The REAL Scandal: Republicans Are Kompromized by the Kremlin

If the Republicans' efforts to dig up scandals on Joe Biden and his son Hunter - in an effort to weaken Biden's standing and cause embarrassment to cover for donald trump's real weaknesses and scandals (and upcoming criminal trials) - looked weak and ridiculous on their own, that's because the GOP's efforts to stir up scandal were weak and ridiculous.

And now, those Republican efforts have turned into a goddamned John Le Carre spy novel with the revelation that one of their key "witnesses" to Hunter Biden's business shenanigans was not only lying about his testimony but that he was passing along "evidence" fabricated by Russian Intelligence.

It's unsettling enough that the Special Counsel overseeing the investigation in Hunter Biden's potential criminal behavior had to pull a 180 on relying on this "witness" Alexander Smirnov and issue felony charges against him instead. And then, worrying that the Nevada magistrate who handled the bail release on Smirnov was giving Smirnov a chance to flee the country, they recharged Smirnov in a California court with more specific evidence - and that he was a flight risk - to ensure the guy stayed in custody.

How important was this "witness" to Republicans digging for Biden dirt? According to that AP News report from Lindsay Whitehurst, this important:

Smirnov’s claims have been central to the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family and helped spark what is now a House impeachment inquiry into Biden.

They became a flashpoint in Congress in July as Republicans demanded the FBI release the unredacted form, a so-called FD-1023, documenting the unverified allegations. Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky had subpoenaed the form as Republicans deepened their probe ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Republicans acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if the allegations were true but said they were significant in their investigation of Hunter Biden.

The allegations of Russian contact with the source of those allegations should be a death knell for the impeachment inquiry, said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “It appears like the whole thing is not only obviously false and fraudulent but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda,” he said.

Of course, the Republican leaders on this - Comer, Jim Jordan, the other clowns in that car - are running away from having Smirnov as their keystone to their entire impeachment effort, except for the fact they've been running away from every other tainted source they tried to rely on over the past year of sham hearings and "rumored" revelations.

What this twist exposes is not only their failure to find legitimate scandal against their true target Joe Biden (they honestly don't care if Hunter goes to jail or not), but exposes how corrupted and compromised the modern Republican Party leadership is towards a foreign power like Putin's Russia. The nominally conservative pundit at Washington Post Jennifer Rubin spells out the problem (this was via a gift link, don't know if it will paywall):

Are Republicans easy marks or willing participants in Russian anti-Biden operations? That’s a troubling question raised by the Feb. 14 grand jury indictment of a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, on charges of concocting a tale about President Biden’s supposed involvement in his family members’ business dealings.

Allegations by Smirnov — who appears to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to the federal indictment — have formed the backbone of the House Republicans’ laughable attempt to build an impeachment case against the president. They championed him as their star witness. Now the Republicans’ fact-deficient storyline has been shredded...

Now Republicans are pretending that Smirnov wasn’t so important after all. They’re vowing to plow ahead on this cock-and-bull mission that never got off the ground. Not only did multiple witnesses testify that Biden had no involvement with his son’s business dealings, but previous allegations that Biden acted on his son’s behalf had also already been thoroughly repudiated...

The current House debacle overlaps with a Russian disinformation project described by the national security specialists Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa on the website Just Security in 2020. That scheme enticed Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) to buy into the now-discredited scenario that as vice president Biden sought on behalf of his son to stop an investigation of Burisma. (It also added in another phony Ukraine election interference claim.)

And let’s not forget that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf.

The current revelations concerning Smirnov should not merely spell the end of the comically inept impeachment proceedings; they should provoke questions about Republicans’ recklessness in peddling claims they apparently knew were unreliable.

At the very least, it is clear that House Republicans had reason to be skeptical of Smirnov’s allegations instead of embracing them. FBI briefers “warned lawmakers that the document, known as a 1023, containing Smirnov’s allegations against the Bidens also included raw, uncorroborated intelligence that should not be made public,” CNN reported on Wednesday. Even if the Republicans did not know Smirnov might have ties to Russian intelligence, they certainly knew the basis for making wild allegations about Biden was extremely shaky...

Republicans’ affinity over multiple elections for Russian-backed plots should warrant wall-to-wall coverage. (Let us not forget Russian efforts detailed in the Mueller report to enlist the Trump campaign and sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.) Responsible news outlets should press House Republicans to justify their refusal to vote for aid for Ukraine and habit of spreading Russian conspiracy theories.

In short, Trump (enabled by House Republicans) wants Ukraine aid blocked and invites Vladimir Putin to invade NATO countries with military budgets Trump deems insufficient. He already has served as an indispensable helpmate in Putin’s assault on democracy and the international order. No wonder Russia appears yet again ready to pull out all the stops to boost Trump.

Rubin refers back to a particular matter that obsessed me during the trump years: The Mueller Report. It annoys me to no end that when then-Attorney General Barr - appointed by trump to shut down the Mueller investigation before it closed in on trump himself - ended that grand jury probe, he promoted - and the mainstream media bought into - the lie that the Report "exonerated trump" and that was the end of that. What everyone seemed to ignore were the factual elements Mueller's team found - the first half of his legal objectives - rampant and provable evidence that Russian Intelligence and their oligarch allies actively engaged in election interference in 2016. What Mueller couldn't prove was trump's direct involvement with those efforts (instead Mueller found at least five instances of Obstruction, which he couldn't criminally charge due to Presidential Immunity but tried to get House Democrats to attempt impeachment, which they failed to pursue).

I remain shocked and angered to this day that Congress both Democrats and Republicans failed to heed Mueller's - and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence agencies - warnings that Russia - above all the other foreign powers looking to interfere like China and Iran - will continue to attack America's electoral systems to force the results - like stealing the presidency AGAIN for trump - that benefits Russia instead of the U.S. and our long-standing European / Middle Eastern / Asian allies. There's been almost no legislation - no priority put to making our elections more secure nor passing legal sanctions and punishments on Russia for their crimes. We're talking about acts of war getting committed on us - our rights as Americans - and nothing, no response.

Worse: We have had solid evidence for almost a decade that Russia was, is, and will do anything they can to disrupt and divide the United States. And it's getting clearer that the Republican Party as a group are happy to help them.

I mentioned before how the Republican mindset - drawing from their deep conservative ideology - their One Truth is that they view only themselves as True Americans. To do so, everyone else - aka Democrats and those who do not fit in the Republican Culture War like women, Blacks, Latinos, gays and trans, and more - dare not and cannot be considered "American" even though geographically, demographically, philosophically, we are as American as they.

Their problem is that those conservative Republicans are not in the actual majority of Americans... and they know it. They've been sliding out of contention with the majority of voters since 2008, they'd been warned after the 2012 election cycle, and yet instead of moderating themselves to retain broad appeal the conservatives doubled down on Culture War extremism and RINO purging to keep party unity, tied into aggressive state-level and federal-level gerrymandering and voter suppression to skew elections to their favor.

Thing is, that Game of Demographics can only work for so long, as the Republican extremism on issues like abortion (and related issues like birth control and IVF) and tax cuts for the rich peel away the edges of their GOP voting base to where they can't "win" even with all the gerrymandering and suppression.

So the Republicans are desperate to get any help from anywhere they can. Even if that help is coming from a foreign power like Russia where their leader Putin and his cronies are openly threatening our allies and our own nation's safety/stability. Even when that help falls under open acts of sedition that rely on corrupted persons like Smirnov. 

Similar to how trump's 2016 campaign met with and tried to coordinate with Russian nationals over getting dirt on Hillary Clinton - in possible violation of 52 US Code sect. 30121 - the current House Republican leadership and their allies from trump's Justice Department (looking at you Bill Barr) have come dangerously close to breaking that law getting tampered/manufactured Russian intel just to pursue false claims against Biden. Not to mention more obviously legal problems like suborning perjury and presenting false evidence.

