Tag James Comey

The facts: Trump’s not-so-secret plan “for the most corrupt political party ever” in America to capture the next Congress

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Welcome back to the blogosphere’s recently-dedicated home of facts about our president.  In today’s installment we focus on the fact that any time he is confronted with true facts that do not suit him, TFG acts like a four year old who’s been told he can’t have any more ice cream.  Plus, we look at the associated counterfactual statements (the lies) he produces in these instances to salve his ego and (he thinks) to convince us all that he really is our favorite president ever.  That will include, currently most crucially, his lies about the integrity of next month’s elections.

There are very many sources that are independent of this Administration where you and I can check for verification of the truth or falsity of things Donald Trump says.  CNN has a dedicated area, as does the Washington Post, and there are websites that do nothing but fact-check politicians (not just Trump), and I have links to some of them in the far left column of this page under Reference.   (I wish there were a Meghan Trainor song-inspired https://iknowyoulieyourlipsaremovin.com/.)  You can check stupid things, like him ham-handedly altering a National Hurricane Center map to add Alabama to the predicted track of a hurricane, or repeatedly insisting in the face of compelling visual evidence to the contrary that the crowd at his first inauguration was the largest ever.  In these cases he’s much like the brat who stomps his feet and cover his ears screaming “I can’t hear you” when told it’s time to come inside for dinner.

TFG has proven over and over that unlike most mature human beings, he insists that all “truth” not only does not put him in a negative  light, it must be nothing less than the most complimentary light.  Ever since he left military school he has existed in a world where his family’s wealth has allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wants and to ignore any negative consequences.  For example, The University of Pennsylvania couldn’t be forced to give him the good grades he’d need to graduate first in his class, but it couldn’t stop him from lying about it afterward.  If ever there is offered any “truth” which claims Trump is anything less than the sterling and respected character he pretended to be on a television show, then that “truth” is a vicious lie being spread by his enemies.  (Who all “hate Trump,” apparently.)  No matter what he’s talking about, he always sounds like a real estate huckster incessantly selling the biggest and best deal, making you an offer you’d be a fool to refuse.  If he had stayed in that private business world his lies wouldn’t matter to the rest of us, so long as we had the good sense not to do business with him.

But he didn’t.  Now, his lies are about things that really matter.  Every single, solitary accusation of “fake news” directed at a reporter or newspaper or network that doesn’t praise the president for every single, solitary move he makes, facts notwithstanding, does two things. It proves that he does not know how journalism is supposed to work: reporters are not there to promote the president (any president), they are there to report what really happened, as truthfully and as fairly as they can, for the benefit of the American citizens for whom every president works.  No president likes negative coverage and some publicly object to the emphasis reporters put on “bad news” stories, but no other president has so blatantly, transparently and falsely accused the journalists of just making shit up to hurt him.  And, his use of repeated false claims are a political propaganda technique to make people believe outrageous things that are not true.  It was called “the big lie” by that noted political philosopher Adolf Hitler, who wrote that the general population could be manipulated with the use of this tool since they wouldn’t believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”  Well folks, someone does.

The most dangerous example of Trump’s use of the big lie is his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 election, to continue to deny it to this very day despite the complete lack of evidence of any fraud significant enough to have changed the outcome, and his continued insistence that all American elections are “rigged.”  Always against him, apparently, even in the two cases where he won.

That claim, which is false – unsupported by any facts – has a very specific goal in mind:

  • to give Americans a reason to believe him when he claims the expected Republican losses in this year’s midterm election are the result of voter fraud,
  • and to get them to agree with his efforts to overturn the results of that election
  • so Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate
  • where the party will continue to roll over and play dead for Trump’s destructive agenda.

Republicans will smugly respond (as they often do) that it’s not hard to find liberal or even moderate commentators who will shill for this anti-MAGA conspiracy.  They have a harder time arguing the facts when they’re offered by a real Republican, a certified conservative – not a Trump butt boy but a true conservative, like former federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig.  He argues in The New Republic that the Trumpist assault on the November midterms is an important next step in their effort to overturn American democracy: fight the results of the expected Democratic victories in House and Senate races, which lays the groundwork for Congress to refuse to seat the Democratic winners  next January and seize control of the government.  Read it yourself and see if you think he’s overstating the case.

…Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021.

That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.

Trump and his Republican allies have been preparing for this final battle since January 6, 2021. For the past six years, they have embarrassed themselves and the U.S. with their preposterous, win-at-any-cost denial that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and their deceitful slander of America’s democracy. Since his return to the White House, Trump’s every unconstitutional act in his effort to seize control over the midterm elections—each hailed by his prostrate Republican Congress—has been toward the end of ensuring that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress.

(snip)

So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3 [emphasis added].

All year long, Trump has been dragooning House Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional Republicans into prejudging as fraudulent the upcoming November elections of the presumed Democratic majority, as he himself has already prejudged those elections. His dragooning appears to have worked. House Republicans are now poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage.

Trump punctuated his expressed intent to interfere in the midterm elections eight weeks ago in a national prime-time address on “election integrity,” accusing the Democrats and the Chinese in particular of threatening the free and fair elections in November. In that address, he claimed without evidence or support (as usual) that the 2026 midterm elections were being threatened by noncitizen voting, weaknesses in voter registration systems, foreign interference, and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

(snip)

Everyone knows that the greatest threat to the upcoming midterm elections is not the Democrats or the Chinese, noncitizen voting, or electronic voting machines, but the president of the United States and his servile Republican Congress.

(snip)

There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election, just as every president could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of presidential power. But those times came to an abrupt end upon Donald Trump’s arrival in January 2017. In a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.

Yet America’s only hope for saving its democracy and avoiding another crippling constitutional crisis on January 3 is for the House Republicans to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump, and telegraph to Trump and Mike Johnson that any unconstitutional plan they might be contriving to deny Democratic members-elect their rightful seats in the 120th Congress would be dead on arrival January 3.

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

In fact, Luttig encourages all House members, both parties, to campaign on that point: make sure to loudly highlight any candidate who refuses “to affirm that they will not be complicit in any attempt to steal the midterm elections.”  It will be effective, assuming the issue becomes important to voters to care about and if we can trust the candidates who promise not to steal the election.

He also he lays out – in enough frightening detail to make you realize that some people have actually given this “plan” a lot of thought – the steps the Republicans may take to refuse to allow some or all of the Democrats who win in November to take their seats in the new House in January.  It begins with Speaker Mike Johnson unilaterally, and quite legally, removing current House Clerk Kevin McCumber, “a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”  Then Johnson appoints someone more loyal to TFG, who “refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.”  When those who are excluded from that roll object, this whole circus expands into the courts.  And that will take time.  Time during which the country would be in a full-blown constitutional crisis with Congress unable to do any business, including responding to international threats.

It is not difficult to imagine the many possibilities, some of the most critical being entirely realistic. It would be the ideal moment for China to move against Taiwan, by way of military blockade, attack, or even invasion. It would be the perfect moment for Vladimir Putin to complete his conquest of Ukraine, and perhaps even to move militarily against Estonia. Every passing day could bring a deepening economic crisis, worsened by our angry allies around the world who would welcome the opportunity to requite Donald Trump for his belittling mockery of their countries and presidents. Without the Congress, the United States would be powerless to respond to any of these crises.

But we can always count on the Supreme Court to be the voice of reason, to restore a little sanity to the whole process…right?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

Surely indeed.

I hope relying on the Supremes to save America’s bacon is not our only chance to kick Trump in the teeth and defeat his election-stealing plans.  (Note to the people who indicted James Comey in North Carolina: this is not a threat of actual unlawful violence against the person of the president, it is the use of a common metaphor indicating I would like to beat him in this contest.  Er, change that “beat” to “triumph over.”)  I like to think that enough people across this country have sufficient distaste for this Administration and its extralegal antics to turn out in numbers large enough to flip enough House and Senate seats into a Democratic majority that would resuscitate the Congressional checks-and-balances impulse that has gone dormant during Trump II.  And I trust that those same people – and maybe a good portion of the inhabitants of MAGA world, too – won’t stand for a blatant attempt to commit such a fraud.  Luttig hopes the same:

Between now and November 3, congressional Republicans would do well to ponder one last time the fate of their Republican Party were the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a fraudulent determination by the 120th Republican Congress not to seat Democratic members-elect who would give the Democrats majority control of the House.

