There is a great debate about whether the Mueller witch hunt turned up enough evidence of presidential wrongdoing, in spite of the many repetitions of NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, complete and total EXONERATION, to require hearings in Congress about Trump’s obstructive acts to determine whether he needs to be removed from office.   The big bone of contention, among many Democrats, is that such hearings could strengthen the perpetually campaigning president when the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to remove him from office, no matter how strong the evidence against him is.

Much of this debate is based on sound bytes.  Mueller has provided none, though his detractors and interpreters have provided a ton of them.   Mueller comports himself like a public servant who lives in a country of literate, law-abiding, thoughtful patriots like himself.   He writes and speaks in a measured, disciplined way.  He does not tweet.  He hopes not to speak publicly again on the matter he has investigated for almost two years and written out over 448 precisely worded pages.

Two OLC memos lay out an opinion that a sitting president can’t be indicted while in office.   Mueller cites the regulation that requires his office to follow this opinion.   Since he cannot indict the president, he considered it unfair to accuse him, even secretly, in a sealed indictment, of doing the illegal things he appears to have done.   The regulations he was bound to comply with put Mueller in a bind.  The bind was that he uncovered a lot of evidence of serious presidential wrongdoing.

Enter Bill Barr, who needs no introduction at this point.  A master of evasion who auditioned for the job of protecting the president from the Mueller report with a 19 page legal opinion that showed the boss his formidable legal chops.   In that memo Barr laid out exactly how he would defend the president, no matter what the Special Counsel’s investigation unearthed.   Once appointed, Barr was as good as his word.  

According to Barr, Mueller left the charging decision up to the Attorney General, and his decision was that the report pretty much exonerates the president, since it did not prove that he was part of a criminal conspiracy with Russia and it did not prove that Trump, in spite of his many overt and some covert obstructive acts, (acts Barr explained away as motivated by the understandable anger and frustration of an unfairly accused, innocent man)  did anything to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference on behalf of the Trump campaign.  In short: no collusion, no obstruction.

Mueller immediately wrote a letter to Barr, a most unusual move for a DOJ subordinate, pointing out to Barr that he had sewn confusion in the minds of Americans by misrepresenting the substance and findings of his report.    Mueller asked Barr to immediately release Mueller’s redacted summary, which includes his conclusion that nothing in his report exonerates Trump. [1]

Here is the heart of that short letter.  It does not make for a sound byte, though I have inserted a few line breaks, for emphasis (and to make it read like a series of tweets, many Americans’ preferred format):

…Accordingly, the enclosed documents are in a form that can be released to the public consistent with legal requirements and Department policies.

I am requesting that you provide these materials to Congress and authorize their public release at this time.

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).

Barr did what Mueller asked, but he waited a few weeks before releasing anything from Mueller.  He did this to allow time for his misleading interpretation to solidify as the controlling narrative of Mueller’s findings.  Not undermining public confidence in DOJ investigations was not Barr’s main concern, protecting the president, his client and master, from impeachment was.

Enter more than 1,000 former federal prosecutors, Democrats and Republicans, who sign a public letter citing findings from Mueller’s report and making a strong case that but for the fact that Trump is the sitting president, and OLC memos hold him immune from prosecution while in office, there was enough evidence in the report to indict anyone not protected by a special DOJ opinion.   Read their letter.  Hard to argue that they’re wrong, or rabid partisans, or that anyone else would not be slapped with multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice based on the weight of the evidence Mueller sets out.  

Hard to argue, also, that they wrote something that can be reduced to a tweet:

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming. These include:

and they go on to list a bunch of damning examples.  

But it’s not a tweet!

Mueller resigns earlier this week, his work done.  He gives a nine minute farewell speech during which he emphasizes that his report shows active Russian interference in the 2016 election, on behalf of the president, and that Americans need to do something about this vulnerability in our electoral system.   He also encourages all Americans to read his report, which, he points out, speaks for itself.

Barr got right to work, speaking before and after Mueller’s brief remarks (the follow up was done during a deliberately misleading chat with a CBS interviewer) making sure the confusing and misleading counter narrative he originally spun about the substance and findings of the report was fresh in everyone’s mind.  

You can read exactly what Mueller said in his farewell remarks here. 

Or you can just read this tweet from former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, which contains two statements from Mueller’s speech:

Yes, Joe, the thing speaks for itself.

Now Democrats need to stop cowering in front of polls and hypotheticals about how much Trump would love an impeachment narrative for 2020, and start dragging witnesses in to testify about what they told Mueller.  Let America watch as these sworn witnesses tell the public what they told Mueller’s investigators, on must-see live television.  This is crucial, since virtually no Americans who need to be convinced are going to read Mueller’s book.   It will also be instructive to watch the angry president’s increasingly unhinged reactions to the sworn testimony as it comes out.  

Until the inevitable impeachment hearings begin, I refer those lazy patriots to Joe Scarborough’s tweet (above).  And God bless these United States…

[1]   Mueller wrote Barr on March 27, 2019

Dear Attorney General Barr:

I previously sent you a letter dated March 25, 2019, that enclosed the introduction and executive summary for each volume of the Special Counsel’s report marked with redactions to remove any information that potentially could be protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e); that concerned declination decisions; or that related to a charged case. We also had marked an additional two sentences for review and have now confirmed that these sentences can be released publicly.

