Law, Power, and Justice

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  • Something is Different: Fight or Get Out of the Way

    chris coons

    Rachael Maddow said tonight that she feels there is something different going on; that a corner has been turned.  I feel the same way although I can’t explain why.

     

    I have watched many Trump rallies, all the way through and taken notes, but tonight, I watched a murderous thug of a moron scream lies at other morons who were wildly cheering the lies he was screaming at them.  The man, the moron, has been allowed to displace 160,000 human beings and provoke the murder of countless men and women who used to be our allies.

     

    This must be the way it felt in Germany to stand and watch and listen to obscenity, unbelievable obscenity being swallowed whole by people who could be your neighbors.  It must be what it was like watching lunacy gathering steam, plowing ahead, taking over.

     

    It is like being in an earthquake.  The thing you depend on, the ground, is moving underneath you and you are completely disoriented.  In this case, the thing that I value and depend on most in the world, logic, reason, truth is moving underneath me.  The culture is being taken over by lies and deception, sham truth, blatant illogic and the people who have assumed authority are saying “get used to it.”

     

    Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.”  Well, it is happening here, but the Democratic leadership is saying: “It’s not happening here.”  “We must be prayerful.”  “It’s not happening here.”  They keep repeating it over and over thinking that it will become the truth if they say it enough times.

     

    They abide by the norms, act with politeness, come to work every day (when they are not on recess) raise money, admonish the Trump administration, chat up donors, help fellow Republicans get unqualified judges appointed to the courts because their fellow Republicans helped them.  They talk about a return to normalcy when normalcy is what go us here.  It is mass delusion.

     

    The leadership of the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the moneyed elite want to pretend this country has not been taken over by a Russian asset and his enablers who are involved in varying degrees with an international crime syndicate and allied with a radical religious quest for power.

     

    People like Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell have been waiting for, planning for a Donald Trump for decades.  They have their man and they are not going to give up.  They have cast their lot with Trump and they will tear the country apart to maintain and expand their power.

     

    Meanwhile, nice people, good people, like Joyce Vance will continue to tell everyone that our institutions will hold, that dedicated professionals in government will assure that justice vanquishes all.

    The time to be nice is over.  Those who don’t want to fight, who don’t understand that it  is essential to fight, need to get out of the way.

    chris coons

  • The Democrats Have a Politeness Problem says the New York Times

    frank bruni

    Frank Bruni published an opinion piece in the New York Times last week entitled: “The Democrats have a Politeness Problem.”

     

    In this article, Bruni argued that the Democratic candidates are too polite with each other, afraid to point out each other’s weaknesses when Donald Trump will certainly not do likewise.

     

    The article is a frustrating but illustrative example of how the corporate press, unable to think of anything constructive to do, pursues a “damned if you do, dammed if you don’t” argument when discussing the Democratic Party.

     

    Bruni criticizes the Democratic candidates for not calling each other out over accepting corporate donations (Warren) or a less than progressive career as a prosecutor (Harris) but then points out that Julian Castro’s comment in the debates about Biden’s memory (which I did not take as an “obvious insinuation…that Biden was in serious cognitive decline”) “…went too far.”  Jesus.

     

    Similarly, when Democratic candidates just talked about Medicare-for-All, the corporate media spent days accusing the Democrats of attacking themselves.  Advocacy for Medicare-for-all was treated in the corporate press as if it were a direct attack on Obama and everything he stood for.

     

    A similar schizoid worry/condemn theme runs through other coverage.  Is the Democratic candidate too left wing?  Are the Democrats going too far in the impeachment inquiry?  Are they going too fast?  Are they going to slow?  Are they being overly broad or overly narrow in the scope of the impeachment inquiry?

     

    All of this reminds me of what it’s like to be a woman.  Is the dress too long, too short, too dowdy, too sexy, to provocative?

     

    I’m sick of it.  The corporate media is full of this sort of coverage.  And, the Democrats are so afraid of provoking this condemnation, they can’t move.  They are like proverbial deer in the headlights.

     

    The Democrats as a Party do indeed have a politeness problem, but it does not involve their competition with each other or their advocacy of policy.  The politeness problem involves calling out the Trump Administration and its Republican enablers.