Two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.

If we Americans are to save our democracy from the forty-seventh president and his MAGA Republican Party, we must disenthrall ourselves from our political bondage to Donald Trump and MAGA, as Abraham Lincoln urged the nation in 1863 to disenthrall itself from its bondage to the ruinous political dogmas of its time. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,” the sixteenth president admonished. The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.

The writing is already on the wall, Republicans.

Weaponization for me, but not for thee

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Hey Pat, why can’t you ever say anything nice about President Trump?

Um…how about this: he really knows how to hold a grudge, like nobody’s ever seen before!

You remember how he campaigned against the alleged/imagined “weaponization” of Joe Biden’s Justice Department, claiming it was “weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions.”  He was so serious about it that he made it the subject of one of those first executive orders issued the very evening he was inaugurated last year.  Today I read that order more closely and realized that it states its purpose as setting “forth a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people” (emphasis added) and directs the Administration to “correct past misconduct by the Federal Government” from such weaponization.  It never promises that this Administration won’t do the same as it claims Biden’s did.

Now, I can’t say for a fact that the Biden Justice Department (or that of any other previous president, except probably Nixon’s) never never ever went after political opponents when there was no legal case, although I have strong doubts.  But the poor Biden Administration clearly has nothing to compare to what’s going on now.  Why, just today, the Justice Department got a new indictment against former FBI director James Comey, a critic of Trump.

An indictment filed in North Carolina charged Mr. Comey with making a threat against the president, and transmitting a threat across state lines, according to court records.

The new case represents another twist in the department’s tortured efforts to satisfy the demands of Mr. Trump to pursue criminal charges against Mr. Comey, a longtime target of the president’s wrath. The first indictment against Mr. Comey was thrown out by a judge, and other prosecutorial efforts against Trump targets have faltered in the face of grand juries or judges.

(snip)

The new Comey charge stems from an incident nearly a year ago, when Mr. Comey, vacationing on the North Carolina coast, posted a photograph on social media showing seashells arranged to say “86 47,” combining the slang term “86” often used to mean dismiss or remove with an apparent reference to Mr. Trump, the country’s 47th president.

Members of the administration, as well as Mr. Trump’s family, declared that the meaning of “86” was to kill, and that the seashell message amounted to a threat to assassinate the president.

Seashells spell death threat by the seashore?

The original Comey indictment, alleging he made false statements and obstructed justice in connection with Senate committee testimony in 2020 (and had nothing at all to do with seashells), was thrown out by a judge who determined that the acting U.S. Attorney who worked the case had been illegally appointed.  By a president who likes to make his own rules.

Also today, a former federal prosecutor “who accused the Trump administration of firing her last year for political reasons, may proceed with a lawsuit in federal court over the government’s objection, a Manhattan judge ruled on Tuesday.”  Her name is Maurene Comey, James Comey’s daughter, who claims…

“…in her suit that there was no plausible explanation for her abrupt July 2025 dismissal other than Mr. Trump’s enmity toward her father or her “perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”

The Trump administration had asked the judge, Jesse M. Furman of Manhattan federal court, to dismiss Ms. Comey’s suit against the government, saying it had to be pursued first before the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that hears complaints from federal workers about employment actions.

But Judge Furman held that her claim was “outside the universe of cases” that Congress intended the board to resolve, and therefore the court had jurisdiction to consider the suit. The judge did not rule on the merits of Ms. Comey’s claim.

This president has appointed a lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election result as the new head of the investigation of an Obama-era CIA chief who has been highly critical of Trump since he first took office.

[Joseph] DiGenova is a staunch Trump ally who repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, he was forced to apologize to Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency who was fired during Mr. Trump’s first term, after Krebs said he felt the 2020 election was free of major fraud or interference.

Krebs later sued DiGenova after he called for Krebs to be “drawn and quartered” and “shot” during a television appearance. Those comments, Krebs later alleged, sparked death threats against him.

This president’s Justice Department has charged a long-time civil rights group with financial crimes, “accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.”  The fact that such an investigation will please MAGA’s white supremacist wing: just a coincidence.