Accordingly, the enclosed documents are in a form that can be released to the public consistent with legal requirements and Department policies. I am requesting that you provide these materials to Congress and authorize their public release at this time.

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).

While we understand that the Department is reviewing the full report to determine what is appropriate for public release — a process that our Office is working with you to complete — that process need not delay release of the enclosed materials. Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation. It would also accord with the standard for public release of notifications to Congress cited in your letter. See 28 C.F.R. 609(c) (“the Attorney General may determine the public release” of congressional notifications “would be in the public interest”).

Sincerely yours,

Arguing with a true believer is pointless, bringing a legal case against one, for good cause, not as much.   The belief of a true believer insulates the person from so-called facts or any counter narrative that contradicts the belief system.   Believers know the truth and you, no matter how much so-called evidence you think you have produced, are sadly mistaken.  Wrong.  SAD!   On your way to hell.  

That kind of dismissive, belief-based superiority does not generally work as well in a court of law where the decisions of judges, even if they deeply agree with the true believer, are bound by law, evidence and the specter of appeal.  Judges hate to be overturned on appeal.

The world is (among many other things) chaotic, confusing, contentious, often violent.    A belief system that puts this mad world in order, even if the system is internally inconsistent, is a comfort to many people.   These systems rest on bedrock articles of faith and come in many forms.  Some creeds encourage peace, others preach violence, always defended as a form of completely justified self-defense.   These belief systems are sold to people by skilled salesmen, by loved ones of unshakable faith, by charismatic leaders, sometimes by total con artist hucksters.  

The virtue of these systems, to those who believe in them,  is the certainty  they deliver about what is right and good and what is wrong and evil and the powerful sense of belonging in the good group that membership confers.  The articles of faith are easy to understand, simplify this complex world and give followers an uncomplicated road map to follow to belong to the group that stands against evil.   Wear the right hat, agree with the right slogans, join the right chant and you’re in.   It couldn’t be simpler.   The powerful sense of human belonging alone is enough to make people defend the faith, to the death, if necessary.

Imagine the terror of living in a country where a hoard of dangerous and unaccountable illegals swarm across porous boarders, are given free rein to rape, kill, smuggle banned, deadly drugs, decapitate, torture, contemptuously speak their secret languages while defying all laws of the country they have invaded.   Just the fact that they are rapists is enough reason to hate them, but there’s more.   We harness this legitimate fear and righteous hatred into a movement to stop these goddamned raping hoards and bring peace and justice to our shores.

When a true believer is imbued with faith, all of the arguments in the world cannot dent that belief.   I’m thinking, of course, of people hearing what they want to hear every time a charismatic demagogue opens his mouth.   Those who love and follow the demagogue hear the larger truth, even in the demagogue’s many demonstrably false lies.  He may be lying about many of the small details, even all of them, fine, but he’s completely right and honest about the big picture!    Those who hate the demagogue hear only a self-serving liar, rattling on, ignoring reality, warping the world to his image and stinking up the discourse, as demagogues often do.

A simple article of faith, a good motto, will always beat a set of complicated and nuanced facts, no matter how damning they may be.   If you are predisposed to believe something you will always find as much evidence as you need, it doesn’t take much.   The man you believe is unfairly persecuting your leader droned on for a long time, saying a lot of subtle things that supposedly contradicted and compromised the leader and his defenders, but then– in a moment that revealed his true despicable nature — he smirked, freeze that frame, he fucking smirked! Look at this fucking face!  Case closed!   The piece of shit showed his true biased partisan colors!   HAT SLOGAN BEATS COMPLICATED 448 page legalistic, biased so-called INVESTIGATOR REPORT!!!

Clearly I am thinking about the raging debate over the findings of the Mueller Report, in the wake of Mueller’s careful public remarks yesterday. Remarks that shed no light (unlike Mueller’s March 27 letter to Barr) on the argument over Attorney General Barr’s misleading and false statements that led his client, the president, to crow NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, complete and total EXONERATION.   Trump’s remarks, in the absence of the report  or the summary Mueller prepared for immediate release (held by Barr for weeks), were fair enough.  They comported exactly with how Barr summarized Mueller’s findings in a letter he strongly argued was not intended as a summary, no matter what he may have written in it about summarizing the report.  

Mueller’s findings, like his remarks yesterday were legalistic, nuanced, by the book, bound by DOJ 1973 and 2000 directives against indicting, or even, in Mueller’s fairness analysis, accusing, a sitting president of a federal crime.  The 1973 DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president was reiterated in the DOJ Manual in 2000 after Ken Starr’s partisan investigation into Whitewater which led to perjury charges against a president confronted, in an unrelated case, with provable allegations that he had received blow jobs in the White House.   Starr pulled no punches:  Clinton committed perjury, impeach him.  

Mueller pulled his punches: we don’t exonerate him, and I present a great deal of evidence of crimes the president likely was directly involved in, and preserve a treasure trove of evidence riddled with holes due to perjury and obstruction, but I can’t say, without a full trial on the facts, that the president is guilty and, therefore, I cannot make a finding beyond that the massive evidence collected, and the pattern of obstruction of my investigation, does not allow me to exonerate him.   The report, he said, speaks for itself.