     

    On Friday, Rep. Steve Israel was asked by a reporter if the Democrat should get tougher on members of the administration who were openly flouting the law and defying subpoenas.  Should, the reporter asked, Democrats move to strategies like garnishing wages which the Congress can do for people who defy subpoenas.    Oh, not now, Israel responded.  We don’t want to do that, not when they have just started cooperating.

     

    Israel is probably playing a scenario in his mind where Frank Bruni comes out with an opinion piece accusing the Democrats of “going too far”  or being savage, or too aggressive, or something.

     

    Where is courage?  Where is righteous indignation? Where is moral certainty?  Where are the people who aren’t afraid of speaking the truth no matter what the goddamn New York Times might think?

  • Normalizing Genocide: The Corporate Media

    via Normalizing Genocide: The Corporate Media

  • Normalizing Genocide: The Corporate Media

    Afternoon Notes: The Media

    • I still can’t believe that we have allowed a moron to displace 100,000 people and provoke what Richard Engels calls “ethnic cleansing” and corporate news commentators continue to laugh and joke and normalize the political situation.
    • I like Chris Hayes. I was delighted to see him come from the Nation Magazine to host a major MSNBC news program.  I cheered for him on his first night when he was so uncomfortable and anxious, he could barely stay in his seat. But, I am now ashamed of him and for him. The nightly news is not a game show.  It is not a celebrity event.  This is true any time, but especially at the moment when democracy hangs in the balance in this country.
    • This is not a game. There’s nothing funny about a president who provokes genocide and an “opposition party” that is too cowardly to respond.
    • Chris Hayes running onto the set like a stand-up comic, to wild applause is undignified, inappropriate and offensive.
    • hayes studio

  • Syria: U. S. Forces “fell under artillery fire.”

    via Syria: U. S. Forces “fell under artillery fire.”

  • Syria: U. S. Forces “fell under artillery fire.”

    syria

    Newsweek is reporting that U.S. special forces near Kobani “fell under artillery fire” from Turkish forces.

    Pentagon officials commented that the Turkish forces should be aware of U.S. positions “down to the grid.”

     

     

  • Who Are the Kurds?

    via Who Are the Kurds?

  • Who Are the Kurds?

    syria

     

    Based on BBC News, 10/9/19 “Who Are the Kurds.”

