May 3, 2019: No Smoking Gun, The Wrong Lesson Learned, Hansel And Gretel

So there is no “smoking gun.” At least according to Robert Mueller. A careful reading of his report, even the summary suggests otherwise, but that's not the way it is being presented to the country. So what you say? Much ado about nothing? Not quite.

A careful reading of the Mueller report reveals that the Special Council didn't cite Disgustus and his minions for conspiracy against the United States—so called “collusion” with the Russians—because the evidence wasn't, in his opinion, sufficient to rise to that level. The report tells us that the reasons he reached that conclusion were that witnesses have lied to authorities, many of their communications were in encrypted messages, many destroyed, many witnesses plead the fifth amendment, and many witnesses are foreign nationals beyond the reach of federal authority. Additionally, Mueller tells us that his office did not pursue all reported leads relating to Russian connection.

One suspects that the Special Council, himself a life-long employee of the F.B.I, as well as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, were more interested in protecting the agency than dealing with the more pressing national emergency that is the tRUMP 'presidency'.

Anyone viewing this from the outside would use the standard established by the late Senator Sam Irvin at the Watergate hearings. “If it looks like a horse, smells like a horse, walks like a horse, and eats hay then we can reasonably reach the conclusion that it's a horse.” So it is here.

Many have commented that another prosecutor could reach other conclusions based on the evidence. Mueller chose to apply the most stringent standards. The 'smoking gun'. In this case, a record of conversation or written understanding between the Russians and tRUMP establishing conspiracy, the absence of which leads to no charges.

But do we need a smoking gun?

Elizabeth Drew, long a reporter for The New Yorker who reported on the Watergate Scandal as it unfolded and who has written a book about it, tells us that our collective memory is faulty.

“Many people are getting their history and their definition of impeachment wrong by asserting that what forced Nixon to resign was the revelation in August, 1974, very late in the process, of a recording of his trying to obstruct Justice. This leads them to the erroneous conclusion that it's essential to find a 'smoking gun' to impeach a president.

“In fact, even before that tape was released, the House Judiciary Committee had already approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon. It was widely understood that opinion had moved so strongly against him that the House would approve those articles and the Senate would vote to convict Nixon on those grounds. The tape simply hastened the finale

“By far the most important article of impeachment approved by the House committee on a bipartisan basis was Article II, which called for the punishment of Nixon for abusing presidential power by using executive agencies (such as the Internal Revenue Service) to punish his enemies and for failing to uphold the oat of office to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.' It also said, significantly, that a president could be held accountable for a pattern of abusive or even illegal behavior by his aides.” (1)

Then there is obstruction of justice. Mueller cites at least ten instances of obstruction but did not indict Disgustus because of Department of Justice guidelines barring the indictment of a sitting president.

Disgustus is, of course, doing a victory dance, claiming “no collusion, no obstruction” citing attorney general Barr's summary of 'no collusion' and making the completely bogus claim that since where was no 'crime' there can be no obstruction. But that's not what the report says.

Mueller has, like Hansel and Gretel, left many bread-crumbs to follow, in effect begging the Congress to act. “Mr. Mueller did not say that there had been no collusion, or conspiracy, or whatever between the Russian oligarchs and intelligence agents with ties to the Kremlin and members of the Trump campaign”, writes Drew, “in fact he traced considerable traffic, or what he called 'links' and 'contacts,' between them in some detail.” (2) Mueller simply hadn't found “some sort of specific agreement” between them. (3) The so-called smoking gun.

Mueller has yet to speak publicly about his report, but one suspects that he concluded that for legal action to be taken it must be preceded by the political remedy of impeachment. That was certainly the case when it came to obstruction of justice and, lacking the 'smoking gun' Mueller more than likely concluded that the evidence, such as it has been developed, is sufficient to warrant, at a minimum, a thorough congressional investigation.

There are many question hanging in the air. Why did he not follow Leon Jaworski's example of naming tRUMP and “unindicted co-conspirator”. Why did he not cite the tRUMP larvae for lying to Congress? These and other considerations beg the question: was he protecting his agency from the sure to follow wrath of Disgustus and his congressional enablers?