The GOP leaders did all this because they truly believe 1) they're above the law, 2) they're the Real Americans fighting against un-American Democratic "criminals," 3) the Russians are not the bad guys. That last part is important because the modern Republicans driven by their Culture War bullshit truly see Putin - with his open homophobia, his disdain for "librul" Western norms, and "traditionalist" worldview (not to mention his sadism towards his lessers) - as a serious ally in that Culture War.

I wasn't there to see it, but I read the history books about the Red Scare, the McCarthyism of the 1950s where conservative Republicans openly hunted liberals and left-leaning Americans as Communist threats buddying up to Stalinist Soviet Russia. "Pinko down to their underwear" was the accusations, and anybody who ever expressed solidarity with Soviet Russia were hounded until they were broken or dead. Today, we now see those inheritors of the conservative Republicans happily and publicly embracing a Russian regime that may no longer be Communist but is just as corrupt and tyrannical as anything Stalin ever led.

The irony of such betrayal is lost on these modern Republicans, too greedy and too desperate to stay in power to see how they've sold their own ideals and their own nation out to a Russian dictator.

This scandal ought to convince every American voter who truly wants what is best for our nation - for our families, for our communities, for our future - to stop voting for a Republican Party corrupted and compromised beyond redemption. 

Elections matter, people. There's a reason why Putin wants to corrupt ours this 2024 just like he tried in 2020 and succeeded in back in 2016. Get the vote out, America. For the LOVE OF COUNTRY  everybody, do NOT vote (R)epublican (R)ussia.

This May Be for trump, But It's Feeling Like Fitzmas

A lot of you kids may be too young to remember, but back in 2003 there was a serious criminal investigation into political shenanigans that disrupted national security: Reporters outed a noted critic of the Bush administration's Iraqi invasion narrative as being the husband of a CIA covert operative Valerie Plame. Because that revelation exposed ongoing CIA operations - a serious breach of security and forced the shutdown of various overseas operations, if not exposing other operatives to harm - the agency insisted on a special prosecutor to hunt down the leaks, which ended up pointing to Vice President Dick Cheney's office staff that were eagerly promoting our nation's involvement in Iraq. 

The Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had a solid reputation as as prosecutor, and by all evidence he conducted a thorough investigation. By 2005, many of Bush's (and Cheney's) critics - the ones who opposed the Iraqi invasion, and who questioned the lack of WMDs that were a cause for that invasion - were hoping that Fitzgerald found enough proof that the leakers included Cheney himself (or that they at least did so on Cheney's orders).

Excitement ran high. Those of us waiting - and yes, I was among that throng - began calling the expectant day of charges "Fitzmas" as a mash-up on Fitz's name to Christmas: The Special Counsel as our Santa Claus delivering presents indicting a corrupt administration of their malice and deceit.

So there was a ton of disappointment when Fitzgerald's final report led to only one person getting charged - Scooter Libby, who was found guilty by a jury but then his sentence commuted by Bush to complete the cover-up - and not enough evidence to prove Cheney had any hand in the leak (Karl Rove almost got indicted on charges of lying to investigators, but Fitzgerald decided against it).

Ever since then, there's been this sense of justice denied. That the moment of holding corrupt figures in high office accountable - Dick Cheney then, donald trump now - had passed us by.

The Mueller special counsel investigation into both Russia's involvement in the 2016 elections as well as any trump ties to Russia during that election cycle started and ended in a similar fashion: High expectations that the most obvious thing - trump had known business ties for decades to Russia, half his campaign people had ties to Russia, trump openly begged for Russia to dig up dirt on Hillary - would lead to justice against a strutting con artist. That ended with Mueller proving only half the matter - he uncovered Russian interference in our elections - while AG Barr ended Mueller's work prematurely and issued a heavily redacted report that Barr claimed exonerated trump (which we can't prove because too much of it remains redacted).

Today, we're coping with a series of federal criminal investigations since 2021, of donald trump's involvement with the January 6th insurrection as well as revelations that trump pilfered hundreds of classified documents to Mar-A-Lago. If you've been regularly following this blog, you'll know that I've been waiting - impatiently, as before - for some form of justice to finally indict trump for the things he's done.

(And this is alongside the state-level investigations in Georgia that should issue indictments on trump and his allies for electoral interference and election fraud - maybe even state racketeering - some time in late July)

It's like every other day there are new revelations and reports to the media about how Special Counsel Jack Smith's digging into trump's misdeeds are going, but today a lot of bombshells got dropped that hint to the very big possibility that federal felony indictments on the Mar-A-Lago documents case are happening this weekend.

A more formal report at the Guardian from Hugo Lowell:

Federal prosecutors formally informed Donald Trump’s lawyers last week that the former US president is a target of the criminal investigation examining his retention of national security materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort and obstruction of justice, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The move dramatically raises the stakes for Trump as the investigation appears to near its conclusion after taking evidence before a grand jury in Washington and a previously unknown grand jury in Florida that was impaneled last month.

Trump’s lawyers were sent a “target letter” days before they met on Monday with the special counsel Jack Smith leading the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the senior career official in the deputy attorney general’s office and argued that prosecutors should not indict the former president in the matter...

On Wednesday, former Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich testified before the Florida grand jury and was asked in part about a statement that Trump drafted in early 2022 that said he had given “everything” back after he returned 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives.

The statement was never issued, Budowich is understood to have confirmed. Several aides to Trump were against releasing the statement because they were not confident that the assertion was accurate, a person close to the former president said.

What charges might emanate from the Florida grand jury remains unclear.

But prosecutors would most probably prefer to bring charges in Washington, where the judges at the US district court are more familiar with handling national security cases – though Florida also has a robust national security section – and the jury pool skews more Democratic.

The impaneling of grand juries has to do with where prosecutors believe a crime was committed. And the most straightforward reason for the Florida grand jury is that prosecutors have developed evidence of criminal activity at Mar-a-Lago, which is in the southern district of Florida.

In this investigation, prosecutors considering charges against Trump for retaining national security material may have concluded from the evidence that he was still president when classified documents were moved to Mar-a-Lago, meaning his “unlawful possession” only started in Florida...

Andrew Feinberg over at the Independent (may be paywalled) is reporting the grand jury is voting this week on the indictments:

The Department of Justice is preparing to ask a Washington, DC grand jury to indict former president Donald Trump for violating the Espionage Act and for obstruction of justice as soon as Thursday, adding further weight to the legal baggage facing Trump as he campaigns for his party’s nomination in next year’s presidential election.

The Independent has learned that prosecutors are ready to ask grand jurors to approve an indictment against Trump for violating a portion of the US criminal code known as Section 793, which prohibits “gathering, transmitting or losing” any “information respecting the national defense”...

It is understood that prosecutors intend to ask grand jurors to vote on the indictment on Thursday, but that vote could be delayed as much as a week until the next meeting of the grand jury to allow for a complete presentation of evidence, or to allow investigators to gather more evidence for presentation if necessary...

A separate grand jury that is meeting in Florida has also been hearing evidence in the documents investigation. That grand jury was empaneled in part to overcome legal issues posed by the fact that some of the crimes allegedly committed by Mr Trump took place in that jurisdiction, not in Washington. Under federal law, prosecutors must bring charges against federal defendants in the jurisdiction where the crimes took place.

Even if grand jurors vote to return an indictment against the ex-president this week, it is likely that those charges would remain sealed until both the Washington and Florida grand juries complete their work.

Feinberg added that that Mark Meadows - who was serving as trump's last Chief of Staff during the final days of his administration, and who was clearly in the room when a lot of things happened - has already testified to both federal grand juries and has accepted a plea deal to testify in exchange for lesser charges.

MORE: It is understood that Mr Trump's last White House chief of staff, @MarkMeadows, has agreed to plead guilty to several lesser federal crimes in exchange for his testimony under a limited grant of immunity. https://t.co/7ZMm60nhxf

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) June 7, 2023

It may take a few more days for all of this to play out. 

HOWEVER.

(Insert GIF of Happy Snoopy Dance)

I'm as giddy as a schoolboy.