    • After WWI the Western allies made a provision for a Kurdish state.
    • Treaty of Lausanne set the boundaries of modern Turkey and made no provision for a Kurdish state.  This left Kurds in a minority status in their respective countries.
    • Any time the Kurds tried in the subsequent 80 years to establish their own state, the movement was quashed.
    • The jihadist group Islamic State (IS) targeted three Kursish enclaves that bordered territory under its control in northern Syria.  It launched attacks that until 2014 were repelled by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – the armed wing of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).
    • June 2014. IS advanced into northern Iraq and drew that country’s Kurds into the conflict.  The government of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region sent its Peshmerga forces into areas abandoned by the Iraq army.
    • August 2014. Jihadists launched a surprise offensive.  The Peshmerga withdrew from several areas.  In Sinjar, where the IS took over, militants killed or captured thousands of Yazidis.
    • A US-led multinational coalition launched air strikes in northers Iraq and sent military advisers to help the Peshmerga. The YPG and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which had fought for Kurdish autonomy in turkey for three decades, came to their aid.
    • September 2014. IS launched an assault on northern Syrian Kursish town of Kobane.  Tens of thousands of people had to flee across the nearby Turkish border.  Turkey refused to respond by attacking IS positions or allow Turkish Kurds to cross to defend the city.
    • January 2015. After a battle that left at least 1,600 dead, Kurdish forces regained Kobane.
    • The Kurds along with local Arab militias under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and helped by US-led coalition air trikes, weapons and advisers, drove IS out of territory innorth-eastern Syria and established control over large tretch of the border with Turkey.
    • October 2017. SDF fighters captured IS capital of Raqqa and destroyed the IS last major foothold in Syria.
    • March 2019. The last pocket of territory held by IS, around the village of Baghouz – fell.
    • There were thousands of suspected IS militants captured and tens of thousands of displaced women and children associated with these IS fighters.
    • Most of the home countries of these fighters refused to accept them back.
    • Turkey claims to want to set up a “safe zone.” This would be a stretch of land 20-miles deep inside north-eastern Syria.
    • They plan to settle 2 million Syrian refugees there.
    • The Kurds in Turkey constitute 20% of the population.
    • After uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s many Kurds were resettled, “Kurdish names and costumes were banned, the use of the Kurdish language was restricted, and even the existence of a Kurdish ethnic identity was denied, with people designated “Mountain Turks”.
    • “In 1978, Abdullah Ocalan established the PKK, which called for an independent state within Turkey. Six years later, the group began an armed struggle. Since then, more than 40,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.”
    • “In the 1990s the PKK rolled back on its demand for independence, calling instead for greater cultural and political autonomy, but continued to fight. In 2013, a ceasefire was agreed after secret talks were held.
    • The ceasefire collapsed in July 2015, after a suicide bombing blamed on IS killed 33 young activists in the mainly Kurdish town of Suruc, near the Syrian border. The PKK accused the authorities of complicity and attacked Turkish soldiers and police. The Turkish government subsequently launched what it called a “synchronised war on terror” against the PKK and IS.
    • Since then, several thousand people – including hundreds of civilians – have been killed in clashes in south-eastern Turkey.”
    • “Turkey has maintained a military presence in northern Syria since August 2016, when it sent troops and tanks over the border to support a Syrian rebel offensive against IS. Those forces captured the key border town of Jarablus, preventing the YPG-led SDF from seizing the territory itself and linking up with the Kurdish enclave of Afrin to the west.
    • In 2018, Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels launched an operation to expel YPG fighters from Afrin. Dozens of civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced.
    • Turkey’s government says the YPG and the PYD are extensions of the PKK, share its goal of secession through armed struggle, and are terrorist organisations that must be eliminated.
    • Kurds make up between 7% and 10% of Syria’s population. Before the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011 most lived in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, and in three, non-contiguous areas around Kobane, Afrin, and the north-eastern city of Qamishli
    • Syria’s Kurds have long been suppressed and denied basic rights. Some 300,000 have been denied citizenship since the 1960s, and Kurdish land has been confiscated and redistributed to Arabs in an attempt to “Arabize” Kurdish regions.
    • “In January 2014, Kurdish parties – including the dominant Democratic Union Party (PYD) – declared the creation of “autonomous administrations” in the three “cantons” of Afrin, Kobane and Jazira
    • In March 2016, they announced the establishment of a “federal system” that included mainly Arab and Turkmen areas captured from IS.
    • The declaration was rejected by the Syrian government, the Syrian opposition, Turkey and the US.”

  • Afternoon Notes: George W. Bush whipped for Kavanaugh, Turkey, Erdogan,Unnecessary Wars

    TUESDAY 8 OCTOBER 2019

    • The Acting DHS Secretary walked out of a public appearance yesterday in D.C. He evidently didn’t like being asked difficult questions.  There are other questions about why he has not become the permanent Secretary.
    • Trump has invited Erdogan to the White House. The last time he was in Washington (2017), Erdogan’s thugs physically attacked protesters while Erdogan watched from his car. Trump did nothing about it.
    • Lest we forget this tweet from the President of the country: “…if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey…” (Random capitalization is the President’s).
    • Those demanding that Trump be allowed to “confront his accuser” (now accusers) are demanding the protections that the Constitution affords defendants in a criminal trial. This is not a criminal trial.  Trump has no such protections.  People who are busily trying to tear the Constitution to shreds are also claiming its protections for their guys not anybody else’s guys.
    • A little over a year ago, George W. Bush was whipping votes for Bret Kavanaugh (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/09/george-w-bush-is-whipping-votes-for-brett-kavanaugh.html?utm_source=nym&utm_medium=f1&utm_campaign=feed-part”
    • People who want regard Bush as some kind of genial nice guy should remember this along with the fact that he started an unnecessary war that cost an unknowable number of lives.