What is certain is that Disgustus has long since me the standards of impeachment and removal from office. What Drew is reminding us is that we need no smoking gun, no universally demonstrable 'proof' that he committed some heinous felony. As noted in many previous posts, impeachment is a political remedy to political crime—indeed the worst form of crime—assault against the greater society, the nation, the polis.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been working hard to keep her caucus in line, saying that talk of impeachment is premature and that, in any case, an election is around the corner. Then there is the “precedent” that to impeach and fail to convict in the Senate would set a terrible precedent.

But, as Elizabeth Drew points out, “Madison and Hamilton didn't say anything about holding off on impeachment because it would be politically risky. It's hard to imagine they'd put political convenience on the same footing as the security of the constitution. And the Democrats who prefer to substitute the 2020 election for an impeachment fight don't appear to have considered the implications if Mr. Trump were to win:Would that not condone his constitutional abuses and encourage his authoritarian instincts?” (4)

More than that, would not failure to impeach whether Disgustus wins or loses the next election, not set the awful precedent that there indeed must be some smoking gun in order to act?

We already have an attorney general who tells the House Judiciary Committee with a straight face that if the president thinks he is innocent that he can then close down any investigation, no matter what the evidence to the contrary may be, into his conduct.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison

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1. Drew, Elizabeth. “The Danger in Not Impeaching” The New York Times. Friday, April 26, 2019. Page A27
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Ibid

April 4, 2018: Finger In The Dike, My Roy Cohn, A Simple Stooge

“Our Caesar Disgustus does not hold a candle to Benedict Arnold. He has neither the courage nor the integrity.”

             ---from The Quotations of Chairman Joe

The Washington Post reported this evening that investigators working for Robert Mueller are upset over attorney general William Barr's characterizations of their report. They are not only upset about the fashion in which our Caesar Disgustus has further mischaracterized the findings as a “total exoneration,” but the way “he and his allies began wielding Barr's summary as a political cudgel to dismiss not just Mueller's work but any future investigations into the president's conduct.” (1)

The Post quoted a source close to the investigation as saying “It was more acute than Barr suggested. ” implying that the content of the material is much more damaging—especially concerning obstruction of justice, than Barr would have us believe.

The report is said to be in the neighborhood of 400 pages in length with indices and other appendages attached. The full report could well extend to several hundred pages more. Further, as reported this evening on MSNBC, the Mueller team had written summaries for each section of the report that were carefully crafted so that they could be immediately released to the Congress and the public. The team was dismayed to find that Barr had stepped in and put his paws all over the summaries, reducing them to a mere caricature of their content and import.

Caesar Disgustus has groused from the beginning that he needs his Roy Cohn—the mafia attorney best known for creating the stench behind the Joe McCarthy hearings. Disgustus is forever bellowing “where's my Roy Cohn”, as he struggles to keep a finger in the dike and hold off inevitable submersion. What he means, of course, is that he wants someone to protect him—for protection he needs—from inevitable discovery, prosecution and imprisonment. That's why he fired Jeff Sessions, and that's why he hired William Barr.

Barr is proving himself to be precisely the political hack that Disgustus will use to obstruct the release of the findings and, hopefully, ward off disaster. Barr had written, as a resume for the job, a 19 page opinion in which he held that the president cannot inherently commit obstruction of justice. It was this a priori reasoning that led those involved in the investigation, according to some commentators on MSNBC, to conclude that Barr simply imposed his rather curious, singular and self-serving interpretations concerning presidential power upon a document whose conclusions he knew the president and the country—for different reasons—would find repulsive.

Barr, as noted previously in these columns, is good at this. It seems that this is his calling in life. Previously he had penned the pardons of six principles in the Iran-Contra Scandal, including former Defense Secretary Weinberger and former national security adviser McFarlane. With those pardons, the tragic story of high crimes in the Reagan-Bush years were effectively put to rest.

The Democrats, and some Republicans, are having none of it. Speaker Pelosi, whose chamber voted 420-0 to release the report, is demanding the full release. But Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell, both of whom recipients of Russian campaign contributions, have prevented the Senate from taking up and voting on the House resolution.

