Category Archives: politics smells like meat

Criminal Obstructionists

Our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Bagpiper Bill Barr, Trump’s third and most aggressively protective Attorney General, is instructing all eye witnesses to and those knowledgeable about Trump’s likely obstruction not to testify.  This applies to former DOJ employees who came forward voluntarily and anyone who has received a legally sufficient subpoena to testify.   Barr is fighting all subpoenas in court under a very weak (but effectively clock-running) blanket “protective executive privilege” argument.   Barr is currently trying to prevent Mueller from more than a token appearance before Congress.   Mueller’s July 17th  appearance is now in question, according to Friday’s reports it’s been suddenly rescheduled for July 24th.

NOTHING TO HIDE, YOU FUCKING LOSERS!!!   NO DO-OVERS (except for my boss!)!!!  NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, WITCH HUNT!

Bagpiper Bill is unscrupulous, and dishonest.    His loyalty to his boss, admirable in some circumstances, is despicable in the context of who he’s defending, based on the many sworn witness accounts of ongoing obstruction set out in the Mueller report,  and how he has been defending him– often with outright lies (more about that in a moment).  He shamelessly shills for and doggedly defends his president (who has his own army of lawyers and appointees to do this), rather than serving as the head of a legitimate and fair Department of Justice charged with the administration of justice, which is another word for “fairness”.

Barr echoes each of his boss’s most ridiculous claims, gives them the imprimatur of the head of the Justice Department.   He announced that the DOJ is investigating “spying” on Trump during the Russia-involved Trump campaign (recall, 100 plus instances of coordination between is campaign and Russia do no amount to “collusion”).  Heroic obstructionist Mitch McConnell had told Obama that he would flay him publicly for “interfering in the 2016 election” if Obama revealed the intelligence about and investigation into Russian interference when they were all briefed on it prior to the election.  Barr is investigating the “partisan” Republican-appointed investigators into Trump’s likelier than not obstruction.   Barr is a giddy bully with the power of the Department of Justice to throw behind his threats.   He is currently intimidating witnesses.

We are at a breaking point for this experiment in democracy.  If a one vote majority is good enough to confirm a divisive, ideologically driven partisan Supreme Court justice, and decide, 5-4 (along ideological lines), cases that affect millions and millions of Americans — well, that’s very close to the breaking point of representative democracy.

Oh, yes, just a small bouquet of Barr’s transparent lies.  It is bracing to consider that the new standard for untruth that we need to be concerned with, under this compulsive liar who is the nation’s thrice bankrupt CEO, is chargeable criminal perjury that will result in a 100% conviction.   The Overton Window has been moved radically in the last few years– lying to advance one’s cause is no longer considered anything to be ashamed of.  In the famous phrase of soundly defeated ahead-of-his-time Republican extremist Barry Goldwater “extremism in defense of freedom is no vice”.  Look at Trump, McConnell and Barr.  They’ve learned that this works especially well when done in slow motion.    NO VICE!   LOSERS! 

Here’s Barr, in April, three months back, toward the beginning of his long, slow stalling tactic, designed to run out the clock on legal opposition to his boss’s (and his) obstruction, lying his ample ass off (arguing for no do-over):

Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims. 

Only a carping “enemy of the people” would point out the well-known details of the White House’s “full cooperation” (which we all see demonstrated daily, on display alongside the president’s famous sense of fair play):

a) access to campaign and White House documents was extremely fettered.  Trump is currently defying the law and not turning over subpoenaed documents.  He has several cases in court now blocking access to requested documents, financial and otherwise.  In the Deutsche Bank case these documents could be very embarrassing to the president, if not also incriminating.   He’s been ordered to turn them over but has ordered his legal team to appeal the ruling.   Trump has long been what Shakespeare called an “action-taking knave”, a wealthy scoundrel who “lawyers up” to weaselishly get what he wants from people who have the better of the argument.   Delay is the action-taking knave’s best friend and both he and Barr know this well.

b)  key witnesses lied to the FBI and to Mueller, or, like the president and his family members (two of whom are highly placed officials in his administration) simply refused to testify.   The Acosta/Epstein-like deal Trump struck with Mueller was to answer only written queries, each of which, except for the last one, he answered by pleading no memory.  The last question was so unnerving that his lawyers had him actually refused to answer it at all.   Mueller tactfully called this refusal to answer “inadequate”.  Trump also refused to answer Mueller’s follow-up questions.  Inadequate, you know, truly and 100% beyond argument: inadequate..  ONE BITE AT THE APPLE, LOSER!  Senior aides and others were (and are, under this bogus privilege claim) forbidden from giving testimony to anyone, in any sworn setting (NO DO-OVERS, LOSERS!  NO PERJURY TRAPS!)

c) a flimsy protective privilege for all testimony and documents related to the redacted Mueller report has been asserted, on Barr’s written advice to the president.  It is virtually certain that this asserted blanket privilege will eventually be dismissed as groundless, but it might be a crucial year or two before that happens.  In Barr’s defense, it was the one part of his statement he wasn’t lying about, at the time.   Although he later urged the president, in the interest of gaining maximum stonewalling time, to assert this privilege, at the time he spoke, in mid-April, the Orange Menace had asserted no absolute, all-encompassing executive privilege.

As no less an authority than Bill Barr himself said, during a network television interview toward the start of this latest round of blatant obstruction of justice (hey, the top cop from the party that controls 3 of the 4 power centers of our democracy doesn’t have to worry about anyone dropping a dime on HIM):

Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good.  They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have.

They start viewing themselves as the guardians of the people that are more informed and insensitive than everybody else. They can- in their own mind, they can have those kinds of motives. And sometimes they can look at evidence and facts through a biased prism that they themselves don’t realize.[1]    

source

Me?  As soon as the legally gerrymandered election of 2020 is over, I’ll be waiting in line for my tattoo, and instructions about which train to get on, to the designated branch of the independently owned Trump American indigents’ Luxury Detention Center.

 

[1] It’s fascinating, and a bit sickening, to watch this interview, in light of what we know now, having seen more of Mueller’s actual findings, including Trump’s inadequate non-answer to Mueller’s most probing question.   We can now see that this immoral lawyer lies as shamelessly as his current master;  he’s smarter, and much more disciplined, but just as shameless.

Here’s a gem from that interview:

WILLIAM BARR: I’d rather, in many ways, I’d rather be back to my old life but I think that I love the Department of Justice, I love the FBI, I think it’s important that we not, in this period of intense partisan feeling, destroy our institutions. I think one of the ironies today is that people are saying that it’s President Trump that’s shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven’t seen bill of particulars as to how that’s being done.

From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring.

 

Bagpiper Bill’s increasingly desperate defense of Donald Trump

Weeks before releasing any part of Mueller’s report (including the redacted summary Mueller had provided to Barr, along with the report) suddenly squirrelly (details below) Bill Barr defended the innocent, unfairly persecuted Unitary Executive this way:

There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.  [1]

You’ll have to take my word that this is a verbatim transcript of what the skilled and highly principled evasionist/obstructionist said in explaining that the president was understandably angry and frustrated, as anyone would be, by his sincere belief that he was innocent and being persecuted.   I transcribed this from an audio recording, made a few months back when I heard it excerpted again on Preet Bharara’s podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet.   (I can tell from the background music that Preet played the clip, it’s possibly from  the 3/25/19 episode).

According to Barr, if someone (in his party) has a sincere belief (like Boof Kavanaugh’s that he was never drunk enough to fall on a younger woman and paw at her clothes, or drunkenly thrust his penis in another woman’s face at Yale) then THAT SHOULD BE ENOUGH.   What do you people want?   He had a sincere belief that his enemies wanted to harm him.   How do you expect him to feel?  Of course he was furious, and frustrated, who wouldn’t be?!   They were going to undermine him, and his political opponents were ready to pile on, and things we classified top secret, because they were harmful to him, were illegally leaked by sinful traitors who wouldn’t know loyalty if it came up and buggered them!