I was checking out a couple of FOX news videos today, in the wake of Mueller’s short, punctilious press conference yesterday.  One was entitled “Trump Reacts to Mueller’s Russia probe with angry tirade“.   It took me a moment to realize that FOX was applauding the president, a completely innocent man, for his anger.   Innocent people have the right to angry tirades!!!   Nothing wrong with an angry tirade, if you are justifiably enraged.  Ask Supreme Court Justice for life Boof Kavanaugh.  They work, yo!

NO COLLUSION.   Mueller found that the 140 contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials were part of Russia’s documented interference with the 2016 election.  Because of the lies Mueller’s team was told, deleted emails and texts, refusals of principals to be interviewed, he was unable to establish the legal elements of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.  He warned America again of the serious and coordinated Russian interference in the 2016 election, interference copiously documented in his report and a series of indictments, interference the Trump administration blocked investigation into and has done nothing to protect America against in 2020.

NO OBSTRUCTION.   Mueller dedicated a second volume of his report to an investigation and documentation of the president’s many attempts to impede the investigation, public statements that directly contradicted each other about firing various people involved with the investigation, ordering subordinates to make false records documenting lies to protect the president from evidence that could compromise him, threatening, bullying and intimidating potential witnesses, hectoring his attorney general to “unrecuse” and shut down the probes, submitting answers Mueller called “inadequate” to written questions and refusing to answer follow-up interrogatories.   The summary of this volume lays out ten very damning instances that smell very much like a vigorous and ongoing attempt to obstruct the investigation.   In response the president has another great slogan to fit on a hat:  No Do-Overs!

As for obstruction allegations, Trump doubles down, he’s consistent in this.  No subpoenas will be obeyed!   No documents will be released.  Let the courts rule against me, I have 5-4 on the Supreme Court now!   In his angry tirade today he claimed that the report written by his enemy, a vengeful man who had an undisclosed business deal with Trump that went bad and who was already angry because Trump denied him the FBI director job he coveted, a man with a conflict of interest who employed a team of angry Democrats, COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY EXONERATED him.

If you love somebody, as millions appear to love eternally fighting Trump, you can forgive that person an extended temper tantrum when they are unfairly attacked by unscrupulous, powerful enemies.   If you watch that same tirade without the love for the angry person, the facts will sometimes speak for themselves.

Our experiment in democracy may already be over, crushed by a skillful forty year campaign by ultra-wealthy extreme right wing zealots with roots deep in the rabid ideology of the John Birch Society.  It could be that enough people, softened by a lifetime of ads that have made them loyal consumers, prefer a muscular chant to something as squishy and complicated as flagrant violations of campaign finance law, flouting the rules against using the office of president to enrich yourself, abstractions like dead children of illegals at the borders, mass killing of the neighbors of possible terrorists, seizing and imprisonment of the illegal fake children of alien rapists.    MAGA means a return to the good old days, when you could honestly call a homosexual a fag without everybody jumping on you, when colored people knew their goddamn place, when the life of every six day-old embryo, every three month-old fetus, was the most sacred and precious of all of God’s creations.    You see, we were once a country of decency and God-fearing Christian values, my friends, and it is only right to return to that golden time when dissent was seen as treason and everybody knew their goddamned place.

I may just be an optimist, but I see signs that our legal system is still not completely corrupt, our democracy not quite completely dead.   An attorney general who, as spin-doctor spokesman and chief legal advisor to a president, deliberately misleads and confuses the public then lies under oath?   Congress’s constitutional duty is to impeach him.   The Senate won’t oust him?   It matters not, put the corrupt, demonically evasive protector of presidential unaccountability on trial for America to see.  Let Barr refuse a subpoena to testify in his own impeachment hearing, that’s OK too.   If the Supreme Court rules 5-4 on Barr’s right to tell Congress to suck it, democracy is already over.  Still, we have to follow the law if we are a nation of laws — it is the only roadmap away from tyranny.  Congress is the only body, under our constitution, who can hold a sitting president, or his hand-picked appointees, accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors [1].   Let the impeachment hearings begin.

If the impeachment investigation in the House, or the trial in the Senate, is stonewalled by Trump’s blanket refusal to cooperate, do you really think the Supreme Court will side with him 5-4 that he doesn’t need to allow subordinates to testify in an impeachment hearing because all charges against him are part of a vicious, partisan witch hunt against a completely innocent man who never, NEVER got a blow job while president!!!?  If so, we’re already finished as an even nominal democracy.   That argument would probably fly with Boof, but it’s hard to see the others, even the most craven, signing on to that decision.  Call me naive, but I still believe in the integrity of our (yes, deeply flawed) legal system and the constitutional system of checks and balances.  I also believe the Supreme Court justices, at least most of them, rule with an eye toward their place in history.  

I see evidence that plenty of government officials still believe in the rule of law too.   There are at least a thousand former federal prosecutors of integrity who signed a letter analyzing Mueller’s report and agreeing that it makes out a criminal obstruction case that would be pursued, but for the fact that the perpetrator is currently the president of the United States.   There are also federal prosecutors of integrity who are presently serving.  

If not, we’re already finished, and you are right to despair, but I am thinking otherwise.  Hope is better than resignation, until they nail the box shut.

It is upon us all to struggle against the idea that, living under a sociopathic scofflaw demagogue who is a useful donkey for manipulative billionaires and powerful bigots to ride, our fate as a nation is already sealed.

