TIME magazine named its Person of the Year the other day. Unaccountably that Person was not Mr. Trump, TIME selected Swedish high school climate activist Greta Thunberg.
You can predict what happened next — the most powerful man in the world took to his phone to cyberbully a sixteen year-old girl.
Here’s Trevor Noah— and Greta:
click on frame above for Trevor’s great segment.
Trump is a flawed vessel for God’s will. You’ll get no argument from anyone on that score. His flaws, including an inability to refrain from constant lying and self-aggrandizement, are endlessly on display. We see this tic constantly because one of his other flaws is a childish need for attention, a need to be the center of attention. Another is his seeming incapacity for the demanding duties he has assumed as the world’s most powerful man.
William Barr, on the other hand, is a highly skilled flawed vessel for God’s will who controls federal law enforcement in the United States of America. He has shown a zeal to defend the president, no matter what, comparable to the zeal of the fierce zealot lawyers, Defenders of the Faith, who argued to the death the right of the Church to torture and kill heretics in the name of Jesus Christ. He has no hesitation to make bold, strong, authoritative-sounding pronouncements that are not strictly supported by actual facts. Because of his power, his zeal, his lawyerly chops, and his Scalia-like devotion to carrying out “God’s will”, he is the most dangerous man in Donald Trump’s revolving, mostly incompetent, crew.
The Department of Justice, created after the Civil War to enforce the rights of newly freed slaves, opened an investigation into the origins of the investigation of the Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia regarding the 2016 election. The DOJ, in the Mueller Report, found Russian efforts on behalf of Mr. Trump were “sweeping and systematic”, and though there were many points of contact, even open invitations for Russian help from candidate Trump (jokes, jokes!), Mueller’s team was thwarted in getting sufficient evidence of a chargeable criminal conspiracy between Team Putin and Team Trump. Several top Trump aides are in prison, or awaiting sentencing, in part over their roles in making sure the DOJ never received sufficient evidence of widespread “collusion”.
Former Attorney General and Trump loyalist Jeff Sessions made the fatal mistake of following DOJ ethics attorneys’ advice and recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation. After Sessions was publicly humiliated by his boss and forced to “resign”, a snorting weightlifter was inserted into the post temporarily until Trump was able to get his new Roy Cohn confirmed by the Senate. Barr was as good as his promise to Trump during his audition for the job — I will protect you no matter what, so-called damning facts be damned.
“Insufficient evidence” to establish every element of the crime of criminal conspiracy became, after Barr’s authoritative, deliberately misleading public spin in the weeks before he released the redacted Mueller Report, “complete exoneration”. Mueller immediately protested this distortion, in a letter to Barr. Barr waited a month to disclose Mueller’s letter, giving time for his authoritative counter-narrative to become cemented in the public mind. The ten instances of obstruction of justice described in detail by Mueller, America was told by the always certain Barr, were irrelevant because the actual crime of obstruction of justice hinges on intent, in this case the intent of an innocent man clearly within his rights to be understandably enraged by an unfair partisan investigation against him and to do whatever was within his considerable powers to stop it.
The zealous defender of Trumpism is at it again. The recently released report concluded the DOJ investigation (begun under Obama) into Russian influence in Trump’s campaign was not motivated by bias or political animus against candidate Trump. It also noted at least 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in how the FBI obtained the original FISA warrants to surveil four Trump aides. It should be noted that the investigation, once it was pursued by the Independent Counsel, ultimately led to numerous convictions of top Trump aides and a raft of indictments of Russians beyond the reach of American law. Of the four initial targets of the FBI investigation that the DOJ Inspector General investigated, three have pled guilty or been convicted of related crimes.
Barr announces that the DOJ report concluded that the “intrusive” investigation was opened by the FBI on the “thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. He also called the investigation “completely baseless”. He is not buying the conclusions of Inspector General Michael Horowitz until Barr’s own investigation of possible criminality by investigators and other members of Mueller’s team is concluded.
For sheer shamelessness, this might have been his best comment:
“From a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government used the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election,” he said [of Obama’s “spying” on the Trump campaign –ed.].
Barr said, among other things:
“I think our nation was turned on its head for three years, I think, based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press, and I think that there were gross abuses of FISA and inexplicable behavior that isn’t tolerable in the FBI,” Barr told NBC News.