We have all noted that in these kinds of disputes (Trump vs. the lies of the partisan Mueller report that totally exonerated him) facts and Reason are easily cast aside in our bloodthirstily tribal culture.   It’s emotions that matter, get people worked up enough to go to the polls, where, if they are not black, or hispanic, or young, or in college, or old, or transexuals, or activists, they can easily cast their votes to Make America Great Again.

We want to undercount millions that the constitution requires be enumerated every ten years because — WE ARE DEFENDING THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT!  Yes, that’s right.   We are defending the federal law that says states cannot discriminate against citizens who want to vote because of race, or to favor a more racist political party, as has been, admittedly, done in our past, particularly, but not only in, the states of the former Confederacy, for a century or more.   That’s why we don’t want to count inhabitants of hated ethnic and social groups who may or may not be citizens.   To protect the right of all Americans, not only Democrats, to vote!

The Federalists on the court all liked this reason, found it good enough to pass Supreme Court scrutiny.  Only John Roberts (now the “swing vote”, God help us) pointed out that the administration’s “reason” for asking a citizenship question on the 2020 Census appeared to be contrived, and counter to the evidence.   Roberts suggested that a sensible reason, no matter how flimsy, would have sufficed, but this Voting Rights Act “reason” had the smell of the thing Boof Kavanaugh’s mother warns judges to be wary of, in using their common sense to separate likely truth from likely crap.   In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the fury on FOX and the president’s tweets, Barr fired the DOJ legal team who had argued the case and tried to replace all the lawyers.

Of course the reason Roberts and the others rejected 5-4 was obviously bullshit.   The administration has made every attempt to suppress votes, even establishing a short-lived commission (headed by famous supporters of voter suppression laws, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and the irreproachable Mike Pence), to prove that Hillary Clinton’s three million popular vote majority was based on massive nationwide voter fraud.  Opposition to  Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was widespread and bipartisan. 

It wasn’t just Democrats who were resisting. Mississippi Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said that when he received the data request, his response would be to tell the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from.”       source

The commission had been set up to investigate the fraudulent votes of three million dead, sneaky, illegal Mexicans that Trump tweeted about.   We can’t have millions of zombie voters here in the land of the goddamned Voting Rights Act!   Trump disbanded the commission after a few months (they found no evidence of this army of dead voters) but… nothing to see here!   We now fully support the goddamned Voting Rights Act!   How does this argument smell to you?  Not for nothing footnote (from the same source) [2].

Back to suddenly squirrelly Bill Barr.  Barr, like Trump, initially said he had no problem with Robert Mueller testifying (Trump also initially claimed he supported releasing the entire un-redacted report, if memory serves me).    Barr said Mueller’s testimony would only confirm his judgment that the report, since it did not explicitly state that the president was guilty but only detailed many, arguably, highly suspicious actions by the president, exonerates the president of all wrongdoing.  Barr read the report carefully and is as well aware as any reader of the disturbing findings throughout.  Barr knows that his definitive, public relations winning “interpretation” is an outright lie. 

Even if Mueller doggedly sticks to the four corners of the report, as he has vowed to do, and as he has always done in the past when testifying, there is a lot that, if simply read aloud by Mueller on live television, is extremely damaging to Barr’s/Trump’s creative narrative of exoneration.   Mueller states unequivocally in clear prose that his report does not exonerate Trump, certainly not of his past and ongoing obstruction of justice.   Exoneration and Case Closed is Barr’s story, and he’s sticking to it, desperately.

Barr has been providing sound bytes to the media the last few days, as we all wait for the televised July 17th Mueller testimony.  Barr told the world yesterday that if Mueller doesn’t like being under subpoena the DOJ will have his back if he doesn’t want to testify.    The DOJ is also trying to bar (Barr) closed door Congressional Committee testimony by two former DOJ employees, both of whom worked for the Special Counsel, who are scheduled to appear voluntarily.   NOTHING TO FUCKING HIDE HERE, YOU FUCKING IRRATIONAL HATERS!!!  It is routine for a former employer to forbid former employees from doing things!

Barr has reason to be squirrelly.   He auditioned for the Attorney General job with an impressive, unsolicited legal memo supporting the arguable legality of whatever the Unitary Executive feels he has to do.   He was evasive during his confirmation hearings, protesting his long friendship with and great respect for Robert Mueller, a man whose findings he promised to honor, a man he quickly threw under the bus when those findings turned out to be problematic for the Unitary Executive.   He lied to the American people about Mueller’s duty under the present “Special Counsel” statute (which apparently bound him to the OLC memo prohibiting indictment of the president) and announced that since Mueller had been indecisive, as judge and jury he, the A.G., was exonerating Trump and holding on to the report for a month or so to let that message sink in.   NOTHING TO SEE HERE!.  Which is why we have to cover it up in every possible way.   What don’t you irrationally angry liberal ass-dicking Christ-haters not understand about fucking CASE CLOSED!!!

To some true believers, Bill Barr is a man of unwavering principle and devotion, a devout Catholic conservative who believes that Christ infallibly guides him in this world of darkness.  To me, Barr is a dangerous fanatic, whether or not he would have been a fantastic lawyer for Torquemada and the devout, pious Christian torturers of the holy Spanish Inquisition.

 

[1]  The full paragraph, from right before Mueller spoke on the day he resigned:

Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion. And as the special counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.   Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.    source

click here for a perfect example of but one part of that full cooperation Barr lied about

 

[2]   from the rabid communists at fake news NPR:

One of the five Democratic members died in October as well, and a researcher for the commission was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography.

Oh, yeah, this too

Trump’s latest: we don’t have to abide by a Supreme Court decision, especially one that calls our arguments “contrived”.   We’ll do the thing these so-called judges called illegal by executive order, or whatever Bill Barr manages to pull oubit of his capacious ass.   Barr promises to find a work around to overcome an adverse Supreme Court decision (even as he recused himself from the Jeffery Epstein federal sex trafficking case– but not because his father once hired Epstein to teach at the exclusive Dalton School).

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the explanation offered by the Trump administration for adding the question “appears to have been contrived.” But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer.

Executive branch officials must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” the chief justice wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”    source

The Trump administration fast-tracked the case about asking a citizenship question on the 2020 census and got it heard by the 5-4 Supreme Court by its June 30 deadline.   The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s argument that this question was necessary to somehow protect the Voting Rights Act (an act whose applications they otherwise oppose).   

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that executive branch officials ordinarily have broad discretion to make policy judgments. But he said the record in the case demonstrated that Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, had not given a full and accurate account of his decision to add the question.

In sworn testimony before Congress, Mr. Ross said he had decided to add the question “solely” in response to a Justice Department request in December 2017 for data to help it enforce the Voting Rights Act, or the V.R.A. Three federal trial judges have ruled that the evidence in the record demonstrated that Mr. Ross was not being truthful.

Chief Justice John Roberts declared that the Commerce Department provided a pretextual reason for wanting the citizenship question that was merely “a distraction,” in violation of the legal requirement that agencies disclose the true reasons behind their decisions.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the evidence in the case showed that “the V.R.A. played an insignificant role in the decision-making process.” Instead, the chief justice wrote, Mr. Ross had tried hard to find a rationale for adding the question.

“The secretary,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the attorney general himself to ask if D.O.J. would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process.”

“Altogether,” the chief justice wrote, “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the secretary gave for his decision.”            source

None of this mattered to Boof Kavanaugh and his Federalist colleagues (all of whom voted to allow the citizenship question that will help to consolidate Republican power for the next decade), even though Trump didn’t give them anything to work with.   The Voting Rights Act argument was a transparent piece of toilet paper. [1]

Let’s not even touch the recent 5-4 majority’s stinking ruling on federal oversight of gerrymandering– according to the Federalists on the Supreme Court the corrupt practice of drawing tortured electoral maps to favor one party is, like the treatment of blacks or other despised minorities, strictly up to the local authorities to oversee.  Not a matter for the federal government to interfere in — states’ rights, you know.   Here’s the Grey Lady on that:

[The Supreme Court’s rulings on gerrymandering and the census have profound implications for American politics. Here’s what the decisions mean.]