[1] At one point during Trump’s angry remarks outside the White House, he pointed out the legal requirement, for impeachment, of “high crimes AND misdemeanors”.   He pointed out the AND to the assembled reporters, a teachable moment.  You see, even if the Report did accuse me of high crimes, which, of course, my sworn enemies completely exonerated me, but you also, constitutionally, need misdemeanors.  It says AND, plainly, and not OR, it’s written right in the constitution.  You don’t have to be a legal scholar or even have a reading level higher than second grade to see A-N-D and not O-R.   He rested his case, witch hunt.    Many followers posted thumbs up icons after this irrefutable remark.  If you love the person, it doesn’t take much to make you click “like”.   MAGA.  MAGA!!!!

Of all the wars fought by this great nation, not many were actually waged for a goal any loftier than increasing the wealth of the few.    The soldiers who bravely faced death, however coerced or manipulated they may have been by the false slogans of warmongers and laws that demanded their service, deserve to be remembered.   Their’s was not to reason why, they were sent to do or die.   Whatever else we can say about our wars, whatever bad things our troops may have sometimes done (remember: some soldiers in every war wind up doing atrocious things), facing imminent death as they did is a heroic act we wouldn’t wish on our loved ones, unless there was absolutely no other choice.

On this day when America shops for great deals on mattresses and cars, let us also remember that the loudest voices calling for war are always the voices of privileged Chicken Hawks, men and women who have higher priorities, for themselves, than personally serving in the deadly wars they agitate for and full-throatedly support [1].    The aptly named Dick Cheney, advocate of America’s unequivocal right to torture suspected enemies and to American rule by force, famously sneered that, as for his studious avoidance of military service during the Vietnam war, he had “other priorities”.   Indeed.

President Trump can be justly remembered as President Fake Bone Spurs, as we now know that the false diagnoses of disabling military service-exempting bone spurs, the basis for his numerous deferments during the Vietnam war, were bought and paid for by his wealthy, unscrupulous father.  

George Dubya Bush, the wartime commander-in-chief whose historically low job approval numbers soared when he remade himself as a warrior president, was a draft dodging, heavy drinking coke fiend who went AWOL from the elite National Guard unit his father got him a spot on.   The records of his shameful avoidance of service — even the silver spoon service his rich and powerful father arranged for him–  were all purged, all evidence destroyed or altered.  A forged version of his military record appeared, was vetted for truthfulness and aired on CBS, and Dan Rather’s traitorous head was cut off — end of story.    Sunlight may be the best disinfectant [2], but it is best to keep shameful shit classified and top secret if you want to protect your reputation as a man or woman of honor!

Which brings us back to untruthful, shame-hiding, boastful, deceitful, massively tormented (and uncontrollably lying) honor-anemic President Fake Bone Spurs.  He is appealing two federal court rulings that went against him this week.   One of these appeals will hold off enforcement of a court order forcing Deutsche Bank to reveal the details of its complicated, actually incomprehensible, arrangements with Trump, which included loaning him $40,000,000 to repay a loan to Deutsche Bank itself that a court ordered him to pay after his long lawsuit against the bank trying to get out of repaying any of the tens of millions he borrowed. The other ruling orders Trump’s accounting firm to release hidden financial documents that Congress has subpoenaed.  Trump, as everyone knows, believes in fighting, everything, constantly.

Trump’s lawyers have a strong argument:   Unfair!!!  We appeal, Do-Over!   Nothing to fucking see here!  Unfair, vindictive Obama judges!   The public has no right to see shit, you fucking losers!!!   Make us!   The law gives us a Do-Over!!   Perfectly legal, assholes!!!!!

Remember, wealthy criminals often use the machinery of our legal system to avoid prosecution.   The “most transparent president in history”, our “extremely stable genius”, has always used litigation as a weapon, to  attack his many enemies (often, coincidentally, his defrauded creditors) and to protect himself from the application of the law to him while attacking others as the real criminals.   He has been involved in literally thousands of lawsuits over the course of his deadbeat career, ever since he learned the despicable tactic at evil Roy Cohn’s disgusting tit.  

Remember, whatever our flaws (and some are glaring), America is a nation of laws, with a Constitution revered by Conservatives and Liberals alike.  The Constitution protects our freedoms, even if we must often wrest those protections from its plain meaning.    Court-enforced constitutional protections are the citizens’ last bulwark against an unscrupulous autocrat openly enslaving us all to his will.

It is no surprise when, on the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, the truth-challenged, nothing-to-hide  president lets his sweaty ass tweet something like this: 

He does know exactly why Radical Left Democrats want Bob Mueller to testify.  Mueller, in the redacted summary of his report that Barr, after spinning a transparently false narrative about it (to Mueller’s memorialized horror) and waiting weeks to release it, explicitly did not exonerate the president for a seamless pattern of obstruction of justice.  Bone Spur’s obstruction that has only increased since the redacted report was released over a month ago.   He has vowed to muscularly fight each and every subpoena, and his 39% dearly love his defiance of law and norms.