Fake news, completely bogus narrative. [1]
“[Horowitz’s] approach is to say, if I get an explanation from the people I’m investigating that is not unreasonable on its face, then I will accept it as long as there’s not contradictory testimonial or documentary evidence… And all he said is people gave me an explanation. And I didn’t find anything to contradict it. So I don’t have a basis for saying that there was improper motive. But he hasn’t decided the issue of improper motive,” Barr said.
(emphasis mine)
Barr dismisses the findings as the easy conclusions of a cursory and inconclusive look into what he considers possible, even likely, “bad faith” by the FBI. It matters not a whit that, as he frankly concedes, he has no basis for saying there was an improper motive for the FBI probe, he just knows it because… God told him.
Indeed. Remarkably, Trump says exactly the same thing about the latest baseless, sick, illegal witch hunt against him. Who are you going to believe, a dense 435 page report by a partisan bureaucrat intent on letting his suspiciously error-prone colleagues off the hook or the clear words of the unambiguous leader of the Free World and his top law enforcement official?
If only the Democrats had the spine to impeach Mr. Trump for his seamless pattern of obstruction of justice as well as his many other misdeeds as America’s Top Executive. Why are the findings of the Mueller Report a dead letter? Barr said so, unequivocally. The Democrats, it seems, made a political calculation about the uphill nature of that fight against America’s top lawyer and the impossibility of getting Americans to tune back into that “old news”.
Too bad impeachment of Barr is off the table, that would be a great show, watching the most dangerous man in America wrestling other lawyers like the snarling, heavyweight, snarling alligator he is. I’d watch that shit show gavel to gavel.
[1] Inconvenient facts? Easily disposed of:
Barr also reiterated his opinion that the FBI did not have enough evidence to open up a full investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 — which diverges from the conclusion reached by Horowitz.
According to the Horowitz report, the FBI investigation — codenamed Crossfire Hurricane — was opened exclusively on a tip to the FBI from an Australian diplomat that George Papadopoulos, then a foreign policy aide on the Trump campaign, had displayed knowledge of a possible plan by the Russians to release information damaging to Hillary Clinton.
In the interview, Barr dismissed Papadopoulos as a “28-year-old campaign volunteer” and suggested that the information he communicated could have been conflated with contemporaneous news reports about Russian hacking.
The saddest part, I think, is how “alternative fact” turns everything to mud– no facts, no facts!!! The resulting no-holds-barred mud wrestle and shit flinging contest makes all but the strongest of stomach turn away from an impeachment inquiry every American should be following closely.
I wish these were in the articles of impeachment, under the president’s ongoing campaign to undermine American’s faith in the essential fairness of our own democratic institutions, the Department Of Justice and Congress among them. This is the final bit of Trump’s April 19th tweet storm after Barr confidently and incorrectly announced that Mueller’s report exonerated the innocent president:
“Very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even [capital offenses]” These menaces are DOJ employees, these very sick and dangerous criminals, perhaps even traitors, people who, perhaps even need to be executed for their sick and very serious crimes.
Note the display of the president’s high-minded due process concern for the presumption of innocence for these dangerous (if un-indicted) criminals he has already marked for punishment, perhaps even execution.
This is what the president told a reporter at the NATO summit last week when asked about the newly released House Intelligence Committee report on its impeachment inquiry:
Leaving aside the obvious projection of these comments — What the FUCK? Seriously, are we actually fine with this kind of response from the president of the United States? Every time you think we have come to the bottom, there is a new bottom under that one.
If you have any doubts about whether Trump is right about Shifty Schitt, FOX star Tucker Carlson will set you straight. In dismissing the impeachment farce he calls Adam Schiff a “bug-eyed lunatic.” Great minds think alike!
A few words about the Ukraine and the involvement of the president’s top men there (personal lawyer/bagman Rudy Giuliani is currently, unaccountably, in Ukraine, reportedly working on a “documentary” about how Ukraine illegally helped Hillary Clinton narrowly defeat Trump in 2016 while hiding Biden’s open corruption):
The Ukrainian presidential candidate that Paul Manafort advised, groomed and put into power in 2010 over a gigantic deficit in the polls (32%, I think), was a Rusnsian-backed thug named Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, by the way, is currently in exile in Russia and wanted by Ukraine for high treason [1].