It is well-known that asking the citizenship question on the census will cause various minority groups, already being rounded up by armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents  and deported or shipped off to concentration campsconcentration camps, not to answer the census at all.    This will result in lower population numbers in urban areas and, ultimately, fewer votes for these under-reported areas in Congress.  That’s because the census is used to apportion House seats.   Lower urban census tallies equals more power for non-urban populations.    More power for non-urban populations equals four more years of Trump, McConnell, Pence and their supremely well-funded malodorous ilk.

This open defiance of a Supreme Court ruling is, by the way, another argument for impeaching this vile orange piece of authoritarian shit.    

 

[1]  Here is a summary of the Federalist Society dissent (all five conservative justices are members, check it out), from the same NYT article:

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority had done something extraordinary. “For the first time ever,” he wrote, “the court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale.”

Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined Justice Thomas’s partial dissent.

Justice Thomas said the courts should give executive branch officials the benefit of the doubt. “I do not deny,” he wrote, “that a judge predisposed to distrust the secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and — with a jar of pins and a spool of string — create an eye-catching conspiracy web.”

He said the consequences of the majority decision would be far-reaching. “Now that the court has opened up this avenue of attack,” he wrote, “opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed his own partial dissent.

“To put the point bluntly,” he wrote, “the federal judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons.”               source

A fascinating hour, well-spent

I didn’t intend to listen to this entire reading of the Obstruction “counts” of the Mueller Report, but it is fucking fascinating.   Every American should hear this. 

It’s called “A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts”.   Each act is a separate instance of the president’s obstruction of justice.

There is no doubt, after hearing  these readings, that Mr. Trump acted, throughout the investigation into his corrupt acts, with corrupt intent.  The intent needed to sustain obstruction of justice charges.

1  President Trump asked the FBI director to shut down the investigation into National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

2  President Trump said he fired FBI director Comey because of the Russia Investigation

3 President Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller   

4  President Trump attempted to curtail the Special Counsel’s investigation 

5  President Trump prevented the public disclosure of evidence 

6  President Trump wanted Attorney General Sessions to “unrecuse” from the Russia investigation   

7  President Trump directed White House counsel Don McGahn to create false documents that covered up the truth from investigators

8  President Trump tried to discourage Campaign chairman Paul Manafort and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn from cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation 

9  President Trump encouraged Michael Cohen to lie about Trump Tower Moscow

10  President Trump tried to get his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen not to cooperate with the investigation.   

Check it out.

Since the actions reported in the Mueller report President Trump has continued to behave like a guilty man.  He forced Jeff Sessions to resign (for not protecting him), made an interim appointment of an unqualified loyalist A.G. (without Senate confirmation), appointed a well-known obstructionist Unitary Executive zealot as A.G., he and his A.G. made repeated false, self-serving assertions about the findings of the Mueller report, his A.G. suppressed the report for a month while they spun the findings,  at his A.G.’s advice Trump asserted a flimsy protective privilege claim as part of a strategy to run out the clock, he publicly instructed subordinates and former employees to defy all subpoenas, continued to defiantly tweet obstructive messages, attacked Mueller and the Special Counsel’s team as “very sick and dangerous [criminals]”, has continued to insist the he is the completely innocent victim of a witch hunt.   A witch hunt that completely and totally exonerated him.   The man is an irrational, ethics-free, perpetual victim.   A national embarrassment and an international threat.

The motherfucker desperately needs to be impeached.  If you still don’t believe me, listen to the reading of the charges by Mueller.

Understanding Trump’s Obstruction

In order to prove obstruction of justice, a prosecutor must prove corrupt intent.  This intent to thwart an investigation can be hard to prove [1], though, unless you are a supporter of the president’s, it is pretty clear that the president’s actions were (and are) motivated by the lifelong scofflaw’s desire to block anything he thinks could harm him. 

I found this podcast, an episode of NPR’s Embedded (which I’d heard when it came out) fascinating to listen to again.  Particularly in light of the additional information that Mueller’s investigators uncovered about Trump’s mood and behavior on finding out that he was under investigation. 

We now know that on May 17, 2017, the president was greatly alarmed to learn that a Special Counsel had been appointed, in spite of his firing of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and, when he wouldn’t let the Flynn investigation go, fucking Jim Comey.  The president’s famous words to Sessions, McGahn and others in the Oval Office should really be more famous:

“Oh my God.  This is terrible.  This is the end of my presidency.  I’m fucked!”

Clearly the words of an innocent man, arguably, but no matter.  With a slight majority in the Senate the man has no fear of being removed from office, no matter how much evidence is stacked up against him by any real and theoretical House investigations.  Trump’s policies endear him to wealthy conservative campaign financiers, particularly his huge tax gift to America’s wealthiest and most deserving and his packing the federal courts (with the indispensable help of zero sum obstructionist Mitch McConnell, who refused to let Obama fill vacancies as they came up) with conservative, Federalist Society-vetted jurists.  These accomplishments, by themselves, are enough reason for Republicans to hold the line, even if Articles of Impeachment emerge from the House, even if the evidence of Trump’s corrupt intent and ultimate guilt of obstruction of justice and other crimes is overwhelming.

Like I said, this February 2018 podcast is fascinating to hear.  It lays out a pretty decent case for the president’s corrupt intent and shows cause and effect quite clearly.  I know this is all considered OLD NEWS, particularly for a populace trained to respond only to BREAKING NEWS, but it is important news.   It is also important EVIDENCE.  It’s amazing how strong a case is laid out by this investigative team more than a year before the Mueller Report fleshed out much of this with sworn quotes from witnesses and participants. 

From Mueller we learn that on May 17th Sessions received a call from his deputy A.G., Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein  (who, after Mueller filed his ‘inconclusive’ report, resigned with obsequious curtsies to Trump) informing him that he had appointed a Special Counsel.  Sessions informed Trump, who promptly lost his shit.   Trump felt betrayed by two men he’d handpicked and appointed to lead the Justice Department, men he’d trusted to be loyal and protect him. 

Trump yelled at loyal Alabama racist Jeff Sessions for following DOJ ethics advisors instead of being Trump’s loyal consigliere, his Roy Cohn, his Robert Kennedy.   In Trump’s mind Sessions traitorously refused to undo his recusal, a failure that allowed a “witch hunt” against him to continue.  This witch hunt jeopardized Trump’s presidency and aggravated Trump no end.   Sessions clearly honored the legal standard for recusal — the appearance of impropriety — in Sessions’ case a glaring appearance of impropriety.   Trump snarled at Sessions about how he failed to  protect Trump from first Comey and now Mueller.   After lambasting Sessions he returns to his predicament:

“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency.   It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything.   This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

From Mueller report, page 290. 

Clearly the same words would possibly be spoken by an innocent man, arguably, but Trump’s actions after uttering these words point strongly to consciousness of guilt, his corrupt intent.

Around this time he casually admitted on TV that he would have fired Comey (who pressed on investigating Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia and his perjury to FBI investigators)  without the letters he had Rosenstein and Sessions write (letters that recommended Comey’s firing based on his mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails).  Trump intended, several times over the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation, to fire Mueller and shut down and/or obstruct the investigation.  He did this in numerous ways, as laid out in Mueller’s executive summary, the one Bagpiper Bill Barr refused to release for several weeks, a month.  The president made his intention to end the “witch hunt” clear over and over, as reported in Mueller’s report, as described in the Embedded podcast more than a year before even Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report was released.

Only a rare genius of obstruction and evasion like Bagpiper Bill Barr could spin his boss’s corrupt-looking intent as the innocent, totally understandable motive of a wrongly accused man angry and frustrated about a partisan witch hunt.  But that spin would come a year after this great podcast came out.