And so, in honor of the Fitzmas that's finally arriving - better late than never - a quick little ditty sung to the tune of "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" (lyrics by Michael Buble):

It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
As Smith's grand juries go
Trump is looking at five to ten with indictments closing in
Obstruction and espionage don't you know

It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Classified docs on the floor
But the prettiest sight to see is Donald Trump that will be
Behind his own prison door

And while we're at at, Justice Department, will you PLEASE release the full unredacted Mueller Report?

Ahhhh, this could be an enjoyable weekend for me, personally.

And yes. I know the Proud Boy types might start street riots if this happens, but damn trump and his decades of avoiding his sins. Let justice be done.

Release The Full Mueller

I admit I put a lot of faith into Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's involvement with our 2016 election cycle. As I wrote earlier:

Even with all that Mueller did find regarding the Russian end of the scandal - which produced real results, numerous arrests/plea deals/convictions, and exposed the facts of how foreign influence in our elections is an ongoing problem - the investigation closed - thanks to incoming Attorney General William Barr who rewrote and redacted the final report - before any direct links between trump's 2016 campaign and Russian operatives could be proved. At best, Mueller found evidence that trump obstructed the investigation, but he couldn't pursue an arrest and tried to get Congress to file impeachment (which they failed to do. The Democratic House decided to impeach over trump's misdeeds with Ukrainian military aid)...

There is still fallout from what the Mueller investigation achieved, due to how AG Barr bent and warped reality to protect trump from accountability. The legal fight over how Barr mishandled the final report - the conclusions Mueller found, which should have led to trump facing obstruction charges - kicked up a notch last week when the judges overseeing the matter found Barr did bad bad things. Via NPR and AP News:

The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memo Barr cited in announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, a federal appeals panel said Friday.

The department had argued that the 2019 memo represented private deliberations of its lawyers before any decision was formalized, and was thus exempt from disclosure. A federal judge previously disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to provide it to a government transparency group that had sued for it.

At issue in the case is a March 24, 2019, memorandum from the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation could support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.

Barr has said he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe, which was an investigation of whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election.

A year later, a federal judge sharply rebuked Barr's handling of Mueller's report, saying Barr had made "misleading public statements" to spin the investigation's findings in favor of Trump and had shown a "lack of candor..."

While it does not look like this would lead to anything like re-opening the investigation, this may clear a path towards re-opening the final Mueller Report itself, which was so heavily redacted on Barr's orders to where any meaningful understanding of trump's role in the scandals were covered up.

There is serious evidence that donald trump and his campaign aides were directly involved in foreign agents to disrupt and corrupt our nation's electoral system back in 2016. These are problems we are still facing today. A full review of the Mueller Report will show us who the bad actors are, and show us where the faults are in the system so we can get these problems fixed.

Gods, we need to know. And we need to make sure this disaster never happens again.

The Aftermath of trumpian Scandals, Still Acted Out

One of the sadder thoughts I carry with me is how - looking back on it now - I had so much hope that the Mueller Report - into Russia's involvement in the 2016 Elections cycle and their involvement in trump's attacks on the American electoral process - would expose all of trump's sins and hold him accountable.

Alas.

Even with all that Mueller did find regarding the Russian end of the scandal - which produced real results, numerous arrests/plea deals/convictions, and exposed the facts of how foreign influence in our elections is an ongoing problem - the investigation closed - thanks to incoming Attorney General William Barr who rewrote and redacted the final report - before any direct links between trump's 2016 campaign and Russian operatives could be proved. At best, Mueller found evidence that trump obstructed the investigation, but he couldn't pursue an arrest and tried to get Congress to file impeachment (which they failed to do. The Democratic House decided to impeach over trump's misdeeds with Ukrainian military aid). 

That should have been, for better and worse, the end of that.

Except for trump's misbegotten narcissism, which casts himself as both Hero and Victim with every action taken against him.

Just as the Mueller investigation wound down, trump kept pushing the narrative that the FBI shouldn't have been investigating him for his ties to Russia in the first place. he insisted on a conspiracy theory that the "evidence" that started the Mueller probe was tainted: That it came from a hastily written and half-proved Steele Report that was started by Republican operatives trying to stop trump during the 2016 Primaries, instead of the FBI getting bits and pieces from other criminal investigations and clues well before the Steele Report was even started. trump argued, and kept screaming ever after, that he was the victim of an illegal spying campaign by both Obama and then Hillary Clinton using their ties to the FBI to embarrass the "ever-innocent donald trump."

So as Barr entered the scene to shut down Mueller's probe, Barr also fished around for a special prosecutor to follow up trump's claims of victimhood, and found one in US Attorney John Durham in Connecticut to handle that investigation.

Tasked with finding any malfeasance among the FBI investigators, and with any persons in Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaigns that may have done any illegal misdeeds, Durham has spent the last three years following any accusation that trump and his handlers insisted were real.

To summarize what Durham found during his witch hunt investigation into the FBI and Hillary's campaign: Not a lot.

If I can refer to Margaret Carlson at Washington Monthly about the uselessness of Durham's efforts:

Durham’s mission was impossible. Robert Mueller successfully convicted every bad actor he’d charged—more than three dozen—and stopped short of Trump because of a Justice Department memo saying a sitting president couldn’t be indicted. Mueller’s investigation was investigated and found to be predicated on sufficient, credible evidence by Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed. They had to, there’s so much out there...

Barr set the tone for the inquiry by taking Durham on a James Bond–like three-star hotel, four-star eating tour of Rome to interview a peculiar professor we would never hear about again. From there, the probe dragged on. In 2021, Durham eked out a guilty plea from the former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith that he altered an email, with information he believed was true, to quickly fill out a surveillance warrant on Page, who frequented Moscow. Durham wanted Clinesmith, the first in his family to go to college and with a wife expecting their first child, to be incarcerated for six months for behavior that showed “his strong political views and/or personal dislike of [Trump].” Manna to Trump, if he were paying attention. The judge gave Clinesmith one year of probation (Editor's note: not even much of a slap on the wrist)...

If you recall Mueller's work - and several other special counsel probes throughout the decades - one of the key tools is getting lower-rung persons involved in shenanigans to plead out and then flip the higher-ups they can prove were committing other illegal acts. You can see Durham was trying to get several people he caught in relatively minor lies into flipping. And yet, none did.

Because no matter how much trump - and trump's cultists - yell and scream about it, the most likely scenario about how the FBI did its job investigation trump and the Russians is that, well, the FBI did its job. The people in Hillary's and Obama's orbits had no reason to flip for Durham because there was nothing really there in the first place.

Leading up to Durham's biggest failure yet to turn a gaslit lie into fact (back to Carlson):

The question is urgent after a Washington, D.C., jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty in Durham’s biggest case to date, charging the lawyer Michael Sussman with making a false statement. It followed on a meeting Sussman had with the FBI general counsel, James Baker, to inform him about information he had been given about curious activity between the computer servers of Donald Trump’s campaign and the Alfa Bank of Russia. Baker told Durham that Sussman hadn’t revealed his firm’s connections to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, although he admitted that his memory on the point had evolved. 

That gave Durham a premise for charging Sussman with a false statement by omission. It gives the rest of us a premise for thinking Durham is a Justice Department careerist out of gas. After the (Not Guilty) verdict, the jury foreperson said that the government’s time “could have been spent more wisely” than on a “possible lie to the FBI.”

Whatever Sussman did (which is so meager an omission and so minor an issue), to the jury it didn't rise to the level of guilt that Durham (and trump) needed. The truth about Sussman's warning to Baker didn't even seem to be at issue. Durham just wanted to catch someone close to Hillary in a lie. No one else bought it.

Without that guilty verdict, Durham's next court trial - going after Russian Igor Danchenko, accused of lying to the FBI about the contents of the Steele Dossier - is looking more like a show trial beating a dead trumpian horse.