He doesn’t know why Americans want to hear from Mueller?   We want to hear Mueller straighten this shit out for America.   Mueller was concerned, as he wrote to Barr the day after Barr started lying about the report, that Barr was sewing confusion about the findings of his investigation.   Mueller should have a chance to answer questions about the case that, but for the perpetrator being a sitting president, would have been brought against the impressively unscrupulous CEO of what he thinks is his family business.   Trump’s presidency rests on an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that a sitting president can’t be indicted and the spineless block of immovable sycophants in his Republican controlled Senate.

The tab for the witch hunt hoax, the origins of which Bone Spurs’ toady is now aggressively investigating, has gone up $10,000,000 since Trump’s sweaty ass last tweeted a price tag.   Facts only get more persuasive when you pump them UP!  

Also, Bone Spurs, (bonehead) you don’t obstruct a crime — you obstruct the investigation and/or prosecution of a crime.   As you did, countless times during Mueller’s investigation and as you continue to do now, doing the only thing you know how to do: doubling down.   You finally have this handsome lawyerly devil as the Roy Cohn you’ve long been looking for [3]:

 [4]

Remember: there is actual truth, facts which can be found confirmed in documents, financial statements, court filings, plea agreements, contracts, sales records, reports made for the Department of Justice.  These true facts tell the real story.   The only person who wants truth hidden is the person who will be hurt by the truth.    NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!!  GO BUY A FUCKING MATTRESS, AMERICA!!!   AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR FUCKING SERVICE!!!

[1]  Take rabid Chicken Hawk John Bolton (mustache) for example, his war policy first, then his record of distinguished military service (both from Wikipedia, here) :

Bolton is a foreign policy hawk and is an advocate for regime change in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen and North Korea.^[16][17] He has also repeatedly called for the termination of the Iran nuclear deal. He was an architect of the Iraq War and continues to support the decision to invade Iraq.^[18] He has continuously supported military action and regime change in Syria, Libya, and Iran.^[19][18] A Republican, his political views have been described as American nationalist,^[20][21]conservative,^{[22][23][24][25]} and “neoconservative“.^[26] Bolton rejects the last term^[27] and uses the term “pro-American” instead.^[28][29][30]

Vietnam War

Bolton was a supporter of the Vietnam War, but purposely avoided military service in Vietnam.^[37][31] During the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew number 185. (Draft numbers were assigned by birth date.)^[38] As a result of the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ decisions to rely largely on the draft rather than on the reserve forces, joining a Guard or Reserve unit became a way to avoid service in the Vietnam War, although 42 Army Reserve units were called up with 35 of them deployed to Vietnam shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968–69.^[39][40] Before graduating from Yale in 1970, Bolton enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard rather than wait to find out if his draft number would be called.^[41][42] (The highest number called to military service was 195.)^[43] He saw active duty for 18 weeks of training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, from July to November 1970.^[42] After serving in the National Guard for four years, he served in the United States Army Reserve until the end of his enlistment two years later.^[5]

He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”^[37] In a 2007 interview, Bolton explained his comment in the reunion book saying his decision to avoid service in Vietnam was because “by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from.”^[44][45][46]

As for bellicose, convicted perjurer and organizer/funder of paramilitary groups engaged in war crimes, Elliott Abrams, the internet is silent about whether the piece of shit ever served in the military.   My guess would be no.   Read this for all you need to know about Abrams, the man Trump appointed to bring “democracy” to Venezuela. 

[2]    “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”    Justice Louis Brandeis

[3]   Readers should note that Trump’s first Roy Cohn, Roy Cohn, was disbarred and indicted for a long series of ethical violations and crimes as the lifelong homophobe (a promiscuous closeted homosexual himself) was dying of AIDS that he insisted, until his last breath, was good old heterosexual cancer.   Trump famously abandoned his surrogate father, his first Roy Cohn, during the evil man’s final, desperate days.

[4] bonus photo:

The self-proclaimed most transparent president ever has an impressive record.   For being transparently fake, transparently fearful of the true facts.   Let’s take a short walk through just three examples.

Tax documents that would show his financial entanglements and perhaps disprove his boasts about his incredible (truly) wealth?    There is a plain-spoken law that requires him to provide these to Congress on request.  That request has been made, the deadline extended, a bullshit legal rationale for not providing them invented.   So?  He’d love to provide them, he keeps insisting, as soon as the longest audit in tax history is done!   What does the IRS say about this audit?   None of your bees wax!  Make me.   [1]

He is a very stable genius, probably the smartest man to ever hold the office of president, in his own humble opinion.  He went to the best schools.  His lawyers have made sure that no transcripts or test scores will ever be released by any school he ever attended.   He’s sensitive!

His second Supreme Court nominee, “Justice” Boof Kavanaugh [2], had the bulk of his legal writings kept secret from the Senate Judiciary Committee during his shameful confirmation process.   An unheard of percentage of his legal writings were protected from scrutiny by a party gatekeeper (and personal friend of the candidate) who decided which ones to classify and which to keep secret.   Conspicuously absent were legal writings from his gung-ho partisan participation in a straight line of hard-line party politics: his work as clerk for a rightwing federal judge who later had to resign in disgrace for serial sexual misconduct (a lifelong mentor who got Kavanaugh his clerkship with Anthony Kennedy),  his time as aggressive lead lawyer for Starr’s moralistic, x-rated investigation into Bill Clinton lying about a blowjob, attorney for the Dubya Bush campaign during Bush v. Gore, his detailed legal advice as part of the White House legal team to scofflaw president Dubya, including his arguably racist positions, his long fealty to extreme right political positions as reflected in his consistent rulings on the D.C. Circuit court after his appointment by a grateful Dubya.   Full transparency, bitches.