Here is the host of the Embedded podcast:

MCEVERS: People who believe Trump obstructed justice say he basically tried to influence, slow down or even stop the Russia investigation in his interactions with Comey and with some other people. And the deal with obstruction is even if the Russia investigation turns up nothing on Trump – if there’s no there there, as Trump and his party insist, he can still be found to have obstructed justice. Like, you can obstruct a thing that doesn’t turn out to be a thing. Trump supporters say the idea that he obstructed anything is ridiculous. And they say Trump’s just an unorthodox president who does things like a New York City real estate developer. We should say right here at the beginning that Trump’s lawyers declined our request for an interview.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MCEVERS: So what we’re going to do today is lay out a bunch of key moments over the first year of Trump’s presidency – basically, everything we know that could be considered evidence of possible obstruction – a lot of these big, major news stories that pop up on your TV and your news feed – so that when you hear the next headline about obstruction of justice, you’ll know what it means because this part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, this is the one that some legal experts say might actually be adding up to a case against the president.

The host asks the DOJ correspondent to define obstruction of justice:

MCEVERS: (Laughter) All right. To start off with, why don’t you just do what you can to describe what is obstruction of justice?

JOHNSON: So what it means is to attempt to impede or hinder some kind of investigation – a congressional investigation, an FBI investigation, a Justice Department investigation – with corrupt intent. So the law says you don’t have to succeed in derailing the investigation. You just have to try. But the key words there are corrupt intent – some kind of bad purpose. And it can be hard to prove that. Not everybody comes out and says I am firing this person because I want to jam up this investigation which is targeting me or my children. So you have to try to prove, if you’re a prosecutor, some kind of pattern of behavior and also a good reason – a good reason to tell the judge and eventually the jury about why this person would work so hard to jam up a federal investigation. That’s what an obstruction is.

Once again, apply Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s judicial philosophy (I paraphrase):

Use common sense.   What smells true and what smells like a pile of Bagpiper Bill’s steaming scats?

 

[1] recall that Bagpiper Bill Barr decided, and publicly insisted, that Trump’s intent was the intent of an innocent man honestly wishing to be done with a baseless partisan witch hunt against him and that his anger and frustration (both “acknowledged” by Mueller)  were the proof of his innocence.   

As was the case with the crying, angry, frustrated Boof Kavanaugh, unfairly crucified by left wing fringe billionaires who manufactured a story about a drunk prep school boy falling on to a younger girl and grabbing at her clothes.

Propaganda versus actual facts on the ground

Let me say at the start: if someone holds a view that is not based on rationality — an irrational view —  the calm, friendly presentation of every reasonable reason in the world to see the issue otherwise will not change that view, in most cases.   

A lifelong racist is unlikely to change his views just because one, two, even ten people from the hated race impress him greatly.  This is a famous bypass of Reason we can see clearly in this historical example: every major Nazi had a list of “good” Jews to be spared the “Final Solution” or any part of it.   This was a Jew they personally knew, liked and protected.   Mr. Hitler himself had 340 Jews on his personal list! [1]   “Doesn’t mean we don’t utterly hate the vicious, race-poisoning Jews and want to exterminate every last one of them and their despicable babies, wipe out their accursed seed, just leave Max alone, Max is cool.”

If something as common as “racism” [2], which can be rationalized but which does not have a rational basis, is immune to reason and persuasion, then we can conclude that much else about human behavior is.  Belief, after all, requires faith that one is correct.   Belief and faith are often not based on any facts one can verify.  Faith, some people say, is superior to Reason because while Reason limits one to provable theories that the limited human mind can test, only Faith can bind us to the ineffable, the unexplainable and immortality itself.  Faith-based arguments, famously, cannot be undermined by appeals to mere human logic.

There is a good argument for faith.   Humans need faith.   I don’t sneeze at faith.  It is absolutely essential to “keep the faith” (as my father used to say) when times are bad.   When a person loses faith she loses hope and without hope all that’s left is helpless resignation to the shit show in progress.   We have faith that people who profess to love us actually do, that when things get bad they will act the way we believe they will, the way they’d want us to act toward them if they were in trouble.  

I am not arguing against faith, not at all.  I am not saying human Reason is the end all of the human experience or any kind of infallible guide to human behavior (though, often it is our best option).   There is a universe of things the brilliant homo sapiens (“wise ape”) mind has only guesses about.   Mental health is one of them as are the realms that cannot be detected yet by the senses or by even the most sophisticated instruments we have designed.   

Homo sapiens are famous for acts of mass insanity.  The concept of WAR was invented by the wise ape, after all.  Let’s not get too hopped up about this “wise ape” shit, our history is bloodied by plenty of mindless, stupid, destructive practices too.  Mass killing done in the name of “Reason” and oceans of blood spilled in the name of defending “Faith”.

My aim here is to show  that often facts on the ground tell one story clearly while propaganda convinces people of another, usually invented, story entirely.   That’s where I’m headed, for whatever the exercise might be worth today.

I learned, during a talk with a friend from down south the other night, that his experience in the military, particularly when he was stationed in Germany, wiped away any traces of racism he may have had after years of segregation in his home town.   Overseas the group he hung around with, joked with, sought out, played music with, drank with, were the Americans.   That included Americans of types he did not know well or at all from where he grew up, types he wouldn’t even have encountered in This home state, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Iranian-Americans, etc.  His service in the army left him more of an American, in the proudest sense of the word, than when he went in.

Institutions like the military can have a democratizing effect.   Labor unions (whatever their faults and corruptions) perform the same function.   They place people of diverse backgrounds on common ground, united for a common, larger purpose.   No logic or reason is involved in the transformation of personal prejudices, just give a group of people a challenging common goal and you can see the great naturally equalizing effect.   Not every two members of these groups will become friends, rivalries and hatreds between individuals will emerge — but these things will, for the most part, no longer be based on anti-group prejudice.

 We have facts on the ground, actual facts that can be verified — like captured children sleeping on the ground under foil emergency blankets in locked enclosures they are locked into, areas supervised by armed guards.  We imprison these children because they are “illegals”, have entered the United States illegally, or perhaps are the children of asylum seekers, there has been little clarity provided for their detention beyond the president’s repeated assertion that America is full and that we have no room for these little illegals and their criminal parents. 

Trump’s followers get angry when these detention centers, like Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was an “internment camp” for Japanese Americans immiserated and locked up during the Second World War, are referred to as concentration camps.   They could be called “penal camps”, perhaps, because the children are alleged to be little criminals (“illegals”) and their detention is part of their punishment (which explains why sanitary conditions for these masses of kids appear to have been an afterthought, if any thought was given to their health and safety at all [3]).   They could be called “detention” or “internment” camps, would that be OK?   It is also fair, judging by what similar enclosures for people of a certain type who were collected behind barbed wire and prevented from leaving by armed guards have been called all through recent history “concentration camps”. 

The word got an understandably bad name from the fucking Nazis.   And I know the song: we are sick of being gratuitously and unfairly compared to fucking Nazis!    Protecting our borders from illegal aliens makes us Nazis, now?!!!   FUCK YOU!   

OK, OK calm down.

The Nazis gave concentration camps a bad name, assuredly, but concentration camps are not DEATH CAMPS.    The first camps the Nazis built were concentration camps, armed shit holes in which to collect and intimidate their many classes of enemies.   In those camps prisoners were bullied, humiliated, sometimes brutalized, occasionally killed, but the concentration camp was a collection point for detained enemies.   It is easy to think of these Nazi concentration camps as the same as death camps, but the Nazi innovation of the vernichtungslager was, at the time and as far as we know until today, a purely unique Nazi idea.  

It’s the image of the death camp is what gets so many Americans worked up over calling these detention centers for children “concentration camps”.   The Nazi death camp was a mechanized killing center with state of the art gas chambers and crematoria for disposing of the murdered bodies sent over from a network of concentration camps.  I get why people are angry when they think these internment centers for filthy, stinking little illegal aliens are being compared to death camps. I understand why it is easy to weaponize the use of the term “concentration camp” to underscore what you feel to be an unfair attack.   

