Tag: Robert Mueller

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A Lonely Man – Kafka Kouncils grill Mueller

July 24th 2019

Today’s hearings had plenty of surreal moments. The one that stuck in my head was that of Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, who demanded to know as a former Prosecutor why Mueller spoke of exonerating Trump.

He was badgering Mueller, demanding to know where, in the remit of the Special Prosecutor, the Justice Department, the FBI or anywhere, existed the power to exonerate.

It could be argued that by saying he didn’t do something, Mueller was implying that he could do it. If Mueller had looked at the panel, and with a condescending smirk and an arched eyebrow, said, “I do not exonerate Donald Trump” then Turner might have a point. Then it would sound like Mueller could exonerate but just didn’t feel like it at that particular moment. But that’s not what happened.

Mueller merely stated in the report that it does not exonerate Trump. Mueller wasn’t claiming a nonexistent power to exonerate.

The report concluded, “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. While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

If Mueller had instead written, “The evidence doesn’t make the President a good guy,” would Ratcliffe (and several other Republican reps chanting the same song) be screaming that Mueller cannot claim that he can make the President a good guy when in fact Mueller is saying the report doesn’t make him look like a good guy?

This all sounds silly as hell, and it is, but it also grazes a salient point that is, in point of both fact and law, the heart of the reason the report, while it contains many smoking guns, wasn’t THE smoking gun.

The Department of Justice has a lunatic rule that a sitting President cannot be indicted for crimes committed while sitting as President. A sitting President can be sued for civil matters (Jones vs Clinton) but when it comes to criminal matters, he enjoys a weird, extra-constitutional diplomatic immunity from his own country.

If I had to guess, it was Republicans who pushed for this rule, because while they love to investigate Democrats for (usually imaginary) crimes it is Republican Presidents who tend to be the actual criminals and end up in for-reals legal trouble. So Republicans scrapped legal harassment of Democratic presidents in order to keep their own out of prison, and settled for endless congressional investigations—none of which needed any actual evidence of criminal behavior in order to proceed, an added bonus. Remember Benghazi? Eight congressional investigations, blowing well over $75 million, and even with corrupt Republicans running the show, couldn’t find evidence of any wrong doing, or even that a crime had occurred.

So from the get-go, Mueller know he could not indict Trump. Lacking the main element for his report, he had to feather the edges. With no power to indict, or even accuse, because Presidents are god-kings well above your stupid puny American laws, he instead listed the crimes (eleven dealing with obstruction of justice alone) and waited for a corrupt and cowardly Congress to do its job.

He must have felt quite lonely doing that.

Did he manage to drop the hint? Over a thousand federal prosecutors signed a letter stating that if they were presented with the evidence Mueller had in his report, and if it were anyone other than the godlike and invulnerable Lord of all the Americas, they would have handed down multiple felony indictments.

Of course, prosecutors have a job to do and understand how to do it. Congress merely needs to look like it’s anything other than the world’s richest landfill.

Impeachment is similar to indictment, in that it is a formal accusation of wrong-doing brought against someone. Where the job of prosecutors is a bit more difficult is that they have to show evidence a crime has been committed and link said crime to the accused. Congress merely needs to impeach for high crimes and misdemeanors. One Congress impeached a President for firing a member of his own cabinet; another, for being misleading about getting a blow job.

Impeachment is enough of a joke that even Congress can handle it. But these days, with a few exceptions, Congress is an even bigger joke, and we have to listen to screeds about the Loch Ness monster and howls that by claiming not to take a given action, a prosecutor is saying that he could do the action if he wanted, a farcical conclusion on the face of it.

Resolve to impeach Trump is growing, but not among the Faux News/GOP part of the country, who all share the Sean Hannity delirium dream.

Mueller faced a grueling pair of sessions, nearly eight hours of badgering and misrepresentation of himself and his former office. He turns 75 soon, and there were quite a few times when his age was evident, when he stammered and looked a bit lost. Of course the Republicans exploited this, zeroing in on queries that they knew he was enjoined from answering because they weren’t in the report or might cause damage to the country. Knowing Mueller to be hard of hearing, they played nasty little schoolboy games, either speaking so quickly, or far enough from the microphone, that Mueller was forced to ask them to “please repeat the question” over 150 times. Republicans remind us that all very young children are sociopaths. Same furtive sense of nastiness that makes them toss ladyfingers at the cat.