Let there be no mistake: Barr is a political hack, the go-to guy to cover up the mess. He has a lot of work to do.

As we speak, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is planning to supeanoa the records and, perhaps, Barr, Mueller and all the rest. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is making similar demands to the IRS in order to get the tax returns of our Caesar Disgustus before the Congress and the American people—and to find out if there ever was an audit. Similarly, the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees, because the nation needs to know if our 'president' is a crook.

Of course, we know he is a crook. But we need to also plunge the level of involvement with the Russians in the last campaign. We have to know if Disgustus is 'compromised', and to get to the bottom of this will require months if not years of further examination.

We need to know why Mueller did not indict tRUMP larvae for lying to Congress. We need to know why the investigation stopped short of accusing the 'president' of obstruction. Was it because of lack of evidence or did Mueller simply conclude that following DOJ guidelines he could not indict a sitting president and so, as we did in Watergate, the special council simply turned the evidence over to the House of Representatives so that the House would indict—as they did with Nixon—through articles of impeachment. This does not, exonerate Disgustus.

And, Mueller may have been reluctant to charge the 'president' with conspiracy against the United States because the evidence—because of the obstruction of justice—was not forthcoming. We don't know, we need to see the report.

It has been observed in these columns that, in the end, the best defense that Caesar Disgustus can mount is that he is too stupid, too ignorant and too incompetent to be a knowing Russian asset.

What the report allegedly does say is that tRUMP and his campaign were manipulated by a sophisticated foreign intelligence operation. Disgustus is, therefore, not exonerated but merely reduced in stature from being a full-blown traitor to being a simple stooge.

It makes sense. Disgustus has not the courage to commit fully grown treason. No, sgt. 'Bone Spurs' cannot be relied upon to do something so courageous. It makes much more sense, in light of his personal history, that he was simply manipulated; becoming not, like Benedict Arnold, a champion of perdition but merely Putin's “useful idiot.”

Let that sink in: our Caesar Disgustus does not hold a candle to Benedict Arnold. He has neither courage nor the integrity.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”.

Impeach and Imprison

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1. Parker, Ashley. Nakashima, Ellen Barrett, Devlin. Leonnig, Carol D. “Potentially damaging information in Mueller report ushers in new political fight” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/potentially-damaging-information-in-mueller-report-ushers-in-new-political-fight/2019

March 27, 2019: Three Word Refrain, Unanswered Questions, If. Fucking. Only.

Yahoo news reports today that Monica Lewinski, the subject of the Bill Clinton impeachment, responded with a tart reply.

Lewinski was“responding to a law professor's comparison of Mueller's still-confidential report on the ties between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government to the 1998 release of the Starr Report...On Sunday, Barr issued a four-page summary of Mueller's report, stating that Mueller did not find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia...

“Imagine if the Starr Report had been provided only to President Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, who then read it privately and published a 4-page letter based on her private reading stating her conclusion that President Clinton committed no crimes,' Orin Kerr, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, tweeted Tuesday Evening'”.

“Lewinsky retweeted Kerr later that evening with a three word refrain: if.fucking.only” (1)

Ken Starr, now a professor at large teaching at Pepperdine University had made a pig's breakfast of the proceedings, and a mockery of justice. Originally called into being to probe the already exhaustively probed “Whitewater” affair—a real estate venture gone off the rails back in Arkansas as the Clinton's were on the political rise, Starr's inquiry found itself sucked down the drain of tawdry sexual scandal that not only exceeded its mandate but about which the country could have cared less. It was, after all, consensual sex among adults and who, after all, would not want to be blown by one so attractive? Nevertheless Starr treated us to all the pornographically titillating details, dragging the young intern through the mud, savaging her reputation. She has spent the rest of her life living the aftermath.

But then, to the ReSCUMlickans everything—including the most personal—are fair game as long as it serves their jaded political interest.

Yes, if only...If only Starr had exercised reasonable adult judgment. How much less painful would her life be?