I'm not the person you need to read on all of the miscues and screwups of Durham's flawed probe. Emptywheel is a far more dedicated and informed resource, and this is just one of many things she found wrong in Durham's work:

This entire three year process was launched with no evidence that a crime was committed, and it seems likely that only the Kevin Clinesmith prosecution, which DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz handed Durham months after he was appointed as a fait accompli and which could easily have been prosecuted by the DC US Attorney’s Office, provided an excuse to convene a grand jury to start digging in the coffers of Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie.

There was no crime. Durham was never investigating a suspected crime and then, as statutes of limitation started expiring, he hung a conspiracy theory on a claimed false statement for which he had no solid proof. Eight months into Durham repeating those conspiracy theories at every turn — conspiracy theories that Durham admitted would not amount to a crime in any case! — a jury told Durham he had inadequate proof a crime was committed and that the entire thing had been a waste of time and resources...

Compare that to the Russian investigation, which was started to figure out which Trump associate had advance knowledge of Russia’s criminal hack-and-leak operation and whether they had any criminal exposure in it...

The answer, by the way, was that at least two Trump associates had advance knowledge, George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, and Stone shared his advance knowledge with Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump, among others. By all appearances, DOJ was still investigating whether Stone had criminal exposure tied to his advance knowledge when Barr interfered in that investigation in February 2020, a fact that Barr hid until the day before the 2020 election.

With the Russian investigation, there was a crime: a hack by a hostile nation-state of a Presidential candidate, along with evidence that her opponent at least knew about the related leak campaign in advance. With the Durham investigation, there were only Fox News conspiracy theories and the certainty that Donald Trump shouldn’t be held accountable for encouraging Russia to hack his opponent...

There should be some sense of relief from those of us on the sidelines watching this theater of the absurd play out to a diminished whimper. It would be nice if it did.

But trump will not let go of his fear and his rage and his victimhood. He kept screaming after the decision that the "legal system is CORRUPT" and isn't letting this damage to his ego go away.

For trump, the grievance is the only way he can convince everyone else he wasn't in cahoots with Putin to fuck up our elections. And he wants to clear a path to redo those dirty tricks when 2024 rolls around.

Gods help us. This train wreck isn't over yet.

Revive the Mueller Findings. Charge Barr AND trump with Obstruction

It's been awhile since I wrote about the Mueller Report. It's been enough time for me to look back and kick myself for putting too much hope into what the investigations into trump's ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign would lead to. 

I had hoped by now we'd see harder sanctions against Putin for his meddling, more laws making it harder for foreign powers to intervene in elections, stuff like that. I don't think I've seen much activity from either the Biden administration or from Congress on those fronts.

I had hoped that Congress would have acted on Mueller's recommendations, on the evidence he found that trump obstructed the investigation at least five times, to impeach trump and have that on record. Granted, the Republican-led Senate back then would have given trump a pass like they did on the two Impeachment trials trump DID face, but for some reason Pelosi's Democratic House refused to go there. Instead, they impeached trump on other acts of misconduct he did in office, such as extorting Ukraine to interfere with the 2020 elections using a faked "investigation" into Joe Biden's son Hunter; and impeached trump for inciting insurrection when Congress tried to confirm the Electoral College votes on January 6th.

I understood back in 2019 when the Mueller Report was released that then-Attorney General Barr would redact and underplay the findings as much as possible: That Barr would weaken the impact of Mueller's work to spare his Overlord trump as much as the twisted Justice Department could allow. As a result, whatever value that Report had for America and for our legal system got diminished and buried.

Until earlier this May, when one of the judges still overseeing the legal handlings of Mueller's prosecutions tore Bill Barr a few holes and demanded an accounting (via Michael S Schmidt for the New York Times):

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department's obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.

The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be...

She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation's findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.

''The attorney general's characterization of what he'd hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,'' Judge Jackson wrote...

Essentially, Jackson's ruling - obstensibly to force the Justice Department to release the internal memos that covered Barr's actions - makes the case that Barr was covering for trump, had already made the legal decision to find in favor of trump, and was going out of his way to ensure justice would not prevail in this matter.

I'm not a lawyer, but to me that sounds a lot like Barr obstructed justice to protect trump from HIS obstruction charges.

We have a new President in Joe Biden. We have a new Attorney General in Merrick Garland.

We should have time on the clock for any and all Obstruction of Justice charges to get issued against William Barr and against donald trump.

This is an Accountability Moment that MUST be answered. Otherwise we risk another round of criminal acts by a corrupt Republican President without any means to stop him.

DAMMIT. Justice demands it. HISTORY requires it.

The Self-Dug Graves of donald trump

A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night.

-- Nicky, Casino

When I began writing this article on Saturday morning the impeachment trial was still ongoing. But then the day turned sideways, a vote on allowing witnesses turned into a debacle that I STILL can't figure out, and it ended with a vote in the U.S. that went 57-43 in favor of removing trump for his Incitement to Insurrection... which did not clear the 2/3rd supermajority needed to make it happen.

We knew it going in that the cowardly Republicans in the Senate would not rise above the gross partisanship of their own party's base, but there was still a slim hope that enough facts and evidence of trump's misdeeds would get out to convince enough Republicans to put country ahead of party. In the end only seven - Mitt Romney (UT) who had previously voted against trump over the Ukraine scandal, plus Richard Burr (NC), Susan Collins (ME), Bill Cassidy (LA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Pat Toomey (PA), and Ben Sasse (NE) - realized the danger trump's riot posed to Congressional safety and our Constitution's integrity.

Mitch McConnell attempted to have it both ways: Blaming trump for causing an insurrection, but then voted to protect trump's ass from removal. Mitch's hypocrisy is damning and two-faced, and it will likely get more Americans killed as trump uses this as an excuse to continue his lying campaign to overturn an election he lost.

The only good news out of this day is threefold: One, it exposes how broken our Impeachment system is to where it needs to go away; Two, it proves we should hold sitting Presidents accountable to arrest on serious federal felony charges (so SCREW that OLC memo); and Three, it leaves trump still exposed to the civil and criminal charges he's facing already.

Let's go to Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

In case anyone forgot, the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York previously treated Trump aka “Individual-1” as un-indicted co-conspirator in Michael Cohen’s case. As a result, the confirmation hearings of Joe Biden’s pick for attorney general, Merrick Garland, will certainly be interesting.

Already, prosecutors in Manhattan have the Orange Don and his crew in their cross-hairs. According to court filings and published reports, Cyrus Vance Jr, Manhattan’s district attorney, is investigating the truthfulness of the Trump Organization’s financial reporting and the company’s relationship with Deutsche Bank...

In addition, Trump’s recent bouts of wrath have given lawyers in Washington and Georgia plenty to ponder. Local authorities in the Peach state are weighing a criminal investigation into his failed efforts to browbeat Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, into submission. Trump telling Raffensperger to “find” 11,779 more votes and interfering with election certification may have been a step too far...

Green wrote that article back in January 20. That Georgia case just went to Hyperactive this week (via Stephen Fowler at NPR):

The Fulton County District Attorney's office has launched a criminal probe into former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn Georgia's election results, including a call pressuring Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes for him. The county includes Atlanta, Georgia's capital.

In a letter sent to state officials and obtained by Georgia Public Broadcasting, newly elected Democratic District Attorney Fani Willis said the investigation will look into several potential violations of state law, including "the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election's administration..."

The letter from prosecutors asked several state officials to preserve all records from administering the 2020 election, with "particular care" given to those that "may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering the election."

In the hourlong call obtained by Georgia Public Broadcasting, an angry Trump alternately cajoled and castigated Georgia's top elections official, seeking to have him toss out the November election results, which was counted three separate times, and "find 11,780 votes" to declare Trump the winner.

trump cannot accept the reality that he lost, he clings to his own lying narrative of "stolen ballots" to keep alive his slim hope of regaining political power, and worst of all he's got a literal mob of followers willing to riot for him to make those lies become a bloody "truth" at everyone else's expense. The cost of letting trump off the hook to keep these lies going will lead to more riots, more anger, more bullshit that won't go away until trump goes away.

This is the only hope for sanity our nation has left: That someone, either in Manhattan or Atlanta or DC, puts it on the line to file credible criminal charges that will convict trump for the damage he's done and remove him from the political stage for good.