Common sense is not so common, as Sekhnet’s mother often told her.   An easy answer if not always a sufficient answer.

Propaganda changes the subject from whether what we are doing to children (and entire families) at our southern border comports with our American ideals about protecting the weak to whether a pushy progressive politician is a fucking disgusting piece of shit for comparing our mild policy of reasonable deterrence to Nazi mass killing!

Mueller Report.  Are you going to believe a 448 page report that Mueller says speaks for itself, presents a trove of evidence and explains why he could not exonerate the president of possible obstruction of justice or the constantly repeated, supremely unambiguous mantra “no collusion, no obstruction, complete and total exoneration” ?

Propaganda spins the “message” of the Mueller report by packaging, branding and marketing it to as many Americans as possible as a particular thing, as NOTHING TO SEE.   Ten detailed instances of the president’s apparent attempts to obstruct justice are reduced by America’s top law enforcement official to a single, clear message “no obstruction.”   Mueller did not find Trump guilty of obstruction, according to Bill Barr, he simply laid out various scenarios while avoiding responsibility by wimping out and leaving it to his boss to make the hard call.   Barr made the hard call, which pleased the president greatly, and loser Democrats still want a do-over!   Like the fucking loser babies they are.

Propaganda makes the entire ground slippery, for even the most sure-footed.   The great Amy Goodman, a brilliant, painstaking journalist and advocate of democracy, stated today that the Mueller report found “no collusion” with Russia.   That is the phrase so often used it has become interchangeable with “could not make a legal case for criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.”  Are the two things different?  “Collusion” is not a crime that can be charged against an American citizen, “criminal conspiracy” is.

As Mueller states in his report, one reason he could not determine that the Trump campaign had been engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia is that his investigators were often lied to, key documents were destroyed, highly placed individuals simply refused to speak to investigators or submit written answers to written questions.   “No collusion” is a significant distortion of what the Mueller report says about the more than 100 instances of proven coordination between members of the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government.

Yeah, I’m speaking to the choir, a barbershop quartet-sized choir.  If you are reading this you probably agree with much, if not all, of what I am saying.   Few who believe, in spite of all the evidence, that Mr. Trump is a great man who only wants to make America great again will read past a few remarks here.   They believe that Mr. Trump didn’t need the job because he’s already rich and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, that he’s sacrificing his own happiness to be a public servant.  They are not going to sit there and read beyond my first smart-ass Jew criticism  of the confused, dithering, incoherent, self-serving massive pile of lies and his blind followers. [4]

I am more sensitive to this kind of misdirection than many people, get more worked up than most about propaganda that distorts things we can see with your own eyes.  All through my growing up difficult questions were routinely dodged, often brutally, by a brilliant but tormented father who employed all manner of techniques to not only not answer anything that made him uncomfortable but to make me feel like an asshole for even posing the questions.    As he was dying my father apologized profusely for this practice, but by then I was almost fifty years-old and my oversensitivity had been long ago instilled.

Propaganda comes in many forms.  Often simply omitting a terrible fact or two, in the manner of the famous Grey Lady’s reporting on certain difficult subjects over the decades, is good enough.  Tie goes to the runner!   Nothing to fucking see here!

Think carefully, friends.  I have faith in your powers of reason.

 

[1] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p.  133. 

[2]  I use racism in its most generic sense.  Only an anti-Semite would call the Jews a “race”.   Mexicans (even the rapists) are not a “race”, nor are “Muslims” or “liberal cucks”.   Racism, which America has practiced since long before its founding, is a fabulously pliable notion and a powerful way to keep the ignorant divided and suspicious of their fellow human beings, the easier to manipulate and rule them. 

[3] Many of the children visited by outside lawyers and advocates do not have access to washing facilities of any kind.  Their unchanged clothes stink, they have not been able to wash their clothes or themelves in days, in some cases weeks.  They are not given toothbrushes to brush their teeth or sinks where they can even wash their faces.   Older children are expected to care for younger ones.   They are being treated the way one treats one’s enemies.  Pretty much the way the inmates in every concentration camp have always been treated. 

one source

[4]   Looking for the exact number of Jews on Mr. Hitler’s special list in Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece (see note 1 above)  I came across this evocative description, by Eichmann, of blind obedience based on unquestioning faith in a leader:

Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions [“superior orders”, “law”] and to strike out on his own.   Since, in addition to performing what he conceived to be the duties of a law-abiding citizen, he had acted upon orders — always so careful to be “covered”– he became completely muddled and ended by stressing alternatively the virtues and vices of blind obedience, or the “obedience of corpses,” Kadarvergehorsam, as he himself called it.     

Arendt p.135

Hope Hicks answers to Congressional committee “inadequate”

Hope Hicks, a young woman who was one of candidate and president Donald Trump’s closest aides (she served as a top White House press official) appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week.   She “testified” for eight hours, with five attorneys (two personal, two White House, and one from the DOJ.  The DOJ?  WTF?)  present to advise her, and, according to the transcript of the closed door meeting, gave inadequate (NO) answers to 155 questions.  The White House lawyer objected each time, claiming she was immune to testifying about anything that happened during the presidency of the most transparent president in history.

Her name appears in the Mueller Report more than 180 times.   She was, for a long time, known as the president’s closest confidante.  Her testimony could go a long way toward illuminating the president’s state of mind and his intent in the days he first began trying to shut down the Mueller investigation.  

Although, of course, current Attorney General Bill Barr has already taken care of the issue of president’s completely, unimpeachably non-criminal intent.   He  famously excused the president’s many guilty-appearing actions as the understandable anger and frustration of an innocent man unfairly attacked by traitors and spies.   And Bill Barr, we all know, is an honorable man. 

Hope Hicks spoke, under oath, to Mueller’s investigators about Trump’s rage when Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel on May 17, 2017.  He was, according to Hicks, who saw the president immediately after his outburst at Jeff Sessions in the Oval Office, as upset as she’d ever seen him.  

The only other time she saw him as distraught, she told Mueller’s vicious partisans,  was when the completely out of context, innocent Access Hollywood pussy grabber tape came out toward the end of the 2016 campaign.  When Sessions told the president that Trump himself was now under investigation, Trump apparently said “I’m fucked.” before lashing out at Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III:

According to notes written by Jody Hunt—then chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions—Trump “slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.’”

“The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, ‘How did you let this happen, Jeff,’” the report continues, paraphrasing Hunt’s notes.

Sessions himself told the special counsel that Trump said, “’You were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect,” according to the report.

“’Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency,’” Trump continued, per the report. “’It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

source    (obviously Breitbart, FOX and The Stormer cover this material differently)

here is a direct citation to a searchable version of the lying, vicious, totally exonerating Mueller report where you can find the quotes cited above on page 290

 

OK, truthfully, between you me and the lamp post that any one of Trump’s treasonous enemies could be hanging from (in Trump’s perfect world) — the Democrats are reaching here.  Hicks was close to the president, true, and told Mueller that the president was very angry that Jeff Sessions would not protect him, as Roy Cohn [1] (who was disbarred toward the end of his despicable life) always had.   But, seriously, is that any reason to put her in position to commit perjury to protect the man she owes her career to?  (She’s now an executive at the company that owns FOX news).

Let us not forget, Hope Hicks gave those Democrat traitors on the Judiciary Committee a legal sounding reason for not answering anything they asked.  She cited “Absolute Immunity” a perfectly legal sounding term one of Trump’s more creative (and brazen) lawyers pulled directly out of his Roy Cohn-like homophobic ass.  Will this novel yet legal sounding reason for giving inadequate sworn testimony stand up in court? Only if Boof Kavanaugh has the final say.  

Although, even Boof would probably be constrained by the long held, indisputable legal principle that says once a privilege is waived (as Executive Privilege was waived  for Hicks once the then White House employee voluntarily spoke under oath to Mueller) it cannot be reasserted.

