non-public areas, and access logs, including of classified information.”

Also smoke signals, if you have any of those, any removed tattoos you’d like to submit for laser analysis, x-rays from that time you broke your thumb at the company softball game. Also, your children’s report cards dating back to birth and their sonograms. Like, this is serious, right? They are going to need it all: Preservation notice.

It ends by saying, “To the extent any of you or your staffs have relevant documents, please identify and preserve them, so we can then evaluate whether and how to provide them to the requesters.”

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This memo went out on May 26th. Comey was only fired a couple of weeks before then. So this memo goes out May 26th to all these people at Justice, telling them to hand over all this stuff about Russia and about the firing of Comey. This is nine days after Mueller was named special counsel, and this is new . . . . This shows the scale of the request for documents and communications even within the Justice Department for people who may have ended up being witnesses to a potential crime that took place within the administration when the president fired his FBI director for reasons that remain in dispute and under criminal investigation.

It gives you a sense of the massive amount of stuff that Mueller and his team are hunting through in this investigation . . . . This also shows you the massive amount of stuff that has been collected by this investigation that will need to be preserved and protected somehow as evidence if, in fact, the president ends up coming for the Special Counsel’s office.

The amount of data this investigation must survey is a breathtaking prospect. In January, for instance, the Trump presidential campaign submitted 1.4 million pages in response to Special Counsel requests. The list of materials in the retention notice is not so much insane in and of itself as necessarily incomplete, and representative of, well, an insane amount of data. Badge records? Including room entry and exit? As Maddow said, “They are going to need it all.”

And then some.

Some 2020 Democratic Presidential Speculation, Just Because

It would be easy enough to overplay the drama in an early look toward the 2020 election by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin of the New York Times:

In a largely leaderless party, two distinct groups are emerging, defined mostly by age and national stature. On one side are three potential candidates approaching celebrity status who would all be over 70 years old on Election Day: Mr. Biden, and Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

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Competing against the Democrats’ senior cohort is a large and relatively shapeless set of younger candidates who span the ideological spectrum: governors, senators, mayors, wealthy executives and even members of the House. They are animated by the president’s turbulent debut and the recent history, from Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 to Mr. Trump’s last year, of upstart candidates’ catching fire.

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In the Senate alone, as much as a quarter of the Democrats’ 48-member caucus are thought to be giving at least a measure of consideration to the 2020 race, among them Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Kamala Harris of California. All are closer to 40 than 80.

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For now, however, it is the party’s septuagenarian trio that is casting the longest shadow over 2020, and all three have taken steps to extend or expand their leadership status in the party.

In between, for good measure, is discussion of an amorphous non-faction we might consider as the collected other, including Rep. Seth Moulton (MA-06), Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Before booking the orchestra for a dramatic score, we should remember this is merely April, 2017; Democrats need to to read the midterm map, first. That is to say, it seems a bit early to see who lands where in relation to what. And, admittedly, it is hard to account for the proverbial known unknowns in the time of Trump; the unknown unknowns seem extraordinary at this time, too.^α

Your Morning Misty Memory

This is just for the hell of it, because I had cause to think of it the other day. Never mind.

Hart Seely for Slate, circa 2003:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is an accomplished man. Not only is he guiding the war in Iraq, he has been a pilot, a congressman, an ambassador, a businessman, and a civil servant. But few Americans know that he is also a poet.

Until now, the secretary’s poetry has found only a small and skeptical audience: the Pentagon press corps. Every day, Rumsfeld regales reporters with his jazzy, impromptu riffs. Few of them seem to appreciate it.

But we should all be listening. Rumsfeld’s poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld’s gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O’Hara’s.