There is, for example, the possibility that Biden's Justice Department could reopen the Mueller Report findings and use that to file Obstruction of Justice charges that Mueller determined could be done once trump is out of office. These are serious charges and everything about them should already be lined up and ready to go.

The civil courts are a different matter: trump was already facing a number of civil charges especially a sexual assault/defamation trial from E. Jean Carroll. Any damages, and loss of life, that happened during trump's Insurrection could be charged in civil courts as well. trump has been delaying these trials over and over as he usually does (it's the only true way he's ever won in court, outlast the plaintiff until they quit or take a lesser deal) but he's running out of room to dodge these cases. Sooner rather than later, trump's got to face his accusers before the law.

The legacy of the donald trump post-White House years will be spent in the courtrooms. he will be dealing in cases that won't settle out of court, that won't sign off on any plea deal where he walks away without admission of guilt.

trump does have a terrifying habit of wriggling his way out of ANY accountability, but for the LOVE OF GOD he's broken so many laws and ruined so many lives, the bill for his sins HAVE to come due now. The grave that needs to get dug now is for his future, a future that ought to be trump sitting in a SuperMax jail cell wondering if his con jobs were ever really worth it.  

Tell It to the Judge, trumpshirts

There's a lot going on today so I may blog more than once, just letting you know.

One thing I'm waking up to is a follow-up on a thing I blogged last week, about how Attorney General Barr (trump's Roy Cohn) forced the withdrawal from Michael Flynn's plea bargain in order to force the judge overseeing the matter to end the case. In order to make it look like Flynn should never have made a plea deal in the first place, in order to make it look like Obama's Department of Justice and Mueller's investigative team entrapped Flynn without cause.

You have to remember, Flynn was a major contact between a lot of foreign players, not only Russia but also Turkey, and was getting caught in a lot of questionable plots to where the entire Intel Community was waving red flags about him. Flynn was also one of trump's inner circle handlers, which made the connections between trump and Russia a lot harder to ignore.

One of the earliest moves Mueller made during the inquiry into what and how Russia did to meddle in the 2016 election, the special prosecutor was able to get Flynn to plead down to "lying to investigators" in order to avoid jury trials over some of the more flagrant stuff Flynn - and his son - was caught doing. It was a foundation on which a lot of other cases and plea deals involving trump's people was based.

When trump was able to get Barr set up as Attorney General, Flynn changed his mind on the deal, and had been trying to wrangle his way out of it. The move Barr pulled last week was the final step - so it seemed - to let Flynn off the hook. No deal, no case, and then trump and his buddies can start claiming everything Mueller did was a conspiracy, a setup by Obama and the Deep State (the whole #Obamagate thing we've been seeing re-emerge this past week by Russian Twitter Bots) to destroy trump's God-approved destiny.

However, like a lot of trumpian schemes, this one wasn't thought out well enough. Judge Sullivan overseeing this matter had ways to keep the case going, and last night he used those steps and even opened up the availability of another weapon to hold Flynn (and Barr) accountable. To Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

First, earlier this week, a retired judge and two former U.S. Attorneys pointed out that this apparent legal coup does not have to end the matter. In an op-ed, the three legal eminences argued that the court has the power to bring in outside legal advisers to argue the case, even if the government has dropped its prosecution, and potentially still sentence the defendant.

Then, earlier this evening, the New York Times reported that Barr’s lawyers misled the court about the testimony of a key figure in the Flynn case. The Justice Department told the judge, Emmet Sullivan, that FBI notes indicated its agents only interviewed Flynn in order to trap him into lying. An FBI agent involved in the Flynn interview told the Department this wasn’t true, a fact the DOJ failed to include in its request to let Flynn go.

Then tonight, Judge Sullivan dropped a bomb. He announced that he would not simply rubber stamp Barr’s maneuver to free Flynn. Instead, he is bringing in a judge to review the case and provide the pushback against Flynn’s defense lawyers that is missing now that the DOJ has essentially joined in with Flynn’s legal team.

What may matter even more is the judge Sullivan picked for this job: John Gleeson, a former mob-busting prosecutor and, more to the point, one of the co-authors of the Post op-ed urging Sullivan to take this step...

I'm not there in person to witness much of this, but I get the impression that Sullivan is pissed.

I get the impression that Sullivan did not like getting lied to by Barr and the DoJ lawyers undercutting their own plea deal. That Times report that lawyers misled the judge on testimony is usually the point where said judge throws people into jail for contempt of his/her court.

I recall Sullivan is someone who, when AG Barr redacted the Mueller Report, fought to get parts of it unredacted for his review of Flynn's plea deal (The Justice Department refused). Sullivan did confront Flynn back in 2018 with the words "you sold out your own country," reportedly due to information Sullivan has on Flynn's corruption that hasn't been made public (yet).

And we're looking at the possibility that Sullivan can add charges regarding Flynn's misconduct in his courtroom. The reality that Flynn changed his testimony - at least once - while the plea deal was still on the table makes him open to a contempt of court perjury charge. Via Adam Gabbatt at The Guardian:

...Sullivan... said he had asked John Gleeson, a former federal judge in New York, to recommend whether Flynn should face a new criminal contempt charge for perjury. Gleeson has also been asked to make the case for why the DoJ’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case should be rejected...

What this does mean is that Flynn's lawyers have more work on their hands. This means Barr and his DoJ team cannot wash their hands of this and walk away. This is being done with an outsider in Gleeson who can't be pressured by Barr or trump to play their game of "loyalty or fired."

What this means is that trump, his inner circle of corrupt bastards, and his Russian cronies cannot pretend this whole thing was a manufactured Obama/Hillary trap. Sullivan seems dead set on making sure someone - Flynn - is held accountable for the sins they caused.

This puts the pressure back on trump. Sure, he could pardon Flynn, he's done that for a number of people undeserving of mercy. I do question if a pardon frees someone held on a judge's contempt order, but we'll find out. And the pardon runs the risk of Flynn being vulnerable to further testimony without Fifth Amendment protections. It also means Flynn has to admit he did (some) of the things he's being pardoned for, meaning trump can't hide the connections his 2016 campaign had with foreign powers (especially Russia).

trump and Roy Cohn Bill Barr are not going to sweep this under the rug like Putin hoped they could.

As Though Wiping Away Every Sign of trump's Crimes

This was a hammer dropped today: Attorney General William Barr, in an attempt to negate the early parts of the Mueller investigation into criminal ties between Russia and everyone in trump's Inner Circle, forced the Department of Justice to withdraw from the plea deal agreement with Michael Flynn. Via Emptywheel:

In advance of a status report due tomorrow, Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the Mike Flynn case... (Emptywheel quotes from the AP Newswire for more details)

Van Grack was apparently the point person on the Flynn courtroom case, and without him the government can longer proceed...

While Van Grack has withdrawn from all Flynn-related cases before Emmet Sullivan, he has not yet withdrawn from two other open cases he’s on, and he signed his withdrawal FARA Chief.

As noted in this post, Sullivan has discretion over whether to accept this withdrawal...

Sullivan is the trial judge overseeing all this, including the plea deal. The deal itself apparently is far enough along that the judge can still accept it, but without a prosecutor to argue for that it's unlikely to happen.

Emptywheel covers a lot of the issue with the case standing in a separate article:

Note that just Acting US Attorney Timothy Shea signed this filing, which may create a similar kind of dynamic at the DC US Attorney’s Office regarding this action as Barr’s interference in the Roger Stone sentencing did. Barr transparently removed the Senate approved US Attorney for DC, installed his flunky, and then had his flunky renege on statements that DOJ (even DOJ under Barr) had made in the past. It is a breathtaking abuse of power, and it’s likely that Sullivan will regard it as such.

I encourage you to follow Emptywheel's link, because she lays out the three key parts of Shea's arguments and then spells out how each of them are flawed, and how Barr's DOJ is making arguments that already failed in Sullivan's court room and still fail a lot of legal logic anyway.