Manafort was paid $60,000,000 for his valuable polling, campaigning and PR advising help, before the unpopular, corrupt Yanukovych was overthrown and ousted by Ukrainians in a democratic coup in 2014. Manafort (long time partner of convicted felon and self-proclaimed “political dirty trickster” Roger Stone in their lucrative lobbying/consulting/campaign management and PR business) is in prison for tax evasion (he hid $30,000,000 from Yanukovych in some Cayman Island tax dodge using a shell corporation and got caught) and lying to federal prosecutors to protect Trump — in addition to a bit of witness tampering in his own trial.
In the months before the 2016 election “former unpaid campaign manager” Manafort gave polling data to a Putin connected oligarch (also indicted by Mueller), that included polling research on the key swing states Wi. and Mi. that Trump won by a combined 0.9% or 33,500 votes (see below, email I sent to my sister a few weeks back).
The mountain of damning facts, first-hand witness testimony (in addition to numerous key fact witnesses blocked from testifying), the numbingly seamless regularity of Trump’s corruption — overwhelming, sickening and, in some odd way, complicated. That odd way is the constant lying spin FOX, Barr and Trump himself are always spewing– the constant invocation of conspiracies, no matter how ridiculous and debunked, hardens already inflexible minds to hate instead of reason. In the war of pure hate and pure reason… well, history is not much consolation there. I still cling to my belief that Americans are not, by far, the stupidest and most grievously manipulated populace in history… you know what I’m sayin’?
A note on the 2016 electoral mandate that sick, dangerous, unprincipled traitor Democrats are trying to unethically overturn using a fake, illegitimate, illegal, foul-smelling, inferiority complex-fueled, insane, corrupt, conspiracy-based partisan impeachment:
According to the final tallies, Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes). If Clinton had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College 278 to 260.
These figures, and that stunning second sentence, are from the conservative weekly rag Washington Examiner which recently wrote that impeachment has caused Trump’s popularity to soar to 48% and cites a poll showing he beats each and every one of the Democrats in 2020 with the exception of Bernie. They have Bernie beating Trump 50-49, which they point out is well within the margin of error. Everybody else, Trump whips handily, according to the trusty Washington Examiner.
I’ve seen the same numbers (the 2016 margins) in more reputable sources, but even these John Birch assholes report the accurate, paper thin margin of Electoral College victory, which calculates to a margin of 0.000609375% of the 136,000,000 votes cast in 2016. Trump won Florida by a whopping 1.2 percent, six times his margin in Michigan.
Build that wall! Build that wall!!!
[1] the skinny on Viktor Yanukovych:
In February 2014, Ukraine appeared to be on the brink of civil war, as violent clashes between protesters and special police forces led to many deaths and injuries.[12][13][14] On 21 February 2014, Yanukovych claimed that, after lengthy discussions, he had reached an agreement with the opposition.[15] Later that day, however, he left the capital for Kharkiv, saying his car was shot at as he left Kyiv, and travelling next to Crimea, and eventually to exile in southern Russia.[16]
On 22 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from his post, on the grounds that he was unable to fulfill his duties.[17] Parliament set 25 May as the date for the special election to select his replacement,[17][18][19][20] and, two days later, issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of “mass killing of civilians.”[21] After his departure, Yanukovych conducted several press conferences. In one of these, he declared himself to remain “the legitimate head of the Ukrainian state elected in a free vote by Ukrainian citizens”.[22] On 18 June 2015, Yanukovych was officially deprived of the title of President of Ukraine by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.[23] On 24 January 2019, he was sentenced in absentia to thirteen years’ imprisonment for high treason by a Ukrainian court.[24]
The People rest.
I had hesitated to post this bit I wrote the other day, because, you know, we’re all overdosed on the inescapable partisan poison, the piece could seem to put my Catholic brothers and sisters in a bad light (because of a few supremely ‘bad apples’) and everyone knows what a shameless, smug, provocative contrarian piece of shit Trump’s personal AG is — so, I decided to leave it be.
Then I heard Barr’s comments today about “communities” (black and brown people) having to show more “respect” for law enforcement or they’d find police turning their backs on them when police protection was needed. You have to love the way this self-righteous pig-faced fuck just continues doubling down in his righteous assholishness, tirelessly carrying the president’s piss bucket, including, it now appears, POTUS’s most racist urine (which is champagne to some of the finest in his 39% base).
Barr tells an audience of law enforcement officials that THEY (complaining urban communities of brown people) have to show “more respect” to police or the ungrateful bastards will “find themselves without the police protection they need”. You don’t have to read between the lines here:
“They have to start showing more than they do – the respect and support that law enforcement deserves,” Barr said. “And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”
So, yeah, fuck that fawning lapdog of American autocrats. Here’s the post.
