Hmmm…obstruction of justice by FPOTUS?

When you are a self-made millionaire by age eight, you operate by a different set of rules. Because you are so important the ordinary constraints that most people feel do not apply, they apply only to losers.

So when F POTUS fired James Comey, for not dropping the Flynn thing, the next day he celebrated in the Oval Office with Russian officials including the Russian ambassador, the guy Flynn had illegally contacted during the transition and lied about speaking to. When F POTUS met with Putin in Helsinki, no records were made of the meeting, the translator notes were destroyed. F POTUS said he believed Putin rather than his own US intelligence experts, though he later clarified that by saying he actually meant the exact opposite of what he said the day before.

When Robert Mueller was investigating and documenting 140 instances of coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign he encountered so much obstruction of his investigation, and so much lying, that he wrote an entire second volume about the obstruction of people like Manafort, Flynn, Stone, although he was very tactful about F POTUS’s refusal to answer written questions. He delicately called “inadequate” F POTUS‘s no answer given for the final long, compound question about Flynn, Comey and the beating heart of his consistently obstructive behavior.

The lying Manafort recently conceded that he had given sensitive polling data on the swing states that F POTUS would go on to narrowly win to Konstantin Kilimnic, a Putin asset. Nothing to see here, Manafort was pardoned, all his crimes now a nullity under the law. But obstruction of justice, which is ongoing, is a very serious crime, perhaps the most serious one of all.

If you successfully obstruct a criminal investigation into yourself, using any means necessary, and all the power of your office, you then give your corrupt attorney general the ability to say that since no underlying crime was proved it is impossible, as a matter of logic and under the law, to have obstructed justice.

If you say so, Bagpiper, you lying sack of shit.

decent Nathan Lane impression, though

Torture Memo author weighs in on Trump obstruction of justice

It’s been a long time, I think, since I referred to someone here as a piece of shit, fucking or otherwise, but if anyone qualifies it’s tenured professor of constitutional law and former OLC stooge (under VP Dick Cheney) John “Torture Memo” fucking Yoo [1]. Here he is rearing his ugly head which I have spared you in this audio clip, as a legal expert on FOX, to tell Fox Nation that now that the government has the stolen documents back, after only 19 months or so of trying, there should be no further investigation because . . . you figure it out, jerk-offs.

Imagine having this proud fascist as your professor of constitutional law at Berkeley University. Foof!

[1] The genius of the secret torture memo, co-authored by Yoo and now lifetime federal judge Jay Bybee, was using a tortured definition of the word “torture” to make every cruel and inhuman technique simply “enhanced interrogation” unless the pain caused was equivalent to something they randomly pulled out of their assholes — the shutdown of a major organ system in the body.

I watched my father’s liver cancer shut down his liver and finally his kidneys and it was extremely gentle. He had no pain at all, his breathing became more and more shallow and then he was dead.

Jared Kushner, boy genius

Asked, on his book promotion tour (the self-serving tome is apparently a bestseller on Amazon) whether his father-in-law had won the 2020 election, graceful Jared did this brilliantly original dance (as reported in today’s NY Times, link at bottom):

“I think that there’s different words,” Mr. Kushner told the talk show host Megyn Kelly during a friendly interview on SiriusXM. He added, “I think there’s a whole bunch of different approaches that different people have taken, and different theories.”

Pressed to say whether Mr. Trump lost, Mr. Kushner demurred. “I believe it was a very sloppy election,” he said. “I think that there’s a lot of issues that I think if litigated differently may have had different insights into them.”

Clearly, it was not the election itself, it was the failure to properly litigate the election, that is, the failure to offer any proof of fraud in any court of law that made the real difference into insights that determine what you call it: sloppy, a steal, a mistake, a fuck up, a mirror image of me, myself and the outsized ambitions apertunant thereto.

The Times book reviewer gushed:

“Breaking History” is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering (the “mechanic”) with issues he was interested in.

This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.

link to full review at [1]

On Wednesday, when asked on Fox News if Mr. Trump made a mistake in taking classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office, Mr. Kushner stepped carefully.

“President Trump, he governed in a very peculiar way,” he said. “When he had his documents, I’m assuming he did what he thought was appropriate.”

Mr. Kushner has condemned the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago, saying on Tuesday, “It just seems like what they keep doing is breaking norms in their attempt to try to get him.”

His father-in-law has been touting his book as a MUST READ. He’s giving it away as a promotion to those who make a certain sized donation to his omnibus Defend the Innocent Trump from unfair partisan persecution PAC fund.

The friendly venues have mostly spared Mr. Kushner tough questions about Mr. Trump’s role during the Jan. 6 attack. His interviewers have also steered clear of asking about how Mr. Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, whom he defends in his book as a reformer on certain topics.

source [below]

Go, Jared.

Go fuck yourself.