This kind of self-sabotage to a court matter that had been in the works for years is an obvious attempt by trump to get his cronies to sweep away the history of his involvement in Russia's actions against the United States during the 2016 elections.

trump has always been upset about the situations involving his campaign helpers like Paul Manafort - found guilty in a trial early on - or Roger Stone - who also risked a trial and was found guilty as well - because while they didn't directly prove what trump did to cheat, the close interconnection of criminal to criminal - all of it tied to either trump or Russia - was a guilt-by-association that could dog trump for whatever time he's got left before his scams run out.

As such, trump would scream and proclaim it was all a conspiracy, all a witch hunt pushed by a Deep State that favored the "more evil" Hillary and Obama.

And now, with the likelihood that Flynn - who had been caught in a web of backroom deals and crazy plots - will walk away with a clean slate, trump is likely going to crow the whole thing was never real. Unlike the risk of pardoning his cronies - because those pardons could compel them to testify against trump himself later on - this creates the wriggle room trump and his media allies can use to hammer at critics until the media - and the rest of the nation - give up and look away from these eyesores.

Criminals love to deny that the crimes they committed - even when caught - never really happened. Even with the pile of bodies and burning wreckage left in their wake.

trump just happens to be at the head of a crime cartel able to force those lies onto our entire nation.

he and his cronies would wipe away every last shred of evidence from the history books if they can.

We dare not let them.

Coming Soon to the Federal Penitentiary System: The Roiling Stone Ten Years to Life Tour

Ahhh, SCHADENFREUDE is the tastiest freude. Via Emptywheel:

During the break in Yovanovitch’s testimony, the jury in Roger Stone’s trial came back with a verdict. They found him guilty on all seven counts. That includes a witness tampering charge for Stone’s efforts to dissuade Randy Credico from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, the very same committee leading this impeachment hearing.

The courts are just now imposing consequences for Trump’s efforts to cheat to win the 2016 election, even as he attempts to prevent the one court that can try him for imposing consequences for cheating to win the 2020 election.

To the official records well okay reporting from Spencer Hsu, Rachel Weiner and Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post for the full count.

The panel of nine women and three men deliberated for less than two days before finding Stone, 67, guilty on all seven counts resulting from his September 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, which was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Kremlin’s efforts to damage Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton...

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson set Stone’s sentencing for Feb. 6 and allowed him to remain free until then. Stone faces a legal maximum penalty of 50 years in prison — 20 years for the witness tampering charge and five years for each of the other counts, although a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.

Stone’s indictment was the last brought by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, revealing important details about the Trump campaign’s keen interest in computer files hacked by Russia and made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. He was accused of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness, an associate whom prosecutors said Stone threatened in an attempt to prevent the man from cooperating with lawmakers...

The primary thing you need to realize is that Stone is one of those rare special Republicans who's been at the dirty tricks game for decades and thus deserves every inch of hard karma about to get shoved up his keister (via Andrew Prokop at Vox.com):

Stone has had a reputation for political shenanigans since he was a 19-year-old volunteer carrying out dirty tricks to embarrass Richard Nixon’s 1972 Republican primary opponent — something that earned Stone a minor role in the Watergate hearings...

Some guys go to college to get a reputation. Stone had to go to impeachment hearings (oh the irony) to earn his.

As a Republican campaign operative, he worked for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole; as a highly paid lobbyist, he worked alongside his friend Paul Manafort for a host of seedy clients. And he’s long been known as a colorful character who rejoices in the dark side of politics: scandals, smears, division, and negativity. Journalists have called him “the state of the art Washington sleazeball” and the “boastful black prince of Republican sleaze.”

He's been at this game of dirty politics so long that at his age now - late 60s - even a ten-year stint in jail screws up his retirement plans, and he risks the odds of dying in a jail cell of old age. If only they'd arrested him when he was younger, like when he stirred up that Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami during the 2000 Recount. But then he never would have reached his greatest achievement: Fucking over the United States by giving us the Eternal Shitgibbon, trump himself:

Stone also, incredibly enough, spent nearly three decades trying to get Donald Trump for president before Trump actually went through with it. The two met in the mid-1980s, as Trump hired Stone and Manafort’s firm to do lobbying and PR for him. After Trump released his book The Art of the Deal in 1987, Stone urged him to consider running for president the following year, but Trump demurred. In 1999, Stone ran a presidential exploratory committee for Trump — but Trump again ended up not officially running...

trump finally bought into what Stone was selling him - noticeably around the same time Obama publicly humiliated him just before Obama gave the order to take out Bin Laden - and from there Stone was both front-office and back-room dirty operative for his boy.

So for all that, absolutely no sympathy for him. Stone was running around shouting "Lock Her Up" for the last four years. Now Hillary can visit him in lockup and just stare at him with a big shit-eating grin for hours on end.

Today's malicious delight out of all the other scandal coverage - trump's Ukraine impeachment inquiry is digging up serious allegations of extortion and bribery - makes me nostaglic, it brings back a lot of fond memories from January of this year when I honored the moment of Stone's arrest with a sweet little ditty "Stone In Jail."

Tweeted this earlier:

Nice to see he's finally getting there.

Save a cell next to him for his boy donald. Given all the exposure trump is getting now for his crimes, it shouldn't be long to wait.

Taking Note of the Mueller Report, As Things Get Worse

By the by, I finished reading the Mueller Report.

Well, the parts of it that weren't redacted.

There's not much to say about it that hasn't already been said elsewhere by better legal experts. I'll just add my three cents by pointing out the three things the Report proves.

One: The first half of the Report is a meticulous and detailed review of how Russia attacked our 2016 election cycle, with a ton of laundered money to help trump and other Republican candidates and a spicy helping of psych ops via social media to suppress voting and distract voters.

You can argue the merits of the rest of the investigation until you're red in the face, but the evidence on this part is solid: Russia meddled in our elections, and there are things Congress - specifically the Senate, where election security bills are dying in the shadows - should act on to protect our rights as Americans.

Two: The second half of the Report tries to answer the question if trump actively worked with Russians - both to get their aid as well as provide information to them for their operations - but ran into enough Obstruction and lying to prevent a full understanding of what happened. While the investigations didn't get enough evidence of that, the Report did highlight how trump instructed his people to hinder those investigations long enough for trump's replacement Attorney General Barr to shut the investigations down (just as Mueller was getting close to trump's Inner Circle with Stone's indictments).

What Mueller left behind with his Report was a road map to how Congress could file Obstruction charges against trump, just as long as the Democratic-controlled House grew enough of a spine to do so.

Three: The Mueller Report revealed a glaring weakness in our legal and political systems. A lot of accountability and responsible governance relies on everybody acting in Good Faith. That is, a general acceptance by all parties - not just the political parties but the media covering the elections and the state/federal agencies overseeing the process - to adhere (mostly) to the rules.

What happened in the 2016 election cycle was a breakdown of that Good Faith. Our system wasn't ready to handle the likes of donald trump - an over-reaching, unstoppable force of lying and corruption - who abused and ignored the rules so often and so consistently that the agencies tasked to enforce them couldn't keep up. The ones that did uncover some of the rule-breaking - our intelligence agencies like the FBI - didn't see enough of the pieces to solve the puzzle fast enough (the details of the June 2016 trump tower meeting didn't come out until after the election). The pieces they did find got set upward to the Congressional level where the likes of Mitch McConnell refused to accept the evidence provided and denied our agencies a chance to warn voters before the election that trump was compromised.

Even Mueller's investigations was - still is - hampered by guidelines and administrative codes that prevented him and his teams from breaking through the lies and delays by trump's people. For all the arrests and indictments his Special Counsel's office could produce, there were glaring misses among the targets - why donnie junior wasn't indicted with what Mueller found out anyway remains one of the greatest flaws of the investigation - that highlighted what couldn't be done.