But the question presents itself to the nation as a whole, because in the process of violating all sorts of norms...from reporting on and seeking criminal indictment on matters surrounding the sex life of presidents—to publishing grand jury testimony—to requiring a president sit before a camera and testify under oath—all novel inventions by Starr, the scandal has left a legacy that has paralyzed the nation. A remedy—the Special Counsel appointed by Congress and reporting to Congress—was abused and then destroyed by Ken Starr. It has been replaced by a process in which probes into presidential iniquity are conducted not by independent counsel but by the Justice Department and report not to Congress but the Attorney General. The result is that no matter what Mueller reports the political apparatchiks will have their finger prints all over the findings, destroying the credibility of the effort.

The Starr probe served to be such a fiasco that lessons learned by the “generation of swine”--that malignant generation currently clinging to the last breath of power—are not the lessons of Watergate, but the lessons of the Lewinski affair. Long before Mueller submitted his report the Democratic leadership—as has been discussed here in previous columns—found itself reluctant to even begin impeachment hearings. The reason is that when the scum did it to Clinton it backfired, Clinton's popularity only rose as a consequence.

I think that's a fair assessment if you are only considering the Stormy Daniels affair. This inquiry, like the Lewinski mess, is unrelated and tangential at best to the serious high crimes committed by the scum now occupying the Oval Office. And it has been and will continue to be treated accordingly. That tRUMP has been, in effect, named as an 'unindicted co-conspirator' in the Daniels' cover-up has been and will be met with a collective yawn by the nation at large. After all, who cares who the swine is porking?

But the press, always mesmerized by tits and ass, has pressed the case; for there is money to be made in appealing to the prurient interest. Mesmerized by silicone instead of violated innocence, our Disgustus, as his predecessor, will dance free. The difference is that instead of a playboy we are confronted with the most corrupt, mendacious and criminal cabal ever to seize power in the United States. We simply cannot move on. Serious evidence of money laundering, tax evasion, bank and insurance fraud, racketeering, obstruction of justice, violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution and campaign finance violations remain, as well as serious questions concerning the intersection of private business dealings with subsequent alterations in U.S. foreign policy. There are, simply put, too many unanswered questions.

Currently, the prevailing wisdom is to move on. Concentrate on policy, report on the outrages in every department, the corruption, the policy changes. Perhaps. But the question remains: if impeachment and removal were not intended for tRUMP, then who?

No! It is a mistake to gloss this over. To gloss this over is to render this attempt at 'justice' as fake as Stormy Daniels' tits, to most, just as mesmerizing. It is, perhaps, the ultimate diminution. The fact that the Democrats have not passed a resolution in the House charging the Committee on the Judiciary to begin hearings regarding the possible impeachment of this swine is an outrage. It has been nearly three months and we have had only one public airing—that of Michael Cohen and two of the three appearances by tRUMP's former personal attorney have been in secret sessions. This simply won't do.

It is right and proper, as the House voted 430-0 last week to do, to make the report immediately available to the Congress. It is right and proper that the Congress—not the attorney general who was appointed for just this role—to then redact information regarding ongoing investigations and release as much as possible. It is then the responsibility of those we elected and who have taken the oath to defend and protect the constitution of this country to use the probe to begin full public hearings.

What the SCUM did with Clinton was take the report, draw up articles of impeachment and, without hearings, indict the president and put the question before the Senate. The experience drawn from the first full-blown experiment with impeachments conducted by the 'generation of swine' is that this pig's breakfast is not an acceptable outcome, and the conclusions drawn from the experience are just as erroneous.

No! We need full hearings. It was the hearings that produced John Dean. It was during an open Congressional hearing that Alexander Butterfield told the nation about the existence of the Nixon taping system. It was the hearings that fleshed out the details and it was the hearings that prepared the nation to remove the swine.

But the 'Boomers', the “Generation of Swine” learn nothing. Experience is powerless to instruct. If only they had done it right. If only now we do it right. If. Fucking. Only.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison.

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1. https://www.yahoo.com/news/monica-lewinsky-sounds-off-on-the-mueller-report-172736648.html