  • Graft, Greed and Corruption: Trump, Perry and Kelly

    • trump 4
    • According to Axois, Trump is now laying the 25 July phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, at the feet of Rick Perry. Trump told House Republicans that he made the phone call at the urging of Perry and claimed that he didn’t even want to make the call.
    • Perry has recently announced that he is leaving his position as Energy Secretary amid reports that while making steep cuts to the budget of the Energy Department he closed needed programs. He then created a program specifically to oversee Artificial Intelligence.  He allocated $119 million in funding for AI in 2020.  Perry’s wife owns stock in Verizon, AT&T and Splunk, companies that are prioritizing AI technology and likely to benefit from such an office.
    • Such an effort is much like (if on a smaller scale) Elaine Chao’s special pipelines for Kentucky grants that would be politically helpful for her husband, Mitch McConnell.
    • Politico has reported (10/1/19) that House Democratic members have been pressing Perry for information about his May trip to the inauguration of Ukraine’s President, Zelensky. The House sent a letter posing questions to Perry about Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Biden.  A similar letter was sent to Pence.
    • Perry has also been a regular visitor to Saudi Arabia where he traveled in 2017 to convince the Saudis to partner with the U.S. in developing nuclear reactors.
    • In July, Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, described himself, Perry and Volker as the “three amigos” on Ukrainian issues.
    • On another front of graft and corruption: One of the supposed adults in the room with Trump was former Chief of Staff John Kelly. I cannot count the number of times I sat on front of the television and listened to commentator after commentator stress how Kelly was a man of integrity, blah, blah, blah.  Well, AP is pointing out in an article (10/3/19) that the Trump administration is directing more and more of the business of housing and detaining migrant children to private industry, specifically to a company, Caliburn, where Kelly sits on the board.
    • While Kelly was in the Trump administration, he backed the idea of taking children from their parents at the border, arguing that it would serve as a deterrent. He is now personally profiting off policies he helped craft.
    • When Kelly left the military, he served on an advisory council for the Obama Administration that studied ICE’s continued use of privately operated immigration detention facilities for adults. Later that year, the federal government announced plans to phase out privately run prisons. That would all change when Trump took office.
    • While Kelly was serving on this committee, he joined the board of DC Capital partners, a financial firm that would go on to found Caliburn.
    • CHS is owned by belt-way contractor Caliburn International Corp. CHS staffs a large Florida facility with 2,000 workers even though the last children left the facility in August.   The Trump administration maintains that CHS is keeping the facility in readiness in case it is needed.
    • In 2015, CHS was paid $1.3 million to shelter migrant children. So far this year, they have been paid almost $300 million.  The AP estimates that it costs the taxpayers $775 a day to house these migrant children.

  • “What America was selling to the world used to be the rule of law.” Zelensky, Ukraine, Kolomoisky, Corruption.

    • Ihor Kolomoisky and Zelensky
    • Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director of Le Monde, writes (NYT) that for Europeans the most embarrassing revelation in the July 25 conversation was Ukrainian President Zelensky’s “servility.” The attempt to ingratiate himself to Trump, revealed in the “transcript” released by the White House, was truly disappointing.
    • In addition, Zelensky told Trump that the new prosecutor general would be “100 percent my person.”  We are left to wonder what in the hell that means.  Zelensky also happily joined Trump in the Euro-bashing.  So, the promising reformer, at least if you can believe the Trump version of the conversation, turned servile politician.  It’s not a pretty sight.
    • To add to the questions about Zelensky, prominent in the circle of people surrounding him is one Ihor Kolomoisky, whose PrivatBank was nationalized three years ago after financial regulators found that $5.5 billion was missing from its accounts.
    • Kolomoisky returned from self-imposed exile just after Zelensky took office. He is now appealing to the government for $2 billion in “compensation” for the loss of PrivatBank.  For foreign experts, whether the government gives in will be a test of President Zelensky’s political strength.
    • Anti-corruption activist, Daria Kaleniuk: “The U.S. push for good governance in Ukraine is seriously undermined. What America was selling to the world used to be the rule of law.”