At a news conference announcing the charges, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America. The law center, he added, was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”

The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.

“Main Justice” had been investigating Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Board chair – who Trump himself appointed to the job back in his first term – on flimsy fraud charges, apparently in an effort to strongarm Powell into lowering interest rates.  Which the majority of the board (not just Powell alone) has repeatedly decided not to do, for reasons having nothing to do with the president’s political popularity.  But when some senators refused to approve Trump’s nomination of a new Fed chair while this Powell investigation was on-going, his puppet U.S. Attorney made the surprise announcement that the investigation was closed! 

The decision came just two days after Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, vowed to continue the investigation despite a federal judge dealing the inquiry a crippling blow in court last month.The move reflected the reality that Mr. Trump, who has spent years trying to get rid of Mr. Powell and browbeating him to lower interest rates, would not be able to install his choice for the job while the inquiry continued.

Curious, I think, that in closing the investigation Pirro thought to reserve the right to restart it again later, “should the facts warrant doing so.”  You don’t suppose she knows something we don’t?

Meanwhile, the FBI denies a report that it is investigating a reporter who wrote a story about (wait for it) the FBI director reportedly using the bureau’s assets “to provide his girlfriend with government security and transportation.”  They’re trying to make a case that the reporter was “stalking” Kash Patel’s girlfriend.

“The scrutiny of [reporter Elizabeth] Williamson is an example of the Trump administration examining whether to criminalize routine news gathering practices that are widely considered protected by the First Amendment.”

And it says right here that employees at EEOC say they are being pressured to bring cases that would satisfy the reverse discrimination beliefs of Trump supporters, even when there is little evidence:

Field staff at the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws in the workplace say they are under intense pressure from leadership to bring in cases that fit the Trump administration’s priorities, including charges of discrimination against white men and charges of antisemitism on college campuses.

That pressure has led investigators and lawyers at the agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to focus its thin resources on pursuing and fast-tracking cases that have little evidence and tenuous legal bases, according to more than a dozen current and former employees, both Republicans and Democrats.

Last Thursday, two days before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at which a man was arrested for allegedly trying to assassinate the president, ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about TFG’s age and health when he said Melania Trump had the glow of “an expectant widow.”  Yesterday morning she criticized Kimmel’s comments, and just hours later her husband offered the opinion that Kimmel should be fired.  Today, the Federal Communications Commission “ordered a review of all station licenses owned by ABC, an extraordinary move to pressure a major television network whose programming has frequently angered President Trump.”  It said the review would be focused on ABC’s “diversity and inclusion policies.”  Right.

The F.C.C. action represented an escalation by the Trump administration and the president to punish major media outlets for their coverage. Mr. Trump has personally sued several news organizations, including The New York Times, and the Pentagon has tried to sharply restrict news media access.

Mr. Trump’s F.C.C. chairman, Brendan Carr, has repeatedly threatened to take action against broadcasters, including to take away their valuable station licenses. His agency’s action on Tuesday was the first direct step toward potentially doing so.

You want to know how you can tell that this Administration is serious about ending the evil of weaponizing government to fight political battles?  Well, there is this sign: it is arranging to pay “damages” to the subjects of Biden-era investigations like Michael Flynn, Mark Meadows and Carter Page.

“The settlements, arranged by the Justice Department, could help fuel the Trump administration narrative that the federal government had wrongly investigated or prosecuted these subjects — even though no court has made such a determination. And the payouts could be used to bolster the president’s repeated claims that the Justice Department had been weaponized to go after him and his supporters, making them victims of a corrupt legal system.

(snip)

Since Trump’s return to the White House last year, the Justice Department has paid at least $8.5 million to resolve high-profile legal claims brought by allies and supporters who allege they were improperly targeted by federal law enforcement during previous administrations, according to legal filings and people familiar with those deals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss privately held details about the settlements.

And more could be coming.

The Justice Department has looming requests for major payouts that could help define the legacy of the law enforcement agency and its leaders during Trump’s second term. Two of those requests totaling about $230 million, alleging prosecutorial abuse in multiple cases, were made by Trump himself.

As a private citizen, Trump claimed he was entitled to money to compensate him for what he calls politicized investigations.

Because of course he is.  Of course they were.