There are many more examples of Trump’s transparent fakeness, of course, but these three, for the man “completely and totally exonerated” by the illegal partisan witch hunt hoax conducted by 18 or more very sick and dangerous hate-filled Democrat criminals, some of whom may deserve the death penalty… well, as our transparently fake president continues his contumacious obstruction of any and all inquiries into what we used to think of as fact and truth, these three will have to stand in for the rest.   In the memorable words of George Lopez “fuck that puto“.

[1]   Note that we are not even mentioning the transparent president’s recent lawsuit against Deutsche Bank to prevent them from disclosing details of how he was able, among other things, to borrow tens of millions from the bank to pay off a previous loan from the bank.   The poorly managed German bank was virtually the only source of funding for the serially bankrupt, famously deadbeat Trump, outside of friendly “oligarchs” here and there.  The Deutsche Bank story is covered in detail here.

[2]  “Boofing” was listed on Kavanaugh’s personal page in the yearbook of the exclusive Montgomery County prep school he graduated from.   When asked about this during his confirmation hearing, he lied.  He brazenly pretended it was a reference to his flatulence, rather than what everybody knew it to be: inserting a tube in the asshole of some eager to get drunk asshole and pouring enough alcohol into the body, through the tube, to render the teenager shit-faced.   So I call the lying sack of shit Boof.   Fuck that lying hyper-partisan choir boy puto.   As that smug piece of shit wrote in 1998,  (source):

Kavanaugh thought impeachment was the best remedy in the case of a president accused of behaving badly. He writes:

“I am mindful of the need for respect for the Office of the President. But in my view, given what we know, the interests of the Office of the President would be best served by our gathering the full facts regarding the actions of this President so that the Congress can decide whether the interests of the Presidency would be best served by having a new President.”

It’s pretty clear that Mr. Trump has no core beliefs about anything, outside of grasping at any idea he feels might be  helpful to his overarching need to win at any cost and to see all opponents crushed.   His beliefs are purely transactional, as are all of his relationships.   Actually, Mr. Trump does appear to have a few core beliefs: vanity and vindictiveness are virtues, law, rules and norms are for suckers and that deliberate cruelty demonstrates strength.   His Republican colleagues in Congress appear to believe the same things, or at least, are afraid of the fervency of their leader’s belief in these things.

Some who have hitched their wagons to the Trump juggernaut may actually have deep core beliefs.  Stephen Miller, for one, probably truly believes in the Nazi-like shit he spouts, the Nazi-like policies he advocates. The same for the belief, in many a pious conservative, that abortion is murder, in every case, no matter what.  It is a truism, in a republic where church and state are explicitly separated in the nation’s founding document, that you cannot legislate morality, but we’ll see about that soon.

Lists were created for Trump of judicial candidates vetted for their fealty to bedrock conservative moral propositions like abortion is murder.   The federal courts are now packed with judges who are skeptical about a woman’s constitutional right to have the final say over whether to become a mother or not.   While each of these judges, when pressed, would probably give lip service to the proposition that the government may not make moralistic, religiously-motivated laws that violate the constitution, they will search diligently for a legally sound way to make anti-abortion laws  stick anyway.

A number of Republican states are in a rush to help in the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects an American’s right to a safe, legal abortion.  Many are the same states who rushed to implement voter suppression laws immediately after the Supreme Court ended enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.  

In Alabama, an impoverished state with a shamefully high infant mortality rate (and maternal mortality rate, for that matter), twenty-five right-wing men have decided to test Trump’s highly moral courts with a draconian law that imposes a ninety-nine year prison sentence on any obstetrician who provides an abortion in the good state of Alabama.  There are two such obstetricians currently in practice in Alabama under the stringent current laws.  

If you were to rape and shoot one of these doctors, and be convicted of premeditated murder and rape, you would serve far less than the ninety-nine year imprisonment mandated in this deliberately provocative test case anti-abortion law.  The same applies if you serially rape children in Alabama.  A nice touch that a female governor signed this anti-woman bill into law.

You can call this politics, the idea that a doctor performing her job, protecting the health and life choices of her patients, is subjected to a sentence many times longer than murderers, rapists and the most foul perjurers get.  This new Alabama law applies even in cases where a girl is impregnated by an adult rapist– no abortion NO MATTER WHAT.   You will have the goddamned baby, slut!

We need to get back in the streets, boys and girls.   Regularly.   These swamp creatures, true believers and cynics alike, must be soundly rebuked in 2020, but a lot of serious damage has been done and we need to be out in the streets, millions of us, showing the world, and the TV pundits, that Trump’s is not the America at least 61% of us want to live in.  

(By the way, Charles and David Koch’s net worth tripled under Obama).