Once again, as before his cunningly orchestrated slow-motion release of the “exonerating” Mueller Report, AG Bagpiper Bill Barr gets out in front of a DOJ report on an investigation to impose his counterfactual spin on it for the sharply divided public. He initiated a criminal investigation into partisan traitors in Obama’s DOJ who allegedly used the infamous Steele Dossier as a pretext to launch a campaign of illegal “spying” on candidate Trump and after his election started a baseless partisan witch hunt against the innocent president-elect. The new report, apparently, does not confirm this anti-Trump conspiracy. Barr comes out swinging, a week before he releases the report, giving a spin that will dominate and muddy the public discussion until the conspiracy-debunking report is released and long afterwards. FOX will have the AG’s Trump-vindicating soundbites to play to Trump’s beloved low-information voters through the 2020 election.
Barr is a partisan, a reactionary and a shameless front man for a shameless president. A conservative religious Catholic who went to all the finest private schools (he graduated from Roy Cohn’s alma mater, Horace Mann), during a time when radical social changes were being demanded by organized activists, he was raised by a father who seethed against the erosion of morality. As reported recently in the Vanity Fair piece about Barr and his father Donald Barr, Bagpiper’s beloved father Donald used his influence as imperious headmaster of the Dalton School to energetically, sometimes unscrupulously, fight the winds of social change blowing in the late 1960s. The elder Barr hated the pot smoking, libertine young anarchists irrationally intent on bringing down the system, trying to swing the pendulum away from discipline, class and tradition toward chaos. Donald Barr was never shy about being a provocative right-wing contrarian, even when it eventually cost him his job as headmaster at Dalton.
Donald Barr’s son Bill apparently feels the same way as his tough as nails dad. What we need is morality, good, old-fashioned Christian piety and a government led by a powerful and unchallengeable CEO who will do God’s will here on earth. It continues to amaze me when a religious Christian endorses someone like Donald Trump in the name of Christ, though, really, at this point, why should it amaze anyone? As a Jew, admittedly, I have only the most fleeting understanding of the teachings of Jesus. I always thought Jesus’s message had to do with humility, modesty, protecting the weak, loving one’s neighbors, being eternally ready to forgive. Then again, what the hell do I know about it?
Still, it’s hard not to notice, in addition to the many devout Evangelical defenders of the Flawed Vessel of God’s will that is Mr. Trump, the several prominent, very conservative Catholics who have risen to the top ranks of government under the magnificently Imperfect Orange Vessel. We have the two Jesuit educated Georgetown Prep alumni Trump appointed to the Supreme Court, Messers Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. We have Barr. We have the incomparable Mick Mulvaney. We have, it emerges, current lead White House counsel, Pat Cippolone, a Catholic so impressively pious he influenced Fox’s Laura Ingraham (Cippolone’s wife worked for Fox, that’s how they met) to convert to Catholicism. Cippolone, we note, is a pitbull for the president, in the same league as blustering bulldog Barr.
God only knows why I am even writing this…
When Trump hired the pugnacious Corey “I have no obligation not to lie to the lying media” Lewandowski as his original campaign manager in January 2015:
Trump’s political staff consisted of three people: his lawyer Michael D. Cohen, veteran operative Roger Stone, and aide Sam Nunberg.[31] In April 2016, another veteran GOP operative, Paul Manafort, was hired; the following month Manafort was named “campaign chairman.”[32] Nunberg was fired in early August 2015;[33] he believes that it was Lewandowski and campaign press secretary Hope Hicks who asked Trump for his ouster.[34] Stone left the campaign a week later.[35]
Lewandowski’s motto as Trump’s campaign manager was “Let Trump be Trump”; those words appeared on his office white board.[36] Trump said of Lewandowski, “He leaves me alone, but he knows when to make his presence felt.”[20]
Of the original five members of the Trump campaign, three have since become convicted felons, victims, we are reminded by other “best” people, of a totally unfair Democratic witch hunt and presumably totally illegitimate trials by so-called judges.
Manafort and Stone, one in prison, the other awaiting sentencing, were bold pioneering lobbyists, partners in the political consulting firm Black, Manafort and Stone [1], who made millions with their access to presidents, senators and congressmen they’d helped to elect. The felonious partners had worked on Ronald Reagan’s winning presidential campaign and immediately became lobbyists to the lobbyists, brokering unprecedented access for their fellow corporate influence peddlers.