The fucking law again!   So goddamned unfair!   Where is Roy Cohn when you need him?!!!

 

[1]  (recycled footnote from here)  

Because when I have any doubt about a factual assertion I make here I do a quick and easy fact check, I asked google “was Roy Cohn a homophobe?”  He was, many sources agree.   Here is one of the results that came up in about one second, a marvelous little summary of the career of this malevolent creature, a career I highlighted in a footnote scroll to the bottom of this one for two excellent treatments of this evil fuck:

Roy Cohn – RationalWiki

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

Sep 5, 2018 – Roy Marcus Cohn (1927–1986) was a lawyer, a rabid anti-communist, a closeted homosexual and homophobe, a Jewish anti-Semite, …

‎Anti-communist crusader · ‎Mob lawyer · ‎Downfall

Some readers (Jews in particular) might find this review of two biographies of Cohn the reviewer waded through, disturbingly fascinating.

20171220_144243.png

(above) the self-hating Roy Cohn, living picture of Dorian Grey.

This is not that hard

So much of what this reality-TV president does is simply wrong, some of it illegal too.   I’m tempted to use the word evil for much of what this divisive demagogue does.   It is not that hard for the average impartial citizen to make a strong case against him, based strictly on his public actions.   He has been showing us the worst of himself, and ourselves, since the day he declared himself a candidate for President of the United States.

One of his first acts as president was to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio for contempt of a federal court who slapped him down for running a punitive outdoor “concentration camp” (his term) penal colony in the Arizona desert.  That pardon sent the clear message that if you are brown, red or tan, or have a Hispanic surname, you are fair game for any rough treatment our bold law enforcement officers can come up with, no matter what a so-called federal judge may have to say about it. 

It wasn’t long before Trump’s cruel family separation policy at the southern border was challenged in federal court.  That court ruled that the children must be reunited with their parents.   The Trump administration has yet to comply with that order, after offering excuses to Congress, including the inexcusable fact that they never really kept track of which little confiscated illegal belonged to which Mexican or Honduran rapist/terrorist/drug dealer.   

The largest detention center for illegal immigrant and asylum seeker children separated from their parents is a military base that was a former concentration camp for interned Japanese Americans.   The Trump administration is in court, defending its inhumane policy towards brown children.  Republicans are hissing at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for calling a concentration camp where inmates sleep on the ground a “concentration camp”.

Trump’s father was a young man when he was arrested at a Klan Rally in Queens, NY, in 1927.   He was released without being charged.  He gets the benefit of the doubt, he may have just gone to watch the Klan parade out of pure curiosity rather than to show solidarity with a group of racists whose beliefs he shared.  His son, our president, who has publicly insulted the intelligence of every black woman who ever criticized him, gets no such benefit of the doubt (particularly in light of the Trump dynasty’s obscene defense against the DOJ’s well-documented charges of race and ethnicity based Fair Housing Act violations). 

If you consider only Trump’s reactions to murderous racist rage at a provocative rally staged by White Supremacists in Charlottesville, you get the picture.  In his mind there are some very fine people, on both sides, fine Nazis, fine Klansmen, fine black sons of bitches who should be thrown off professional football fields if they don’t show respect for the American flag and all it stands for. 

There is his lifelong view of the law and lawyers.   The law is an obstacle to making profit, lawyers are the tool to remove that obstacle.  A time-tested strategy is the lawsuit meant only to delay and wear the other party down, if not bankrupt them.  Trump has used this blunt axe literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times over his long career as a deadbeat billionaire.   

Trump’s legal philosophy is to never back down, no matter what the so-called law says.   Any defense is better than no defense.   Trump continues to claim never to have lost a lawsuit and never to have settled a case, even as he did both days before the 2016 election and in the weeks after.   As the man himself said, in a rare moment of telling the truth (he told an interviewer candidly that he tries to tell the truth, when he can), he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and his base would still love him.   

He has, in fact, done the legal equivalent of shooting somebody in the face by his deliberate, public obstruction of justice.  Not only his pattern of trying to obstruct the investigation into the 140 documented instances of his campaigns coordination with Russia.   Forget Russia, with whom Mr. Trump apparently did not have every provable element of an indictable criminal conspiracy (though there were plenty of instances of coordination, if you don’t like the word “collusion”)  and just look at the clear and unwavering pattern of obstruction of justice laid out in Mueller’s summary, right before Mueller’s conclusion that, based on this mass of evidence, he could not exonerate Trump of obstructing justice. 

Or, if you prefer, just look at how Trump has doubled and tripled down on his obstruction since the strategically redacted Mueller Report was released.  Recall that the unredacted report was carefully vetted by the president’s legal team before anybody else in the world saw any part of it.  After that consultation, Barr famously (infamously, actually) concluded that Mueller hadn’t proven jack shit, that all his “evidence” was nothing and that Mueller had “punted” and left Barr to decide, and Barr decided “nothing to see here, case closed.”  Millions of Americans, on both sides of the political divide took this as the final word on Mueller’s investigation/”witch hunt”. Trump himself added “no re-do, no do-over, no backsies, I’m the rubber you’re the glue, I know you are but what am I? make me!!!  nyah yah yah yah yeah!”

Bill Barr’s cynical distortion of the findings of the Mueller investigation (accurately trumpeted by the president and his followers as ‘no collusion, no obstruction, complete and total exoneration!’) ,was immediately protested by the “by the book” Robert Mueller III.    Here is the heart of Mueller’s immediate reaction to Barr’s first public spin and strong suggestion of complete exoneration, aired live, worldwide on March 24th (broken into sentences for ease of reading/digestion):

As we stated in our meeting of March 5 and reiterated to the Department early in the afternoon of March 24, the introductions and executive summaries of our two-volume report accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions.

The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.

We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25.

There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.

This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.  See Department of Justice, Press Release (May 17, 2017).

Again, Mueller writes like a careful, cautious, subordinate, rules-bound lawyer writing respectfully to his superior.   You actually have to decode the lines about Barr’s misleading summary of the investigation which:  “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the report and consider it alongside other careful, lawyerly Mueller euphemisms.   

Mueller is the same lawyer who characterized Trump’s complete and total NON-ANSWER — the transcript says “TRUMP:  (no answer provided)”–  as “inadequate”.  Trumps refusal to answer certainly resulted in an answer that was not adequate, the non-answer could hardly have been more inadequate, but it was also NO ANSWER WHATSOEVER and a clear and unmistakable expression of the president’s utter contempt for the law.  I’d venture to guess that no mafia boss ever had the gumption to give a silent “fuck you” as his final answer to a prosecutor’s interrogatories.

Mueller apparently sent follow-up questions to Trump that were also disposed of by “inadequate answers.”   These “answers” were inadequate for the same reason Trump’s final answer to the original written questions was inadequate.  Trump simply ignored the follow-up questions because “I know you are but what am I?  Make me, loser.  You’re the rubber, I’m the man! My lawyers will fuck your lawyers UP!”  In Muellerspeak, bending over backwards to remain impartial even when the weight of the evidence you have uncovered points to the guilt of the subject you are investigating, a silent “fuck off” is, to be as candid as he can, “inadequate.”

There are dozens of articles of impeachment that could be drafted against this unimpeachable man with his narrow majority of politically motivated zealots in the Senate who will never convict him no matter what and a Justice Department that has already shown no hesitation to lie, evade and equivocate to protect the Unitary Executive. 

The president’s shameless, open monetizing of the most powerful office in the world by itself should be enough reason to open impeachment hearings.  The fact that White House staffers have Mar-a-Largo credit cards that can only be used at the president’s expensive private membership resort should,  by itself, be enough  for Congress to open immediate hearings.