And of course, Mueller had to grapple with the biggest limitation of all: The simple declaration that evidence existed that Donald Trump committed multiple felonies and should be indicted. He isn’t allowed to say that. All he can do—all he could do—was present the facts to Congress, and let them decide.

And that had to be a very lonely feeling for Bob Mueller.

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Barr None – A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

Barr None

A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

March 25th, 2019

OK, I’m going to beobvious the labor here and tell you that I think William Barr’s third-grade book report version of the Mueller Report is somewhat short of credible.

Barr, you’ll recall, was the architect of the Iran-Contra pardons issued in the final day of the George HW Bush administration that basically destroyed a six year investigation of some of the worst felonies committed since the previous time a Republican was president. Back then, William Safire referred to Barr witheringly as “the Coverup-General” and here we are, some 23 years later, and we still have a Coverup-General, and it’s the same despicable toady.

Safire was a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew (‘nattering nabobs of negativism’) and he found Barr contemptible in his willingness to subvert the legal process in service to party.

Safire’s dead, but the evil spawn of the far-right takeover of the GOP live on.

Barr’s letter is nothing more than a last-ditch effort to confuse the Mueller Report with Trump administration talking points. We still don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. We know that Mueller did not indict Trump for treason or even conspiracy against the United States, but that was never part of his remit. He could recommend such a course to the Justice Department or the House of Representatives, and he still might. And even Barr couldn’t manage to pretend that serious evidence of obstruction of justice didn’t exist; the best he could manage was that the Report “does not exonerate him [Trump].”

So we watch to see if Congress can wrest the report from Barr’s greasy paws and bring most, if not all of it into the light of day. We’ve gotten the talking points from Trump’s dancing monkey; now let’s see the actual report.

Even if Barr and Trump do manage to bury the report, there are three grand juries and at least a half dozen state investigations underway to determine the extent of Trump criminality in everything from using inaugural donations as a laundry for foreign influence peddling to the wild shenanigans surrounding the Trump Tower in Moscow to the demand that Moscow ferret out Hillary’s emails. Even without whatever Mueller has, Trump faces decades in prison for the potential charges he will face.

But Congress will subpoena the report, and possibly Mueller himself. Barr can’t prevent that, and Trump might face a revolution if he tried.

And remember, we still don’t know what is in that report. All Barr did was show up with an empty plastic bag draped over a hanger and grandly announce our tuxedo was back from the cleaners.

The media, in general, got completely played. I even heard a lot of them transposing Barr’s book report with the Mueller tome, and saying Mueller exonerated Trump. Most TV journalism is a vast wasteland, but even for them, that was a limp performance.

The right wing online circus weighed in, of course. One meme read, “Why are so many liberals in tears over learning that their president is not a traitor?”

I still think he’s a traitor, or at least conspiring against the United States for personal gain. (In just about any other country, conspiracy against that country would be considered treason, but the US has a very specific definition of the term ‘treason’ that sorta takes Trump off the hook.) If anyone’s crying, it’s because they just realized that Trump and the Republicans may have so badly broken the United States that it may no longer have any legal address to rid itself of an enemy in high office. That would be a death knell for any country. That would leave any thinking person in tears.

Well, Barr gave the empty-headed goosesteppers of the far right something to cheer about, and managed to confuse the equally empty-headed fluffers who purportedly keep us informed, but I doubt it’s going to last for very long.

Just the things Trump has openly admitted to should have gotten him impeached two years ago. Maybe the United States is that badly broken, in which case expect bloody and horrible times ahead.

Or maybe it’s like 1940, where the United States was suffering massive attacks on life and property from Germany on the high seas (the equivalent of a 9/11 every two weeks) and needed 18 months or so to gather the resolve to crush their vicious tormentors.