After his ouster from the Trump campaign in June 2016, and Trump’s unexpected, brilliantly engineered 78,000 vote Electoral College victory, Lewandowski followed in Manafort/Stone’s lucrative footsteps:
On December 21, 2016, Lewandowski and [71] Barry Bennett, a “former Trump senior adviser”, whom Lewandowski had known for ten years,[72] co-founded as equal partners a political consulting firm called Avenue Strategies.[73] They were joined by other Trump presidential campaign veterans.[73] Bennett, Mike Rubino, Jason Osborne, and most of Lewandowski’s associates at Avenue Strategies filed lobbying registrations.[71]
Mainly because of Lewandowski, Avenue Strategies soon became one of “the highest-profile government-affairs outfits in Washington”.[73] Avenue Strategies’ office “overlooks the White House”, and Lewandowski has “relatively unimpeded access” to President Trump either by phone or in person at the White House.[71] Access to President Trump can be “highly lucrative” — “relatively few established K Street powerhouses have ties to the new president”.[73]
In February 2017, Avenue Strategies “quietly agreed” to lobby for Citgo Petroleum Corporation (Citgo). In April they signed a $25,000 a month contract as tensions mounted between the United States, Venezuela, and Russia.[74] Citgo is headquartered in Houston, Texas, but is owned by the government of Venezuela. Citgo took out a loan from Russian state-owned oil giant, Rosneft in December 2016 that it has been unable to pay. It is under threat of a takeover by Rosneft.[71] By early May the legally required paperwork had not been filed revealing the contract to the U.S. Government through the Senate Office of Public Records.[74]
The governor of debt-ridden Puerto Rico hired Avenue Strategies to lobby Congress for funding.[73]
Avenue Strategies also “operates a fledgling super PAC to help Trump win re-election”.[72]
[1]
The firm has represented, and lobbied the US Congress on behalf of, numerous foreign governments and heads of state from both representative democracies and unelected dictatorships including Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia, dictator Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines,[4][5] dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire,[6] andJonas Savimbi of Angola. According to “The Torturer’s Lobby”, a report published by The Center for Public Integrity, the firm received $3.3 million in the early 1990’s for their work with dictators.[7]
During the 1988 presidential campaign in the United States, it was disclosed that Black, Manafort retained the island nation of the Bahamas as a client at a time its leadership was being attacked for alleged ties to drug traffickers. BMSK officials insisted that they intended only to help the Bahamas obtain more United States aid for efforts to curb drug smugglers.[1]
Domestically the firm represented Bethlehem Steel and Tobacco Institute, helped elect Senators Phil Gramm,Jesse Helms, Charles McCurdy Mathias Jr., Arlen Specter, Paula Hawkins and David F. Durenberger—and worked on legislation that benefitted the firm’s clients.[citation needed]
I wake up thinking that the most famously unscrupulous, inept, attention-craving and litigious man born to great, unearned wealth in the United States became the most unscrupulous, inept, attention-craving and litigious president in history. He uses the courts, as he was taught by his surrogate father, the disbarred Roy Cohn, to exhaust opponents, bankrupt them, play out the clock on statutes of limitations, extract favorable settlements with no admission of guilt. This is what I wake up thinking on Thanksgiving, a day I should be thinking about tomorrow’s fabulous sales.
Instead I’m thinking “Jesus, he successfully obstructed justice in the Mueller probe.” Key witnesses to his campaign’s collusion with Russians, at his urging, with pardons dangled, lied to investigators and destroyed evidence — resulting in a finding of “insufficient evidence” of a criminal conspiracy with Putin, although there was substantial evidence showing repeated coordination between the parties and that Putin exerted great influence in his useful idiot’s 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate. Mueller and the Republican-controlled Senate both concluded there was massive Russian election interference in favor of Putin’s preferred candidate, the guy who won in spite of losing the election by 2.9 million votes.
He is successfully using an absurdly broad blanket claim of “protective immunity”, conjured by his corrupt AG Bill Barr, to silence fact witnesses and prevent the disclosure of evidence in his own impeachment. I say successfully because, although he keeps losing in court he is able to appeal each time and he only has to run out the clock on these claims for a few more months in order to successfully obstruct the impeachment of history’s most openly unscrupulous, inept, attention-craving and litigious president. Roy Cohn lives!