Above all, there was only so much Mueller could do. He was hampered by a major guideline - an Office of Legal Counsel memo from 1973 claiming a sitting President can't be indicted - that he felt couldn't be challenged or ignored. The argument for that memo relies on authority outside of the courthouses: the power of Congress to impeach Presidents for abuse of office ("high crimes and misdemeanors").

And this is where the Good Faith breaks down even further. Impeachment isn't a legal tool, it's a political one. It relies a lot on the willingness of both major political parties to see it through. When one party (Democrats) are reluctant to apply it and the other party (Republicans) are eager to quash it to protect their own corrupt boss, relying on Impeachment to resolve the high crimes of trump becomes impossible to comprehend. Even if the House Democrats follow through on their inquiries - currently on trump's Ukraine extortion efforts - and Impeach, there's every sign McConnell will simply toss the proceedings over the Senate railings and let trump crow "vindication!" in triumph.

It's sad to note that ever since the release of Mueller's Report, trump's own behavior has gotten worse: open acts of compelling foreign nations to dig up dirt on political enemies, threatening retaliation against the FBI for even impugning his Russian buddies, and making impulsive foreign policy decisions that clearly benefit Putin to the detriment of our allies.

Everything Mueller documented in his Report is replaying out again in real time. Only now, trump's gone public with it.

Because trump thinks he's untouchable now.

Which makes trump more dangerous than ever.

Gods help us.

Mitch McConnell STILL Deserves The Deepest Pit in Hell

If you survived the Mueller hearings, you hopefully noticed Robert Mueller was trying desperately to tell Congress several important things, one of which was JESUS GODDAMN CHRIST THE RUSSIANS HACKED OUR ELECTIONS AND WILL DO IT IN 2020 unless Congress passes stronger laws protecting our rights to vote.

If you consider it good news, the Democratic-led House has already passed two bills that ought to fix a lot of our security problems surrounding our electoral system, and strengthening the laws blocking foreign involvement.

Sorry to report, however, that Senate Majority Bastard Mitch McConnell is still a partisan sonofabitch willing to destroy the nation. Using his control of the other branch of Congress, the Senate isn't even taking one quick peek at the House bills, with McConnell accusing the Democrats - like he accused Obama back in 2016 when the first warnings were issued about Russian interference - of being the partisans trying to hijack the elections. Per Nancy LeTourneau at the Washington Monthly:

...Just as we’ve seen with Trump, he is sending a message to Vladimir Putin that he welcomes another attack. But it’s not just Putin. The invitation also goes out to other foreign adversaries, like China, Iran, and North Korea. You have to wonder why McConnell would be so confident that—to the extent that any of those countries interfered in the 2020 election—it would be to benefit Republicans. And if the only way for the GOP to survive politically is to invite foreign interference in our elections, the party of Lincoln has been completely corrupted.

McConnell won't lift a finger because he knows the Republicans cannot win in a fair fight, not in the Presidential election and maybe even in the Senate campaigns (all the Democrats have to do is keep their seats and flip three battleground states to claim control in that branch). McConnell wants the interference from Russia and other nations because it will help justify the GOP Narrative of Voter Fraud to ensure the can suppress results in the Red states they control.

There's a reason why #MoscowMitch is trending on Twitter.

There's a reason why Mitch McConnell deserves the deepest pit of Hell when he passes on.

Mueller Testimony Before Congress: The Circus Cover Up

So... I got a little distracted from reading the Mueller Report like I promised. Work's been crazy, real-life distractions aplenty. I got as far as the first full page of redactions and refused to find out how many times the phrase "trump conspired with Russians to hack the elections" fit inside the void.

As a result, I'm not fully briefing myself on the report's contents as of today, when Mueller is expected to testify before Congress about his findings.

I don't have high hopes today will end well (by that I mean "trump getting charged on his counts of Obstruction and getting campaign aid from a foreign power").

A lot of what happens today depends on what Mueller actually says. Despite AG Barr's assertions that he can control what Mueller can answer, the former special prosecutor can say whatever he feels is not covered by the "matters of ongoing harm" regarding active investigations.

The most likely things Mueller will cover are the most obvious ones: That Russia actively attempted - and in some cases succeeded - to interfere with our country's 2016 election cycle. I fully expect Mueller will spend much of his presentation making the case for Congress to pass stricter laws against foreign meddling and to make more concerted efforts to protect our voting methods.

Whether or not trump committed crimes like Obstruction, Mueller still hasn't come out and simply said so: He keeps saying "Well Congress needs to act on that" and leaves it up in the air. I wonder how many Democratic congresscritters are going to try to get him on record saying "Yes, trump committed Obstruction (more than once), and yes this requires Congress to at least begin impeachment proceedings right now."

That's when the circus part of the testimony will kick in, because the Republican congresscritters will do everything in their power to block those questions and answers with every sleazy distraction in the book.

It's already a given - considering how they acted to Michael Cohen's post-guilty-plea testimony - that the likes of Jim Jordan and other Republicans will debunk Mueller based not on the evidence but on Fox Not-News talking points. The expectations are high that they'll try to accuse Hillary of being more involved with Russian tricks, or throw out conspiracy stories about "Deep State" sabotage on trump's campaign. There will be - guaranteed - a major attack on two of Mueller's investigators who were caught Tweeting against trump, as though that compromised the entire Mueller investigation (hint: those two didn't).

The Republican offensive against Mueller will be offensive, no doubt. Mueller's integrity will be mocked and slimed. They'll try to pressure the special prosecutor into unleashing a rageful retort, something they hope will cause a gaffe and discredit the whole investigation.

The best hope I have in that situation is that Mueller remains calm and focused - as a Marine, he's likely to do so - and stays on message. I also hope that during their attempts to discredit Mueller, the damned Republicans indict themselves. If any of the congresscritters makes an open case to have the Mueller Report unredacted, that would be nice (and also a hilarious self-own).

I just won't be watching today.

I'm still busy at work.

Short Description of Mueller's Public Speech

Best interpretation of Robert Mueller's public appearance today to explain his closing down/resigning from the Special Prosecutor's office (there's a ton of opinion pieces out there but for now the Daily Beast link to Olivia Messer will suffice):

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, AMERICA, READ THE GODDAMN REPORT. I SPENT ONE WHOLE SECTION EXPLAINING HOW RUSSIA INTERFERED IN THE ELECTIONS, AND THE SECOND SECTION I SPELLED OUT LIKE FIVE SPECIFIC PLACES WHERE TRUMP COMMITTED OBSTRUCTION, AND EVERYBODY'S TAKING BARR'S WORD THAT TRUMP IS "EXONERATED"? WILL YOU GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND CALL CONGRESS TO START IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDINGS ALREADY. THERE'S NOTHING ELSE I CAN DO, PEOPLE, THE GODDAMN DOJ IS RIGGED TO BLOCK EVERYBODY BUT CONGRESS TO STOP A CROOKED PRESIDENT. OKAY, PELOSI? STOP WAFFLING AND START CHARGING TRUMP'S LACKEYS FOR LYING TO CONGRESS AT LEAST, HOLD THEM IN CONTEMPT LIKE THEY DID IN THE OLD DAYS, GODDAMMIT. I MAY BE A DECORATED MARINE BUT I CAN'T SAVE THE WHOLE GODDAMN PLANET, THAT'S YOUR JOB. AND WILL YOU START BITCH-SLAPPING MITCH MCCONNELL UNTIL HE AGREES TO PASS LAWS TO STOP THE RUSSIANS FROM HACKING US AGAIN! CHRIST, I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

Well, at least, that's how *I* heard it.

Okay, So There's ONE Republican Who Calls It Right

It took awhile, but at last one Republican Congresscritter read the redacted Mueller Report and realized "Holy Shit, trump obstructed justice and we need to hold him accountable through the impeachment process!"

I don't I agree with Justin Amash on everything, but at least one Far Right sociopath is sticking to honest-to-God constitutional conviction (until his deep-pocket backers insist he change his tune).

So who had Amash as TBD?