     

  • Morning: Impeachment Watch

    trump

    Tuesday 2 October 2019

    • The State Department IG, Steve Linick, requested an urgent meeting with senior Congressional staff related to documents about Ukraine. The request came soon after Pompeo claimed that the schedule for State Department officials to give depositions to Congress was “not feasible.”  Speculation this morning is that there is a State Department whistleblower.  CNN is reporting that the IG plans to “provide staff with documents related to the State Department and Ukraine.”
    • A Congressional aide describe the IG’s request as “highly unusual and cryptically worded.”
    • Volker is scheduled to testify before Congress on Thursday, October 3. The former Ambassador to Ukraine is scheduled to testify on October 11.
    • Chris Hayes had Mimi Rocah on last night. Rocah used her position as a commentator on MSNBC to make a personal, unprofessional, mean-spirited attack on Bernie Sanders.  Had she said that women shouldn’t vote for any other candidate because that candidate made her “skin crawl,” she would never be back on television. Just imagine if she had said this about Corey Booker or Kamala Harris.   But, for some reason, probably because Bernie has become the designated fall guy, it’s permissible to say such things about Sanders.
    • Elizabeth Warren’s plan for medical care does not include mental health or dental coverage.
    • There are reports that the Ukrainian government signed an agreement Tuesday with pro-Russia separatists, Russia and European monitors that will allow a local election in the separatist-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine.

  • Impeach the MF Now.

    barr

    • Among the people who are subject to “what happened to them” discussions is Rudi Giuliani. He was, supposedly, the Nation’s mayor.  But, as freelance investigative journalist Ogla Lautman tweeted over the weekend, Giuliani “was entangled with a known Russian mobster in the 80s.  He elevated (Sam)Kislin to NYX Biz council and Kislin is digging around in Ukraine today for Biden dirt.  One connection out of so many.”
    • Fortunately, Giuliani is one of the people now subpoenaed for documents related to the Ukrainian military aid for dirt scandal.
    • Lindsey Graham is another person often talked about as having made an inexplicable transformation from calling Trump a “kook” to slavishly licking Trump’s golf balls. But, the Intellectualist reports that Graham has received at least $800,000 in campaign donations from a man with ties to Putin-allied oligarchs.  The Dallas Morning News detailed donations from Len Blavatnik and calls him  “one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle.”
    • Republican Christopher Collins (R-NY) has announced today that he is resigning from Congress after fighting for a year to fend off charges of insider trading. He was one of the first men in Congress to come out in support of Trump.  He has decided to plead guilty tomorrow to the charges brought against him for using information that was not public about a pharmaceutical company he and his family held stock in, to warn his son to dump the stock.  A number of people were able to protect themselves from massive losses in the company thanks to Collins’ tip off.
    • According to Andrea Chalupa, Former FEC Commissioner Matt Petersen suddenly quit the federal government and went to work for Conservative law firm Holtzman, Vogel, Josefiak, Torshinsky. The law firm worked on Trump’s inaugural committee which is now under investigation for foreign money FEC violations.
    • The State Department under Mike Pompeo has decided to utilize its time to further investigate Clinton’s emails. They are targeting lower level people who might have sent emails to the Clinton private server.  State has, according to Philippe Reines who worked for Clinton, decided to construct an extraordinary interpretation that anyone who as much as sent a newspaper article to the Clinton private server was confirming the information in the article.  Three infractions could ruin the career of a state department official.
    • As Philippe Reines stated, when the Republicans lost the house they lost the committees they were using to torture political enemies and now they have turned to other means.
    • Reuters reported that the Kremlin said on Monday that Washington would need Russian consent to publish transcripts of phone calls between Trump and Putin.
    • Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Russia would be prepared to discuss the issue with Washington if it sent Moscow a signal, but that such disclosures were not normal diplomatic practice.
    • Trump evidently not only tried to pressure Ukraine to help him politically, he also used other countries, Australia for one.
    • It has been revealed tonight that Pompeo sat in on the July 25 phone call between Trump and the leader of Ukraine. He then tried to cover up the transcript of that call.