It may be that Trump himself, vicious and heedless in what he seems to believe is a victory, will trigger that himself. He has already said he would “call for organizations to fire members of the media and former government officials who he believes made false accusations about him”.

Ever heard an American President say anything like that? Nope. Not even Nixon.

Still, he needs to maintain the pretense that Barr’s Cliff’s Notes version is a substitute for the actual report, and not the real thing. And he has to do something about all those other investigations going on.

At which point, people will have to decide if they want to simply surrender to this vicious five-and-dime despot and his brown-shirt devotees, or put up a fight.

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Cooperation – The Manafortress has Fallen

September 14th, 2018

Paul Manafort has flipped. He’s going to give Bob Mueller everything he knows; about that Trump Tower meeting, about any and all other contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and the exact degree each played in subverting the Clinton campaign and forced propagandization of the public discourse.

It’s a devastating blow for Trump, le coup de grâce, and it’s now becoming very unlikely that he will still be president six months from now.

It’s bad enough for a president when his campaign manager pleads guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States. (Trumperdoos, “Conspiracy” is the legal term for “collusion”).

Trump, when Manafort’s going to spill the beans, rat you out, sing like a canary, give it up to the G-men, telling them every thing you did as a part of that, you have a pretty sizable problem.

Mueller has a death grip on Manafort’s throat. In addition to the two guilty pleas and promise of cooperation, Manafort has agreed to give over nearly all of his personal wealth, some $145 million including four mansions, to asset forfeiture. It leaves just enough so his wife and kids won’t starve while he rots in jail. Manafort is clearly a man with no options and no bargaining chips, other than to give over Trump and many others close to Trump. This way, his family isn’t destitute, and he might actually live long enough to get out of prison, something not in the cards last week.

Shortly after Cohen decided to plead out and turn evidence, Trump got asked about ‘flippers.’ His answer was characteristically weird, in that he said he knew a lot of flippers and they were just part of his regular environment.

You have to wonder what other crime lords would have made of that statement. James Cagney’s characters would have prefaced any remarks made to suspected flippers with “Youse doity rats” and ended up with escapades involving cement overboots and the East River. Real mobsters would have arranged for brake failures, or skiing accidents (“Both legs”). For a man who supposedly demands absolute personal loyalty from all the people he’ll eventually betray, it was an oddly tepid response.

If America had to elect a mafia don president, at least they picked one that was profoundly incompetent and abjectly stupid. Trump can’t even call his little friend and arrange for Manafort to have an adventure involving ricin, polonium or novichok. It’s too late.

Manafort has already given everything he has to convince Mueller to let him off with just a decade or two and $145 million. All he had to do was sign the paperwork, and all that evidence were there for Mueller to do with as he pleased.

It’s too late for Trump to pardon his way out of it, too. A lot of the evidence will go to the State of New York Southern District, who will use it for state charges. Trump can only pardon federal offenses.

A lot of that evidence stands to implicate Trump himself. Even with Trumpenstooge Kavanaugh on the court (not a foregone conclusion at this point) the Court is unlikely to rule that a president indicted for criminal conspiracy against his own country (which is now quite likely) can pardon himself. Even Dead Tony would have trouble arguing that this came under the aegis of original intent.

I suspect that it wasn’t for their damp lust to get Kavanaugh on the court, thus assuring a corrupt corporate majority, the Republicans would have dumped Trump by now. Unfortunately for them, they need to maintain the few remaining tatters of presidential legitimacy Trump possesses for them to get Kavanaugh confirmed.

But it’s costing them massively, since the American people, Republicans in particular, are beginning to realize that this isn’t a witch hunt or a librul conspiracy; this is real, and Trump’s position becomes less defensible by the day.

A lot of Republican Senators, even those in safe states, are wondering what the real costs may be of forcibly rubber-stamping a man to the highest court in the land by a president facing indictment for criminal conspiracy against the United States. For Republicans, the question is no longer, “How badly will we lose the mid-terms?”

They have to ask if they can survive at all as a party, or even a movement. They’ve bet all their political, ethical and moral legitimacy on this one last toss of the dice.

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