While I’m droning on about the rule of law, and our morally heedless president, here’s one that caught my eye recently.  The president recently pardoned a lieutenant who took a prisoner outside, stripped him naked and shot him in the head.   The president apparently agreed that this American soldier had acted in self-defense against this dangerous, possibly al Qu’eada-affiliated Muslim and that it was intolerable that he had been locked up for five years just for doing his duty.  Mr. Trump has acted in a similar way in other cases, the optics, or legality, be damned. [1] 

One of Mr. Trump’s first, and most famously in-your-face, pardons was of the contemptible Joe Arpaio, the famously vicious sheriff who set up open air concentration camps in the desert that he bragged about repeatedly.  A federal judge eventually informed him that such cruel and unusual  incarceration was illegal (this was prior to Trump’s widespread use of punitive child detention camps– now cruel AND usual, yo.)  Arpaio reacted to the federal court’s ruling with what the court decided was contempt of court.  Trump, impressed by Arpaio’s in-your-face defiance, extended a full, in-your-fucking-face pardon for Arpaio’s contempt of a federal court order.    Mr. Trump being Mr. Trump.

There are so many reasons to get this foul, persistent shit stain out of the Oval Office, boys and girls, outside of the multiple, very weighty counts to be found in Volume II of the Mueller report, which people are still fighting over America’s right to see. 

We need to be in the street, millions of us.   We need to be there today, tomorrow and for as long as it takes.

Note:  Steve Mnuchin’s father paid $91,000,000 yesterday for a statue by artist Jeff Coons, after making the winning bid at an auction.   I am no longer wondering why Mnuchin has that smug fuck-you smile on his face every time he talks to reporters on camera and smiles about obstructing execution of a lawful request for the president’s financial documents.   An expression remarkably similar to the one on Secretary of Education Betsey DeVos’s charming, clueless face, or Ivanka’s.

[1]  from the Washington Post:

Or consider the cases of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher and Army Special Forces Officer Matt Golsteyn. Gallagher is awaiting trial on charges that, without authorization or combat justification, he killed a prisoner in Iraq — and then held his reenlistment ceremony with the victim’s corpse. This March, Trump tweeted that Gallagher would be moved to “less restrictive confinement” in honor of his service to his country. And Golsteyn was investigated by the Army for the unsanctioned killing of an unarmed Taliban fighter in 2010, an investigation that was reopened when Golsteyn admitted to the killing on Fox News in 2016. In December, Trump tweeted that Golsteyn was a “U.S. Military hero” whose case he would be “reviewing.”

source

Meantime, Chelsea Manning is back in jail today for her ongoing refusal to comply with a subpoena related to the prosecution of Julian Assange of Wikileaks, an outfit Mr. Trump expressed “love” for numerous times.

Mr. Trump flings his feces so regularly and so wildly that it’s often hard to see any plan or pattern in the spatter.   I recently heard three Trump tweets read aloud, in context, and it blew my mind a little.  I share them here, the president’s swing from euphoria to paranoid, arguably coherent Hitler-in-the-bunker raving.   It is good, sometimes, to step back, with the aid of hindsight, and look more closely at the thing that went by in a blur.

The tweets were read by a lawyer on an episode of an excellent podcast called “What Trump can teach us about Con Law”– Con Law being law student-speak for constitutional law.   Mr. Trump never studied Con Law (obviously), and so each time he sets off a complicated constitutional shit storm the host of the podcast, and his neighbor and friend, a constitutional law professor, dissect the particular constitutional issue involved.   The most recent episode was called Contempt Power.   It laid out the limited options Congress has for holding people openly contemptuous of its constitutional powers to account.   

As you might imagine, in the end, real enforcement depends on the federal courts who can order compliance.  Courts packed with conservative judges vetted by the Federalist Society for their extreme right wing bona fides and appointed in record numbers by the man who demonstrates his contempt for the constitution daily are not a sure bet to rule by the spirit and the letter of the law.   Additionally, even the fairest and most non-political of courts can take years to decide on a political matter.

The lack of  a speedy legal way to compel people who tell Congress to fuck off  to follow the law is another reason why impeachment, (once Americans are on board in sufficient numbers– and the Democrats have to keep pushing here), is the only real constitutional tool for a full investigation and excision of this tumor of a president.  

The professor read the president’s first tweet after Barr announced, falsely, that the Mueller report had exonerated Mr. Trump.   Hearing the tweets read out loud really drove home how wild and mad this prolifically tweeting president actually is.   Trump was euphoric after Barr cleared him, tweeting:

Never mind that Mueller’s summary ends with these words (words that would not be seen by the rest of us for several more weeks, as Barr redacted and continued misrepresenting Mueller’s report):

If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.   Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.   Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,

Then it was only a matter of a few more weeks until Barr, after a wildly spinning hour long informercial for “his client’s” innocence, released the redacted report, including the redacted summaries that Mueller had prepared, and redacted, for immediate release on March 24th.   Trump outdid himself with the celebratory tweet this time:

HBO was not crazy about the president’s appropriation of their copyrighted Game of Thrones motif as Trump seemingly portrayed himself as the Night King, supreme leader of the massive and inexhaustible zombie army that threatened to wipe out humanity (and was finally defeated, after epic carnage, toward the end of this final season).

At this point Trump seemed to have won, declaring the game over.  Set and match.  Suck it, bitches.

Then people started reading the redacted report, released the day before Good Friday, which coincided this year with the first night of Passover. The release was timed to minimize the damage of the actual report.  Trump-haters nonetheless jumped on the redacted report, even as many of them prepared for religious holidays.  