Many of us have a lot of reasons to be thankful on this Thanksgiving, but having this brazen sociopath in the world’s most powerful position (outside of the Kremlin), using the Department of Justice and the American judicial system, the appeals courts in particular, to subvert the lawful administration of justice, defy legal process and pervert all democratic norms sure ain’t one of them.
I’d be thankful for a day I don’t wake up hearing the list of who this sick puppy has attacked on twitter while I was sleeping. As a citizen of the world’s still most powerful country, and also one of its multitude of famously powerless consumers, I wake up praying for the serenity to not get angry as hell just thinking of the fucking serenity prayer.
Trump’s conspiracy to get dirt on a political opponent just keeps getting deeper and dirtier. As time goes by, more and more of the concealed details of the conspiracy to enlist foreign aid to smear an American political rival come to light. More and more key players, Secretary of State Pompeo, Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Personal lawyer Rudy Giuiliani and a large supporting cast working to keep the details secret, are directly linked in the long, coordinated plan to have Ukraine announce a corruption probe into the company Joe Biden’s son worked for. As more interviews are conducted, under oath, and more public testimony is taken, more connections emerge. All this confirms Robert Caro’s statement that truth takes time. Every investigator I’ve ever heard discuss research has said something similar– time is crucial for developing and following the path to true facts.
The incriminating July 25 “I need you to do me a favor, though” phone call between Trump and Zelensky was just one part of a coordinated plan that began months earlier and included the smearing and removal of the US Ambassador to Ukraine, and didn’t end until after Trump was made aware of the whistleblower’s August 12 complaint and released the aid to Ukraine a month later, two days before Zelensky was scheduled to make the announcement of the corruption probe into Hunter Biden and Burisma on CNN.
If not for that complaint, which every attempt was made to conceal– to “prevent leaks”– there would be absolutely nothing to see here! Another baseless, hate-fueled hoax perpetrated against our eternally innocent Victim-in-Chief by super- rich liberal Jews, among others, who spend endless dark money to besmirch our Commander-in-Chief. Like the Mueller probe, its origins now under criminal investigation by Trump’s new Roy Cohn, AG William Barr.
I read a detailed timeline of the plan to get the Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son’s role in Burisma, a company investigated for corruption that occurred, according to a Ukrainian source, prior to 2014, the date that Biden’s slimy son began his well-paid job for Burisma. Hunter, we note, “worked” for Burisma from 2014 to 2019, pulling down a very high fee for minimal services rendered.
Here is one day’s entry from that chilling timeline put together by factcheck.org.
Sept. 26 — The House intelligence committee releases a redacted copy of the whistleblower complaint, and hears testimony from Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence.
Maguire says the whistleblower acted in “good faith” and “did the right thing.” Democrats on the committee press him on why he did not initially turn over the whistleblower’s complaint. Maguire says it was an “unprecedented” situation, and he was concerned about the possibility of “executive privilege,” so he brought the matter to the attention of the White House and then the Department of Justice. He said he did not initially release the complaint based on the advice of lawyers in the Department of Justice. [emphasis mine].
In an interview with the Washington Post, Lutsenko says of Hunter Biden: “From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything.” He went on to say that an investigation of Burisma’s owner involved activities that occurred before Biden joined the company’s board. “Hunter Biden cannot be responsible for violations of the management of Burisma that took place two years before his arrival,” Lutsenko says.
Check out the detailed timeline of Trump’s Ukraine/Biden conspiracy compiled by factcheck.org. Unlike many such organizations, factcheck is a model for donor transparency [1]. It is hard to call it a front group for any particular political ideology, though, of course, we know how that works.
For example, some of the best people are saying Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was rightfully smeared, by people working for the president, as an agent of that notorious radical Jew billionaire George Soros, while those same truthseekers pushed the, arguably, unfounded, counterfactual conspiracy that Ukraine, not Russia, had hacked the 2016 US elections– contrary to the findings of US Intelligence agencies, the Mueller investigation and the Republican majority Senate’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. [2] Hey, it’s a free country, yo.
[1] Factcheck.org:
Our policy is to disclose the identity of any individual who makes a donation of $1,000 or more. We also disclose the total amount, average amount and number of individual donations.
In 2015, Inside Philanthropy praised our disclosure policy for “exemplifying nonprofit transparency.”
“FactCheck.org is totally transparent about its funding sources — going so far as to list a detailed breakdown of financial support by every quarter, the same standard expected of political campaigns and party committees,” it wrote. “So, quite apart from its stated mission, FactCheck.org is making a contribution by exemplifying nonprofit transparency.”