  • Proceed With Caution: Pelosi, Barr, Maguire, Kushner, et. al.

    nunes

    Sunday Morning Mulling:

    • Schiff has reached an agreement with the whistleblower to testify before Congress.
    • We should be extremely mistrustful of Nancy Pelosi in this impeachment process. If Pelosi so narrowly defines this impeachment inquiry (as Mueller did his investigation) that it only covers Ukraine, we should not only demand more, but demand that she resigns as speaker.  If the leadership of the Democratic party refuses to investigate Trump’s financial crimes, we should seriously investigate why.  I suspect that if serious investigations begin on financial misdealing, it will catch up Democrats, especially Democrats in leadership positions.  I personally don’t care.
    • As just one example of why we shouldn’t trust Nancy Pelosi, Friday she said on Morning Joe that she prays for Trump regularly and that she hopes for some kind of religious revelation for Trump. We don’t need prayer; we need action to hold a corrupt President and administration and Republican party to account.  I am not content to wait until Trump has some kind of religious experience.  And, this is not just about getting Trump out of office.  We have to demolish the whole lot of them.
    • Lindsay Graham, according to press reports, has taken campaign money from Russian sources. This should be investigated and talked about in the media.  I hear conversation after conversation where hosts and panelists ask each other why Lindsay Graham did a complete turn around on Trump.  None of them will point out the obvious blackmail potential that this financial information reveals.  Why won’t the media talk about this?
    • I hear the same repeated questions about why William Barr would involve himself in such a trashy and corrupt administration. Because Barr himself is trashy and corrupt.  People like Mitch McConnell and William Barr have been waiting decades for somebody like Trump to come along.  Barr auditioned for the job by making clear, in writing, that he was willing to construct the legal arguments that would support authoritarianism.  He (and McConnell) looked at Trump and said: That’s my guy.  Let’s go.
    • Along the same lines, Nancy Pelosi said on Morning Joe that Barr had “gone rogue.” No, he has not gone rogue.  He has been rogue for decades as has the Federalist Society.  They are both dangerous.  Similarly, Barr hasn’t, as many on television claim, been “dragged into” this scandal.  He is part of it, up to his arrogant eyeballs.
    • One of the things I fear about the outcome of this impeachment, especially led by Pelosi, is that the upper echelons of this administration will be rehabilitated and brought back into the political process. The elite will argue that people like Barr just “went rogue” temporarily, and that others were “dragged” into this.  No, they made decisions all along the way to be a part of this.
    • One of the things that has made me crazy about reading the opinions about Maguire and his testimony is the repeated genuflecting to his “service” and his military career and how sorry everybody feels for him. He is a coward.  He made the decision to run to the White House with a complaint ABOUT THE WHITE HOUSE.  What a toady, what a disgrace to his uniform, but we are supposed to feel sorry for him.  I don’t have one ounce of sympathy for anybody near this administration.
    • KellyAnn Conjob and her husband are playing a game, a cynical game and I have no use for either of them. They are making sure that they protect their cushy lifestyle no matter what happens to Trump.  They are trash and deserve to be treated as such.
    • People like Neal Katyal who write articles with Conway are naïve at best. They are part of why we wound up with Trump and why we have a long way to go to repair the damage that Trump, et. al. have done.  People who are willing to subvert democracy are not, cannot be, your friends.  They are our enemies and should be treated as such.
    • As far as I can tell, Alexandra Chalupa (the woman Ken Vogel has called a “Democratic Operative,”) did everything in her limited power to try to warn the American government that Trump was connected with the Russians and that Manafort was a Russian asset. Nobody would listen to her.  Ken Vogel evidently tried his own smear tactics on her for reasons I do not understand.  For Devin Nunes to drag her name into the Intelligence Committee Hearing so she can be subjected to more death threats is unconscionable.
    • According to news reports today, Manafort tried to weasel his way into McCain’s campaign, but McCain was alerted by someone in the NSC about Manafort’s sleazy connections. McCain cancelled the contract with him.
    • There is a fascinating thread on Twitter at the moment about Manafort’s connection to a company that was involved in analyzing the voting data from Ohio. The thread is that the data from part of Ohio was diverted through a server in Tennessee owned by Manafort and Rick Davis.  That’s all I know, but it’s fascinating.  I think that eventually they will come out with evidence that the vote in 2016 was directed manipulated in certain districts.  That’s the reason Manafort was giving information to the Russians about polling in specific areas.
    • Please remember that Mueller mentioned the fact that Manafort gave this data to the Russians, but said he couldn’t prove that Mueller had any criminal intent in passing this information along. (Just because he walked into the bank with guns and bags that doesn’t mean he was going to rob the bank.)  This one fact illustrates that Mueller was part of the coverup of all this.  He was hired to do exactly what he did, an investigation that was so limited in scope and that gave the benefit of the doubt (no matter how ridiculous) to the Trump family at every turn, it was all but meaningless.  Mueller is part of the coverup.
    • Finally, Joaquin Castro has called for an investigation into whether Jared Kushner shared intelligence information with bin Salman that led to the killing of Khashoggi. That comes under the category of, well, of course.