It was, shockingly, nothing like the report that Barr had summarized in the letter he later hotly denied was a summary.  In fairness to Barr, nothing in his letter conclusively indicated that it was intended as a summary, unless you want to nitpick and single out the last sentence in paragraph two:

Although my review is ongoing, I believe that it is in the public interest to describe the report and to summarize the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation 

We now know (as we learned weeks later just before Barr testily testified before Lindsey Graham and friends) that Mueller immediately wrote to Barr to protest the misrepresentation of his report, the confusion in the minds of America that Barr’s misleading summary and ongoing distortions had created.   Unprecedented, as far as I know, for a Special Counsel to write a letter of protest to his boss about the deliberate mischaracterization of his work, and make it part of the public record.    At the time, the day before Good Friday, all we had was the redacted report released on the eve of two major holidays right before the weekend.   The president knew people were going to start talking about this “game over”/”no do-overs”, in light of new evidence,, so, beginning at 4:53 a.m. the  next morning our president tweeted this:

Finally, time for vengeance, to bring justice (think Texas-style) to some “very sick and dangerous people” guilty of “very serious” capital crimes.   Traitors will be hung from lamp posts, eleven and twelve year-old German boys will fight in the streets of Berlin until the last of them are killed… if the Reich is too weak to survive it deserves to be exterminated, I have been stabbed in the back by very sick, dangerous traitors…

The day after Mr. Trump’s paroxysm on twitter, some of the finest people, the finest people, celebrated the birthday of Mr. Hitler, who turned 129 this year, on April 20th, the day after Good Friday and the first night of Passover. 

from the report:

Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment [that Trump did not act with corrupt intent and did not commit felonies]. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.  [1]

And, if you are still on the fence about the importance of moving forward on impeachment hearings, take three minutes to watch this excellent short video  on the five major benefits of beginning an impeachment of President Obstruction.

[1] Mueller also wrote, with no ambiguity whatsoever:

The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

I had a professor in law school who drilled his students to begin every answer to a legal question with “it depends.”   He’d stop us if we forgot to begin our answer that way, smile encouragingly as one of us began with this phrase and wave his hand for the follow up, an explanation of the devilish details on which your actual answer depends.  He was no radical, as far as I know (he taught Intellectual Property, the area he also practiced), but that qualification, “it depends”, turns out to be the key to all critical discussion of our laws.

If you are eighteen and your girlfriend is sixteen, in many states you can be easily convicted of statutory rape.   Will every eighteen year-old sleeping with his sixteen year-old girl friend be prosecuted for this crime? Obviously not, but why not?   It depends.  On who the boy is, who the girl is, who their families are.  A prep school kid from a rich family can be excused for letting his heart rule him that way.   It seems so unfair to let this youthful love affair (even — yea, especially–  if it is only one night long) destroy the boy’s entire life!    A hard boy from the ghetto will generally get a less generous pass from the law for letting his heart decide what the law should be.   Additionally, justice reasons, the kid from the ghetto should know exactly how ungenerous his pass will be.    Impossible to compare the lives of those two boys, one a hard criminal type, the other the finest sort our society produces!

Is contempt of a subpoena to testify a crime?   It depends.

The Attorney General is instructing the president on a (very weak) “protective presidential privilege” defense for his ongoing obstruction of justice.  He has given Trump’s energetic attempts to cover up all potentially damaging information against him the tiniest, most obscene fig leaf of legal cover.   On the plus side, from Barr’s experienced point of view, when Obama was challenged on a similarly weak assertion of presidential privilege, it took the courts four years to decide that his weak-ass defense could not stand.    

A random note about time:   four years is the difference between Mr. Hitler as Time Magazine Man of the Year, for restoring German power and prestige,  and Mr. Hitler as a Hall of Fame mass murderer at the top of his game, gleefully slaughtering in the East.  

Back to contempt of a subpoena to testify, or to release documents.

Chelsea Manning, who leaked, among other things, video footage of American soldiers committing war crimes, murdering civilians and civilians who went to rescue the surviving machine gunned civilians, with the full backing of their commander (“light ’em up!”), was locked up for seven years, after being sentenced to thirty-five years for giving the files to Wikileaks.    She recently was locked up for more than two months for failing to comply with a grand jury subpoena (she got out yesterday or today, temporarily).  They are trying to force her to give additional testimony that will aid in convicting Mr. Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and locking him up under the jail for the rest of his natural life.

[1] You can read that basics about Contempt of Congress HERE. 

There’s a good discussion of what Congress can do to give teeth to a contempt citation HERE

A person cited for contempt of Congress can be arrested by the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Representatives and dragged into Congress.  The last time this procedure was used was a long time ago.  Gratifying as it would be to see Barr dragged into the House in handcuffs, it would just as likely be a bloodbath as a cornered, twitchy, enraged Barr could use his own armed agents to repel the sergeant-at-arms in a hail of bullets.   I would put nothing past the smug, contemptuous Nazi bastard.

Here are a couple of powerful government appointees who were held in contempt in recent times (from the table at the bottom of the Wiki):

Eric Holder, Attorney General under Obama, was found in contempt of Congress (by a vote of 255-67, no less) in 2012.

Note also that Anne Gorsuch, mother of our own Neil Gorsuch, was, like her son, a faithful soldier whose service to her masters included allowing herself to be cited for contempt of Congress.