Promoting His Memoir, Kushner Offers Tortured Defenses of Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/us/politics/jared-kushner-trump-book.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkQFUZBCbIRp8_qRmHmfnE2_s-j2XzIG2WVC1CyekPRpSa5kLVIKBkYNh13yieQJUJFo4Tc8FI770VOV1xGU7vq4GYmZ8BLmJsotLjA2lm1NfBDbtgtGK1MTH8eOsnmfixtUzbPjO9C6GOgiYxNU0y98seAFKg3HICwq_AE_ckmYUtmKd8We0pAGsIdyKIvPL3ChRhO9vgbRrU6AQ-W-gxSiiE1JfHqOpGKFMOfAqAGHBv4m8868deMMcUPcv_LB0hfcn9gNYBG22cXFQG6Nxq4PA225KPu8U

[1] Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/books/review-breaking-history-jared-kushner.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkQFUaBCbfWt8ktVqciObOzaN5jGXzJSuUTzkHz-UOH4-a6gLPbLBua54wwi-bQtJbdr8zQfg4hsluA3tQcSj66J2VhMZCZCwvtYO4Wm5x08LBUb1ioWOvMTHlIqIinODh-hiPOmj1UaHZ1HZwdls185EyZkjqjSJTvtrNG-Nw09V92_4zVNstFXpbOn7877S_AA5-Od6GchjW9gE9PupaUjzTltKZgKkSJEQQURmVCSMivhtvrY9UK9gVP63gLh4_ecGYgr0ZD2dgKInBFIROvEs9zUnYURc6upaakNAx

To write or not to write

I had a girlfriend many years ago, very cute and much younger than me, I was 30 and she was 20. I was the first boyfriend she had who wasn’t a boy and she responded very well to all of my attentions. We had as harmonious a relationship as I could manage at the time.

When she was getting divorced many years later, and needed to be cheered up, encouraged as a desirable woman I suppose, she said to me “if I come to New York will you fuck me?”

My hesitation surely gave away too much, then I told her that I was in a long-term monogamous relationship, sadly, and for some reason my hand wrote on a piece of paper “if I come to New York will you fuck me?”

I folded the paper and put it in my pants pocket and forgot about it. Until weeks later, when it inexplicably showed up on the floor on my side of the bed. Sekhnet picks it up, unfolds it and reads to me “if I come to New York will you fuck me?” I give her a short, sheepish, truthful account of the call. Years later I had dinner with my still very cute younger ex and her very smart, good looking 16-year-old daughter. That was the only time I’ve seen her in all those years that I can recall, except one other time, about fifteen years earlier.

I mentioned to my friend today that there’d been flooding in her area recently and I’d thought of calling her to make sure she was okay. My friend said “and if she saidif I come to New York will you fuck me?’

I wouldn’t write it down,” I said.

“The heat is building up. The pressure is building up.”

The lawyers Trump is still able to hire filed a unique motion in federal court the other day related to his right to retain government papers after leaving office. The judge gave them a few days to fix their filing, since she was legitimately confused about what they are seeking and why they are seeking it in her federal courtroom.

The 27-page filing is replete with Trump’s typical political bombast, including boasts about the power of the former president’s 2022 campaign endorsements and about the Mar-a-Lago estate itself. But it also confirmed aspects of the timeline related to the Mar-a-Lago search, including the fact that the Justice Department issued two subpoenas prior to the search — one for documents on May 11 and another for security camera footage in late June. . .

. . .“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump declared.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/22/trump-files-suit-special-master-mar-a-lago-search-00053196

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post clarified that Trump didn’t have his lawyers include that strong paragraph in his motion for a special master:

“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform soon after the motion was filed. . .

. . .Three days after the raid, on Aug. 11, the former president’s attorneys attempted to convey a message to Attorney General Merrick Garland from Trump during a conversation with Bratt. That message, according to the filing, was:

“President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry.’ The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.”

https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/trump-asks-for-special-master-to-go-through-documents-seized-from-mar-a-lago/

You know, as you do when you want to make sure the guy knows it’s a nice little democracy he’s got here and it would be a shame if something happened to it.

States vs. Feds

Right-wing demagogues are making the same point that the Confederates made back when they were defending their constitutional right to hold other people as property and do with them as they pleased. It’s like the goddamn Civil War was never fought, or won by the forces of the Federal Union. Swastikas and Confederate flags, free speech protected under the First and Second Amendments, States Rights, home rule, local sovereignty! Here’s a beautiful short summary of the basic idiocy of the “States’ Rights” position.

Trump’s ongoing threat

New reporting, Trumpie reached out to Merrick Garland to inform him that the country is on fire and wanting to know what he could do to turn down the heat — outside of turning over evidence, being truthful, not doxxing traitors online, or calling on the most violent of his followers to stop threatening violence against Trump’s ever-expanding group. of enemies, the the ones whose home addresses, names of spouses and children and where the kids go to school has been posted on Trump’s Truth Social network.

Trumpie’s larger point is that he controls 90% of the country’s most volatile, unreasonable, violent assholes, and 100% of our enraged racists, and the other side may well have 90% of the more reasonable, less violent citizens, but we can all agree that it would be a shame if anything happened to this great divided burning country, Merrick, my friend. You know what I’m sayin’, Merrick? Merrick?