Trump’s refusal to turn over financial documents, and ordering his dumbly smiling Secretary of the Treasury to illegally refuse to produce documents pursuant to a legal request by Congress (as his lawyers simultaneously and baselessly appeal a judge’s ruling that Deutsche Bank must produce records of their hundreds of millions in suspicious-looking loans to Trump), alone are probably grounds for his impeachment.   (Make the weak Dems take me to court, if they want to try to force me to follow the law.   I own the courts!)

His utter disregard for the rulings of federal courts over reuniting children ripped from their mothers’ arms by itself could probably be stand-alone grounds for impeachment. 

The seven or eight instances in Mueller’s summary of obstruction of justice that directly involve Trump in a seamless pattern of presidential obstruction should be seven or eight articles of impeachment.

Forget how distasteful and embarrassing it is to have a routinely lying bully and braggart as our president.   He is an easy person to dislike (unless you love him).  An EXTREMELY stable genius who cannot seem to express a single thought without veering toward an incoherent attack on some real or imagined enemy who is persecuting him without any cause whatsoever.   “… time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying and Treason.”  

I understand, he speaks to people who are, as most Americans find ourselves, desperate, powerless and angry.  But Trump speaks ONLY to desperation and anger (also greed, must not forget the never sated greed of our greatest and most important citizens and their eternally living corporate avatars) and the bar for stoking righteous rage is very low– it’s “us” (yay!) or “them” (lock them up! lock them up!).  It’s especially easy to keep the rage going full tilt with a fawning mass media echo chamber to bellow into.  So simple, as we’ve seen, that a supremely confident simpleton can do it!

Forget all that for a moment and look only at what Trump is doing, in terms of normalizing presidential contempt for the rule of law.   He has always been above the law, as the greatest human mankind has ever produced (also the most sensitive to a slight, which is an odd contradiction) and his position as president, the world’s most powerful man,  is that he is still and always above the law.  He is a law unto himself.   Truth and “lies” are beyond the point, not worth discussing, really, unless the lie is slam-dunk provable perjury, which is exactly why only a moron takes an oath to tell the truth.

Trump once bragged to an interviewer about what a great athlete he was, claimed that he could have been a professional baseball player (and considered it, though the money at that time wasn’t very good, which is why he never allowed a major league team to draft him).  He was playing baseball at this superstar level at exactly the same time that crippling bone spurs kept him from being drafted into the Vietnam war, over the course of several deferments.    Truth and falsity are purely transactional elements to Trump, to be mixed and matched as required to “win”.  

The law, Trump has long held, is for “ethical” suckers and black and brown sons of bitches who are vicious, criminal parasites who need to be hammered hard by law enforcement.   That’s why you hire an army of the best lawyers who will work for you, to keep yourself free of fucking rats, spies, traitors and enemies.    Mr. Trump  lives in a vulgar gold-plated world where his word is law and undying loyalty to him is the only quality he prizes.   Like in the fondest dreams of the spoiled, abused little millionaire bully he was at eight years old.

This uncouth, impulsive, contemptuous child-man is not a president who embodies the democratic aspirations American patriots have been dying for all these years. 

He is an inexorably spreading stain that needs to be removed before it succeeds in blotting out democracy itself.   

As the earth itself becomes uninhabitable because the most powerful man in the world refuses to believe that the unanimous opinion of the world’s scientists, including US government scientists, means nearly as much as record-breaking profits for private, government subsidized oil companies. 

God bless our two and a half century experiment in democracy.   This inexorably spreading stain needs to be removed before the experiment is fouled beyond salvation. 

Yeah, I know, fuck “science”.

Lawyerly Understatement

I missed delivering to you a wonderful, if also sick, punchline in the debate over whether Trump obstructed justice, continues to obstruct justice by willfully disobeying legal requests for documents and testimony and ordering everybody in his orbit to resist, to dummy up.   He is one lawyered up presumed-innocent guilty-acting motherfucker, I’ll say that for him.

Lawyers with any skill are masters of evasion, within the narrow bounds of truthfulness and their ethical responsibility the best of them can obscure the truth like nobody’s business.   Think of Bill Barr’s supremely misleading remarks at his confirmation hearing, Boof Kavanaugh’s tearful and evasive rant at the end of his sickening confirmation process.   Numerous demonstrable lies, but none, arguably, rising to the level of perjury.  A good lawyer knows how to walk purposefully up to the line of perjury and phrase things so his answer achieves the desired purpose without crossing the line.   

This ability to cavil [1], and the willingness to employ cant [2],  while directing attention away from damaging truth, is the main reason lawyers are so despised by so many.   Just make it plain, you lawyerly fuck.   There is even a movement, in law schools, to encourage young lawyers to write in plain English.   I don’t know how well it’s caught on.  Most of the legal writing I wade through is larded with conditional phrases, qualifiers, finely parsed distinctions, self-serving characterizations and shit like that.  We long for people to just speak plainly, just say what you mean, particularly lawmakers and government officials.  Speak plainly without lying– not a lot to ask, even from lawyers.  Plain talk is refreshing, it restores our faith in our human capacity to communicate openly.

Procol Harem’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” is apparently one of the most popular wedding songs of all time.   The band made many millions in royalties over the decades since the song was on the charts.   One member of the band, the organist who wrote the distinctive Bach-like intro, was not credited as one of the songwriters.  He received no royalty checks.   An interviewer spoke to him during his lawsuit against the others for the millions in back royalties he claimed were owed to him, and the right to future millions.   

The interviewer (you have to picture both of them as British, which they are, for the full effect) listened to his story and said “so, you’re saying they could have been more generous to you.”   

 “They could hardly have been less generous,” the uncredited songwriter replied. [3]

We have Robert Mueller, lifelong conservative and former FBI director, a public servant seemingly beyond reproach, a Marine and before that an Eagle Scout.   He investigated a president who was constantly trying to undermine his investigation, made several attempts to rig the outcome, including a few feints toward firing Mueller, actively discredited Mueller’s impartiality and eventually hired a faithful and dogged Attorney General who vowed to protect him no matter what the investigation found.   Mueller found a mountain of evidence of apparent presidential wrongdoing, but he obeyed a regulation that he said compelled him to abide by two OLC memos, both written during presidential impeachments, and from which he concluded he had an ethical and legal duty not put the president under an unfair cloud.  

Let’s be clear.   The president bragged about being ready to speak to Mueller any time, but his rotating army of lawyers (notice that nobody works for Trump for very long) vetoed that.  Trump, they all agreed, would be walking into a “perjury trap”.  We note that a “perjury trap” only works against a compulsive liar who has at least one dirty secret to hide.  The president consented to answer written questions from Mueller, questions he claimed, ridiculously, to have answered all by himself.

Fast forward past Bill Barr’s numerous infomercials for his boss’s exoneration by a disappointing Mueller who weakly punted responsibility to the A.G. to make a final, binding charging decision about the extent of the president’s arguable misconduct and his corrupt acts done with the power of the president of the United States.    This was a month before any part of the completed report was released to anyone but Trump’s lawyers, the only people so far to have seen the document before it was redacted.

Past Mueller’s remarkable letter to Barr, the letter that was not seen by the public until many weeks later.   Mueller’s letter was immediately after Barr’s public comments on the report.   Mueller contested Barr’s distorted mischaracterizations, informing him that his misleading remarks have caused public confusion and requesting again that Barr immediately release Mueller’s own redacted summaries.   The remarkable letter, a very important piece of evidence for Congress, is here.

Past the month that Barr waited to release anything from Mueller but his own deliberately misleading spin about COMPLETE AND TOTAL exoneration, which many Americans who will never even read an article about the 448 page report (“that speaks for itself”) believe to be unimpeachably true in spite of instance after instance, with names, dates, quotes from people involved, all fitting a larger, consistent, pattern of obstruction of justice.

Past the month after that, before it was revealed that Barr had perjured himself when he said under oath that he had no idea how Mueller felt about his characterization of the Special Counsel’s findings.   He mocked the question, in the way that religious men who believes they are carrying out the Lord’s will often do and got a laugh from the Republican peanut gallery in the Senate that day.   “How would I know what Bob thinks of my summary?”