This list of examples of Trump’s weaponization of the presidency to punish his opponents and reward himself and his family (the grift that keeps on giving) is not exhaustive, and I’m sure you have some favorites of your own; feel free to share.  All these stories happened just within the last ten days, a rate so bigly that I bet no other Administration could possibly match it.

Our elections are under attack and Trump doesn’t much care

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

Yes, Adam Schiff is a Democrat, but Robert Mueller is a Republican.  If you can’t conceive of a world in which someone not of your political party can be telling the truth even when it is not supportive of your party or school of thought, save yourself some time and trouble and stop reading right here.  Because this is about how Russians are attacking American elections and the Trump Administration isn’t doing anything about it.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate last week reminded us that the special counsel’s investigation—which became necessary only because the president’s attorney general had to recuse himself from the whole matter because he had been part of the campaign—was originated to look into Russian interference in the election, not into crimes by Donald Trump or any other American.

Robert Mueller was originally charged with investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and that only secondarily was he tasked with figuring out whether the president had obstructed justice by impeding that investigation. The whole point of this sad affair—lost entirely on a Law & Order nation intent on seeing the Mueller investigation end with Trump in handcuffs on the White House lawn—was that Russia hacked an election, that it is right now hacking the next election, and that this is a threat to national security and the long-standing American experiment in representative democracy. On this one point, Mueller was emphatic: “They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it in the next campaign,” Mueller told the House Intelligence Committee. Indeed that, and not the commission of specified crimes, was always meant to be the special counsel’s yardstick.

Rep. Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intel Committee, has been making this argument for more than a year, trying to remind the American people that criminality is not the baseline; criminality is a side dish. Congress is meant to be overseeing and investigating something far more important and also something far less quantifiable—not just whether Donald Trump committed crimes (Mueller functionally tagged him for that regardless)—but whether Donald Trump sold out, devalued, shilled for, and grifted around American democracy over the course of the 2016 election. The question for Mueller has always been whether Russia interfered in an election (it did), whether Trump benefited (he did), and whether he tried to stymie the investigation into this concern (he did). All of that was laid bare on Wednesday for anyone who was listening. Trump campaign members were exchanging polling data with Russian intelligence operatives and hosting meetings at Trump Tower in order to obtain “dirt” on Hillary  Clinton’s campaign. Trump was lying about all the Russia contacts before he was even caught lying about it. This is not in dispute, even as all the screaming over the origins of the Steele dossier attempts to distract from these facts.

(snip)

Donald Trump prioritized his brand over American national security during the election, and he gave foreign interests ample opportunity to exploit and capitalize on those actions, both during the campaign and after. His campaign prized winning and, if he did not win, his ability to still build a hotel in Russia over American interests. Nobody disputes any of this. Republicans in Congress admire it. Half of the American electorate forgives it, sold on the dream that to be “successful,” i.e., to make money freely, is the ultimate expression of American aspiration. The Trump campaign exposed and continues to expose the country to foreign meddling, and it continues to make itself vulnerable to foreign blackmail. And the GOP is unbothered, because it is prioritizing party over patriotism, and party over national election security.

This president spends a lot of time criticizing people who oppose him by asserting that they don’t love this country.  (Merely opposing what a president—any president—says or does or wants to do is not evidence of lack of love for America; you can make the argument that it is the quintessentially American thing to do, that speaking out for what you think is best for America is clear evidence of love of country.  Trump himself has been doing it for years!)   Yet we are to believe that Donald Trump loves his country although, in the face of clear evidence that Russia is attacking us by interfering in our elections, he’s taken no action to punish the attackers or to protect us from future attack?  When he, in fact, makes repeated public and oleaginous displays of cozying up to the leader of the country that is attacking us?

Mueller’s testimony before two House committees last week has been criticized for not being a good enough “show.”  That’s not the point, or shouldn’t be.   There are two points, actually: the fact that the Russians are attacking us, and the fact of what Mueller’s investigation found about President Trump’s actions while investigating those attacks.  As reported in The Nation, Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler narrowed the focus:

NADLER: Director Mueller, the president has repeatedly claimed your report found there was no obstruction and completely and totally exonerated him. That is not what your report said, is it?

MUELLER: Correct, not what the report said.