To quote from Digby at Hullabaloo:

As it turns out, Amash is literally the only member of the Freedom Caucus who took any of that stuff seriously. The rest have become the most sycophantic of Donald Trump's toadies, acting as his most loyal henchmen. Their dedication to the Constitution and fiscal rectitude seems to have evaporated on the day Barack Obama left office. The Tea Party itself has morphed into the Donald Trump base, gleefully abandoning all the principles it claimed to hold dear and instead cheering on Trump's endless betrayal of constitutional principles.

Amash, on the other hand, seems to have believed what he said. He took to Twitter over the weekend, becoming the first major elected Republican to have the guts to state the obvious. He had read the Mueller report and recognized that President Trump has committed impeachable offenses. Anyone who has read it and acting in good faith would say the same thing but so far Amash stands alone among Republican members of Congress.

His fellow Republicans are not happy about it. Trump called Amash a "loser" and a "lightweight." Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said, “I don’t think anybody is going to follow his lead." House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared that Amash was "just looking for attention" and is "out of step with America." Amash's longtime buddies in the Freedom Caucus formally condemned him on Monday night.

I don't agree with most of Amash's libertarian philosophy. But he is a champion of civil liberties and a harsh critic of government surveillance overreach. I've often admired his willingness to stand up to his party on those issues in the past, and it's telling that he never signed onto their "deep state" conspiracy theory to protect Donald Trump. Given Amash's record, if there was the slightest granule of plausibility to those theories, he'd be on board. Now he's gone further and called for the president's impeachment, based on the fact that Trump committed crimes while in office, a genuine affront to the constitutional order...

Amash is already facing a primary challenger, which is no surprise when this is a standard response from the GOP when one of their own goes Full Apostate. But the Republicans have to be terrified of the situation.

It's not that Amash is giving other Republicans the opportunity to quit on #Teamtrump. It's that Amash is giving Democrats the political cover to openly pursue impeachment proceedings.

The Dem leadership under Pelosi has been putting the brakes on the Impeach The SOB movement among their ranks. It falls under the "Democrats Are Cowards" public meme but Pelosi has legitimate concerns about overreach. There are fears that trump could use the media circus of an impeachment hearing to regain voter support (which IMHO is an overrated fear because trump's clowning won't be able to hide the facts of trump's crimes).

But Amash makes it harder for Pelosi to stay quiet. If even a Republican - with a reputation for civil libertarian consistency - is openly calling for impeachment, it's going to make the Democrats look weaker and self-defeating (again). At some point, Pelosi is going to have to let the dogs out. Amash is making that sooner rather than later.

We're watching in real time politicians trying to find moral conviction to uphold the Constitution and the system of Checks and Balances.

This is the moment the Democrats have to grow a spine and hold trump - and the corrupt Republican Party - accountable.

Barr: Falsifying, Concealing, Covering Up, Also Being Snitty

After the rough day Attorney General Snitty Toady Barr had with the Senate committee - where he got caught dumping mistruths and denials for most of the day - it's pretty clear he doesn't want to go through Round Two against a bigger and meaner opponent.

Referring to Matt Stieb at the New Yorker:

The immediate logic is obvious. Barr, a ruthlessly competent partisan, testified before the Senate committee, where he would enjoy the aid of its chairman, Lindsey Graham. With Democrats running the show in the House, the line of questioning would be even less forgiving. Barr cited the House committee’s vote to allow staff lawyers to question him for an additional hour as the reason for his cancellation. The Justice Department defended Barr’s decision, claiming that it would be inappropriate for congressional staffers to grill a member of Trump’s Cabinet...

Which is, by the way, bullshit. Congressional staffers have questioned Cabinet members before as W. Neil Eggleston explains in Slate:

Of particular relevance to the current dispute between the attorney general and the House Judiciary Committee, witnesses who testified at the hearings were first questioned on television and in open hearings not just by the members of Congress but by lawyers on the committees’ staff. As I recall, the House and Senate committees divided the witnesses over which committees’ staff would be the first questioner. If the Senate lawyer was the first questioner, the House lawyer would take a turn at the conclusion of the Senate lawyer’s questioning. Only then did the senators and members of the House begin their questioning. There was no serious outside challenge of whether committee lawyers would conduct the questioning or members of Congress would perform that role: Both did.

Barr is essentially try to excuse his way out of getting grilled by House Democrats who will cut him no slack over every lie and sabotage he's committed while defending trump from the Mueller Report.

And Barr did lie. During his April 9th appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, he was asked about complaints from Mueller's investigation team about Barr's infamous 4-page letter that misstated Mueller's conclusions. Barr claimed he had no knowledge. Now it turns out Mueller himself sent a letter just after Barr's making those complaints known and before Barr's April 9th testimony.

I think it falls under the US Code: 18 USC 1001 - Fraud and False Statements:

(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.

I'm not a legal expert so I might be wrong here... but his false statements fall under SOME rule that says lying to Congress is a BAD IDEA.

In the meantime, Barr is willing to confront a Contempt of Congress charge. That's under 2 USC 192:

Every person who having been summoned as a witness by the authority of either House of Congress to give testimony or to produce papers upon any matter under inquiry before either House, or any joint committee established by a joint or concurrent resolution of the two Houses of Congress, or any committee of either House of Congress, willfully makes default, or who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000 nor less than $100 and imprisonment in a common jail for not less than one month nor more than twelve months.

I hope the House Democrats take this seriously and pursue the jail time aspect of the law. Barr's being snitty here, and deserves to get that word shoved down his throat.

We're At War With Russia. Congress Needs To Act.

While the debate to impeach or not impeach rages, there's a part of the Mueller Report that requires direct and immediate attention:

Russia interfered, meddled, messed with our 2016 election cycle.

And they're threatening to do it again.

Referring to Amy MacKinnon at Foreign Policy:

Indeed, there was one conclusion in the 22-month investigation that no one in Washington was disputing on Friday—with the possible exception of Trump himself. It came on Page 1: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

Russia experts say the extensive detail about Russian activities in the Mueller probe reveals much about Moscow’s game plan—and what U.S. counterintelligence officials should watch for—in future elections, starting with 2020.

“Make no mistake: They are at war with us. Whether we want to recognize it or not,” said Daniel Hoffman, who served as CIA station chief in Moscow under the Obama administration...

What Russia - and their authoritarian boss Putin - wants is full Western destabilization. They want Europe in-fighting, torn asunder by Nationalist factions. They're meddling in election after election, trying to taunt republics and democracies with the belief that such governance is weak.

You think Russia will pull back, now that they've been exposed through Mueller's investigation into their tricks? No, no they won't:

...It was also an operation that Russia intended to be discovered, knowing the backlash it would cause, Hoffman said, suggesting that the political strife over the Mueller report is itself evidence that the Kremlin’s tactics are still succeeding.

“I think the fallout [from the discovery of Russia’s role] is far more damaging. It’s an amplification of their themes,” he said. “The strategy was to pit us against ourselves.” And having discovered how well that strategy has worked up to the present, Moscow will be encouraged to keep applying it.

“All the partisan fodder here is going to make it difficult for Democratic and Republican lawmakers to come together and form a real strategy to counter Russia,” Hoffman added...

Russia is counting on the Republicans to run interference, to block any attempt to impose tighter security on our electoral system. There's a lot Congress could do in spite of any trump intervention, such as imposing harsher sanctions on Putin and his cronies and passing reforms to improve our Internet and technology security to crimp Russia's cyberwar stunts.

But will a Senate run by Mitch McConnell - who already blocked for trump (and Putin) by denying Obama's request to reveal the early evidence of Russian meddling - agree to make moves that he would automatically assume hurts his chances of retaining control? McConnell remains the center force of partisanship in Congress - obstructionist and rule-breaking - who is in many respects causing more damage to our nation than anything trump wants to do.

The smartest move Pelosi and the Democratic House should do right now is issue stronger sanction laws against Russia, dare McConnell to ignore a move that most Americans would support. It's the most obvious, bipartisan move Congress could make.

We're at war, Mitch. You're going to have to choose a side: America or Putin. And it's not really a choice, you sonofabitch. Side with Putin and history condemns you forever.