Past the day, a month later, when the letter from Mueller (dated two months earlier) that told Bill exactly how Bob felt was revealed.  As soon as Bob heard Barr’s lying summary of his findings he wrote to correct the record.  Bob was angry enough to put it into writing, make a record that he was protesting this confusing mischaracterization of the investigation’s conclusions finally became public.   Mueller was obeying the best instinct of a law-abiding lawyer, he was making a record.   With luck, fifty years from now when everything is unsealed, posterity will know that Bob Mueller was, in the end, an honorable man.

Mueller got up in front of cameras, the day he retired from his role as Special Counsel, and spoke publicly for almost ten minutes.   His remarks were bookended by the continuing untruthful spin of the deeply religious, God-fearing protector of the Unitary Executive, William Barr.   Mueller spoke carefully, like a lawyer.  He may have reiterated that the president, rather than, as he claimed, fully cooperating with investigators, submitted answers that were “inadequate.”   I don’t think he cited the president’s refusal to answer follow up questions to remedy the inadequacy of his lawyers’ written answers.

“Inadequate”, that was how Mueller characterized the answers you can read here.

I was surprised to find the interrogatories on-line.   I’d heard that Trump’s attorneys had answered virtually every question with a variation on “I don’t recall”.   I scanned and found this to be true for every answer I read.   Mueller’s questions are detailed and lawyerly, a challenge to read, and in light of the evasive answers given, not worthwhile struggling to read.   

Trump’s team of lawyers worked hard to craft the carefully phrased answers, virtually all of which are variations of “I don’t recall” or “I have no specific recollection” or “for the life of me, I truly don’t remember” or “how do you expect me to remember a detail like that?   Wouldn’t that make me look guilty if I did remember doing that, fuckface?”

Here’s what you do, and I promise it is worth the payoff.  Quickly skim the questions, just looking for names you are familiar with, run your finger quickly down the questions.  You’ll see Manafort and Flynn and Jared asked about.   The president answers, under penalty of perjury, that he doesn’t recall anything and that he’s been informed his office has already fully cooperated and provided all necessary documents and information.  Publicly the president was whining daily about the unfair, illegal witch hunt against him which was so unfair and vicious and SAD!

Skip down to Mueller’s last long, complicated question.  It is about Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, Erik Prince, “or anyone else associated with the transition”.   Follow your quick moving finger down  until you get to the president’s last “inadequate” answer.  GREAT SHIT!

Go read it now, quickly, just follow your finger to the bottom, it will take a minute.  Otherwise this next bit will be a spoiler.

Mueller could have told America, more accurately, truthfully, straightforwardly, unequivocally and unconfusingly:  “not only did the president refuse to cooperate with requests to speak to him directly, his legal team submitted evasive written answers pleading no memory of anything and, in one remarkable display of contempt I’ve never seen in my long career as an attorney and in law enforcement, refused to answer at all.  Not even another assertion about the presidents monumentally poor memory.   You figure it out, assholes!”

“Inadequate”?  Trump’s last written answer to the Mueller investigation  could hardly have been less adequate! 

click here for question and final answer

 

[1] cavil (v):    make petty or unnecessary objections.  complain, carp, grumble, moan, grouse, grouch, whine, bleat, find fault with, quibble about, niggle about…

[2] cant (n — can also be used as a verb):  hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature;  the pretending of having virtues, principles, or beliefs that one in fact does not have; dissembling, dissimulation, hypocrisy, insincerity, false piousness    

words related to cant:  deceit, deceitfulness, deceptoin, deceptiveness, dishonesty, double-dealing, falsity, perfidy, two-fadednees, affedtation, affectedness, pretense, pretension, pretentiousness, sanctimoniousness, self-righteousness, self-satisfactoin, duplicity, fakery, falseness, fraudulentness, shamming, artificiality, glibness, oiliness, smoothness, unctuousness 

antonym: sincerity

[3]     from WIkipedia:

In 2005, former Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher filed suit in the High Court against Gary Brooker and his publisher, claiming that he co-wrote the music for the song.[44] Fisher won the case on 20 December 2006 but was awarded 40% of the composers’ share of the music copyright, rather than the 50% he was seeking and was not granted royalties for the period before 2005.[45]

Brooker and publisher Onward Music were granted leave to appeal, and a hearing on the matter was held before a panel of three judges during the week of 1 October 2007. The decision, on 4 April 2008, by Lord Justice Mummery, in the Court of Appeal upheld Fisher’s co-authorship[46] but ruled that he should receive no royalties as he had taken too long (38 years) to bring his claim to litigation. Full royalty rights were returned to Brooker.[47]

On 5 November 2008, Fisher was granted permission to appeal this decision to the House of Lords.[48] Lawyers say it is the first time the Law Lords have been asked to rule on a copyright dispute involving a song.[49] The appeal was heard in the House of Lords on 22–23 April 2009.[50]

On 30 July 2009 the Law Lords unanimously ruled in Fisher’s favour. They noted that the delay in bringing the case had not caused any harm to the other party; on the contrary he had benefited financially from it. They also pointed out that there were no time limits to copyright claims under English law. The right to future royalties was therefore returned to Fisher.[51][52] Both the musicological basis of the judgment and its effect on the rights of musicians who contribute composition to future works have drawn some attention in the music world.[53]

Common Sense

It was often said, in reply to the concern of people who resisted what they felt to be unconstitutional violations of the Fourth Amendment, mass secret government intrusions on their privacy after the attack on 9/11, “if you have nothing to hide– pull down your pants and spread your cheeks!”   An innocent person is not worried about their privacy!

Anybody who had nothing to hide, these patriots insisted, would not hesitate to let the government see all of their telephone calls, emails, be probed and x-rayed at airports, etc.  That was the common reply to the increasingly indiscriminate surveillance all Americans have been subjected to since the cheerful, freedom-loving days of Vice President Dick Cheney.  Cheney famously kept a huge safe, large enough to imprison a full grown human, in his office.   Dark side, indeed.

Presidents sometimes brag, as Obama did, about having the most “transparent” administration in history.   In the case of Obama, smooth, smart and apparently decent in many ways, I had a strong impulse to bash his face when he paused in his comedy routine at his final Correspondent’s Club Dinner to sincerely thank the American corporate press for being his “partners” in “transparency” which he correctly said is essential to educating citizens of a true democracy.   Obama was many things, but his administration was famously non-transparent and he broke all records for using the death sentence carrying 1918 Espionage Act against journalists and their sources.

Naturally, Trump nonchalantly boasts about being the most transparent president, “probably in history.”   He has said many times that he had no problem speaking to Mueller, or anybody else, that everything should be out in the open, including (at first) the fully unredacted Mueller report.   These remarks are but a tiny sliver of the thousands of documented lies he has publicly told as president.

Lately, on the written instruction of his wartime consigliere, “avid bagpiper” [1] Bill Barr, the religious Catholic believer in presidential supremacy and God’s law, Trump invokes a vague, ridiculously broad blanket privilege that the court is likely to strike down (in a year, or two).   The president and his lawyers. led by America’s attorney general, now assert a vast and limitless “protective presidential privilege” over all testimony and documents anyone in his administration, at any time, may have spoken or produced. 

Clearly, Mr. Trump has nothing to hide.   

Which is why he has already released all his financials, after the longest tax audit in US history (nothing but the best for Mr. Trump) in spite of the over-the-top coughing of Koch-funded Tea Party winner/Trump dead-ender Mick Mulvaney when Trump began talking about it on camera recently.

Trump has nothing to hide, which is why he is totally transparent, all the time.   Mueller exonerated him, no do-overs, losers.

All one needs to do is apply Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s judicial maxim:   Use common sense.  what smells OK and what stinks? [2]

 

 

[1]    according to Wikipedia, where I went to have a long at his extreme religious orientation (no mention)  source

[2]  “Oh, God, Boof, not again with the beer flatulence!!!!   We have to change your diet!!!!”