    My final advice is: PROCEED WITH CAUTIONnunes

  • Devin Nunes and the Maguire Hearing

    nunes

    House Intelligence Committee Hearing

    • The dreadful Nunes, started off the hearing for the Republicans by calling a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee “information warfare.” He claimed that the Democrats on the committee had enlisted the mainstream media in their effort to impeach Trump.
    • When Nunes started talking I knew that the Republicans were going to stonewall this. They were going to try to claim that black was white.  They were going to take the stance of saying: Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?
    • Nunes hit all the talking points – that the whistleblower complaint was “hearsay evidence,” that the whistleblower had a “political bias,” that this was “another Steele dossier,” that this hearing was going to destroy the whistleblower process. “They want a public spectacle,’ said Nunes.
    • Nunes also claimed that the hearing should not even have been conducted in public. The Republicans believe that everything should be dealt with behind closed doors, especially if it involves a Republican.
    • Nunes accused the Democrats of wanting to “create a media frenzy.” Then, Nunes went on to claim that the Democrats were “colluding with the Russians” and that he had examples of Democrats “doing the same thing.”
    • He claimed that Biden bragged about extorting the Ukrainians to fire the former prosecutor.
    • Nunes even dragged in Andrea Chalupa, accusing her of providing dirt on Trump and his associates. As if that weren’t enough, he also dragged in Nelly Orr and accused the Democrats of tying to get nude photographs (God forbid) of Trump.  Where that came from I have no idea.  My guess is that there are such photographs out there and the Republicans are trying to lay down a cover story to blame that on the Democrats.
    • Nunes called the meeting of the committee a “grotesque spectacle” and then proceeded to act as if he were choking up with outrage.
    • Later in the hearing, Nunes congratulated Maguire for being part of a “charade of legal word games.” But it was Maguire himself who started the legal word games by contesting and arguing with every question the Democrats asked.
    • Maguire spent ten minutes trying not to admit that he had gone to the White House with the whistleblower complaint before he went to the Justice Department.
    • Finally, Nunes warned the Director of National Intelligence to be careful what he said. Everything you say will be “used and spun.”   They just can’t get enough of the mafia talk.

     

    Some additional notes about Maguire

    • Maguire disingenuously claimed that he supported “Congressional oversight.” Evidently not since instead of turning over the complaint to the appropriate Congressional committee as required by law, he turned tail and ran directly to the White House and then to the Justice Department.
    • Maguire repeated the typically tortured legal argument provided to him by Bill Barr, that the allegations involved executive privilege and therefore he had to go to the White House. Additionally, the argument goes, because the allegations involved nobody from the intelligence community (a lie in itself) it didn’t fit under the Whistleblower Protection Statute.
    • Maguire claimed it wasn’t for him to say how the President could conduct foreign policy. Nobody asked him to.  He was simply required by law to turn over the complaint to the Congress and he did not do so.
    • Maguire claimed that he was not authorized to waive executive privilege for the White House. Shiff asked him if the White House had ever claimed Executive Privilege.  Maguire answered: “They were working through the executive privilege procedures.”  This is typical of Maguire’s answers throughout the hearing.

     

     

    Lest we forget:

    • There are other records that were transferred to the high security server. What’s in those documents and transcripts?
    • Nancy Pelosi says she prays for Trump. She hopes he has a revelation from God.  Who is this designed to appeal to?
    • Maguire remained silent while the whistleblower was being accused of being partisan and relying on hearsay information.
    • If the IG hadn’t informed Congress about the existence of the WB complaint, we wouldn’t know about it. It’s not thanks to Maguire.
    • The White House was aware of the existence of someone in the CIA objective to Trump behavior before the official whistleblower complaint was filed.