NADLER: You wrote: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are not able to reach that judgment.” Does that say there was no obstruction?

MUELLER: No.

Nadler pursued the matter further, asking, “Can you explain what that finding means so the American people can understand?” Mueller replied, “The finding indicates that the president was not exonerated for the act he allegedly committed.”

That may not have been a revelation for Americans who read the Mueller report. But it was a conclusion that was so jarring, when stated by a veteran investigator and prosecutor, that Nadler sought a final confirmation of the special counsel’s determination. “In fact,” said Nadler, “you were talking about incidents in which the president sought to use this official power outside of usual channels to exert undue influence over your investigations. Is that right?”

“Correct,” replied Mueller.

I found a couple more things I’d like to share, starting with concerns about proceeding on impeachment when there’s a good chance the Republicans controlling the Senate would do anything to protect the president of their party:

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1155536314319720448

https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1154507206395514880

https://twitter.com/Comey/status/1155271446207389696

https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1155229134693556224

rdi96EyD

Thanks Tom the Dancing Bug/gocomics.com

The post that wasn’t because of the news that is

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

At first I had great plans for a post called “Fecklessness, thy name is Mitch McConnell” in which I would elegantly make the simple point that Republicans in the U.S. Senate are refusing their constitutional duty to be a check and/or balance on the president of the United States.  The Senate that last month unanimously passed a bill to fund the government while the president was on record promising to sign such a bill should not now be refusing to even consider passing the same bill because the president has said he won’t sign it.  (This is, of course, precisely what is happening.)  The job of the Senate is not to pass only those bills which the president has indicated with a wave of his hand that he will deign to accept.  If you think the bill deserves passage, as you did a few weeks ago, pass it; if the president vetoes it, override the damn veto if you can.  (Hint: you can.)  Mitch, it’s not your fault that the president’s word can’t be trusted (about anything), or that he went back on his promise because a couple of women on Fox News effectively called him a thing that can be grabbed by stars without the stars even asking permission, which they did because he hasn’t made good on his campaign promise to build a wall on our country’s southern border, even when his party controlled the House and the Senate and the White House.  It is your fault if you keep deferring to the president and the leader of your political party when you know full well he’s a lying hypocrite who not only doesn’t have the best interests of this country at heart but is using his office for personal enrichment.  And maybe working for the Russians.

It’s that working-for-the-Russians part that made me change my mind about what to write about, because—did you see this in the New York Times:

In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

That’s the same president who’s now in the fourth week of a Fox News-inspired temper tantrum over funding of his request for more than $5 billion to support construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to fight illegal immigration, which has caused a portion of the federal government to suspend operations and more than three-quarters of a million federal employees to miss their paychecks, and who has reportedly thought about seizing federal funds allocated for Hurricane Harvey recovery and future flood control efforts in the Gulf Coast region of Texas but not yet committed to specific projects and spending it on border wall construction under a theorized declaration of national emergency.  But this is even more outrageous, I think.

I’ll offer two of the many analyses of the Times story floating around out there today.  First, in The Hill Jonathan Turley suggests “this is likely the only time in history that the FBI has investigated whether a sitting president was either a knowing or unknowing agent of a foreign power” and in the next breath wonders if this investigation explains everything away innocently: “What if there were no collusion or conspiracy but simple cognitive bias on both sides, where the actions of one seemed to confirm precisely the suspicions of the other?”  Seems unlikely, but it’s an interesting read.

Even more so is this one in Esquire by Charles P. Pierce, who everyone should be reading anyway all the time just because.  He thinks that one word in the story is a clue left by the Times reporters that today’s bombshell isn’t the end of the story.

The word is tucked into a sentence that, at first glance, seems to be a perfectly anodyne statement of the current facts. Indeed, it’s tucked into a sentence that would be an unremarkable bit of knee-jerk newspaper balance if this explosive charge of a word weren’t placed right the in the middle of it. That word is “publicly,” as in: No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.

(snip)

This is not a word chosen idly, not in a piece as judiciously written as this one. Clearly, the Times printed pretty much all it was given by its sources, but the implication of that “publicly” is that investigators likely know far more than what appeared in the newspaper.

More to come?  Yeah, I bet there is.