[2] The Senate report was quietly released, with a bit of fortuitous und grotesque irony, the day Mueller testified, completely and totally exonerating Trump of criminally conspiring with Russia’s sweeping and systematic attempts to elect him president. The very next day the totally exonerated Trump called to shake down the Ukrainian president for dirt on Biden…
SEAL Eddie Gallagher is Trump’s kind of platoon leader:
Both defense attorneys and prosecutors agree that Gallagher’s relationship with his former platoon was growing increasingly acrimonious.
The SO1 sniper told NCIS that one of the SEAL SO1s who assisted Gallagher with the wounded detainee said the chief had begun threatening “to kill mother(expletives)” who accused him of wrongdoing.
Gallagher allegedly told two lieutenants and another chief that he had dirt “on all of them” and “would bring them all down” if they reported his war crimes, prosecutors wrote.
As more witnesses began reciting their allegations against the chief, prosecutors contend that Gallagher circulated their identities to others in the SEAL community “and encouraged them to disclose the names and blacklist them.”
That included Gallagher telling another platoon chief that “the rest of the platoon were afraid to go out on patrol during the deployment and they were all cowards,” according to the NCIS report about the SO1 sniper’s interview.
Three months ago, prosecutors argued that Gallagher “spread numerous rumors about his teammates to members of the SEAL community, describing them as cowards who were afraid to go out on missions during deployment and went so far as to tell the new chain of command for teammates who had transferred,” according to a filing provided to Navy Times.
You can be sure POTUS didn’t need to hear even that much about the case to love the SEAL (or as Trump tweets “Seal”) the Navy was poised to remove from the elite unit after he was convicted of posing with the corpse of a teenager he was alleged to have stabbed to death moments before. Gallagher was demoted by the Navy and lost some pay.
Gallagher is the kind of “take no prisoners” tough guy the draft evading, torture loving, Muslim banning president loves. Trump would have been just like him, if only that podiatrist, a commercial tenant of his father’s, hadn’t kept diagnosing him with crippling bone spurs. Trump championed Gallagher’s case, publicly praised him many times, restored his rank after the Navy demoted him, and also restored his lost pay. Trump and close friend Sean Hannity made Gallagher a national hero on FOX News, and gave Gallagher the platform to plead his case that excessive zeal in war, alleged killing of a few girls, old men and so forth, is no vice, if done in the name of liberty and fighting TERROR .
So, while so many are openly and disloyally challenging the president’s exercise of his powers under Article II, the president rose up to assert his unappealable powers to insist the Navy leave this great, unfairly maligned, hero alone. The Navy had other plans, citing Naval discipline, morale, protecting the reputation and honor of the elite Navy unit and allowing the SEAL command to have the final say on policing their own.
The Commander-in-Chief heard enough from the whining bleeding hearts at the Navy and had his most recent Secretary of Defense, war veteran, top lobbyist for US weapons giant Raytheon, former beautician to the stars, and enthusiastic “Always Trumper!”, as one wag has it [1] fire the Secretary of the Navy, a man the Defense Secretary publicly denounced as both sneaky and disloyal.
Some other unrelated, very troubling intel from that same Navy Times article:
This one involved what’s called a “switchblade drone” that was operated by the platoon on Aug. 1 that killed civilians in Tal Afar, according to legal filings.
Small enough to be transported in a backpack, the quiet, hovering UAVs can unleash tiny, but potent, missiles to blow up enemies, miles away from where operators are remotely piloting the drones.
Picture the horrifying possibilities of that little baby, in the wrong hands.
[1] Nah, just kidding,Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has the finest credentials for his post, unusual in the current adminstration.
Unlike fellow top West Point graduate (same class) Mike Pompeo, Esper had a distinguished military career that included a good deal of combat for which he was decorated multiple times. On leaving the military he took a very good job at the Koch Brothers’ Heritage Foundation and made his way into government service after a successful tenure as a top lobbyist for a top US weapons maker.
Before joining the Department of Defense, Esper was vice president of government relations at Raytheon, a major U.S. defense contractor.[3] During his time at Raytheon, Esper was recognized as a top corporate lobbyist by The Hill in 2015[4] and 2016.[5]
from the chyron writing snarkmeisters at CNN, I think. Classic, and ongoing.
gratuitousblahg 