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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#12401 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 10:02

 cherdano, on 2019-March-23, 22:33, said:

It is? Can you provide a link?


I don't have that link but I have this link to Lawfare that explains what it means that the probe has ended.

Quote

Having vested in an executive branch official the principal authority to investigate the president—having done so knowing that this official cannot indict the president, and thus knowing also that all he can do is “report” about him—the report becomes everything. It becomes the only mechanism by which you can figure out why the investigation is over.

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#12402 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 11:50

 Winstonm, on 2019-March-24, 10:02, said:

I don't have that link but I have this link to Lawfare that explains what it means that the probe has ended.

2 years of chasing down procedural miscreants (arguably Manafort is a "real" criminal in all senses of the word but most of his crimes would indict too many "friendlies" to be brought as charges) seems a lot. Starr took quite a while as did Jaworski et al. I guess it is the system more than its constituents.
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#12403 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 12:14

 Winstonm, on 2019-March-24, 10:02, said:

I don't have that link but I have this link to Lawfare that explains what it means that the probe has ended.




That is a very good article. Perhaps "very good"means that the author sees things in somewhat the same way as I do, but he knows more. Politics always has had and always will have some really ugly parts to it. In the 2016 election it seemed particularly ugly. Again it's true that I hadn't voted for the winner, but that's not the whole of it. I think I can distinguish between "I didn't vote for the guy" and "This is really ugly"..

So we will, I hope, learn more. Something about just how ugly it was, and, for that matter, just how ugly it wasn't. This is good, and I for one am very grateful to Mueller. And it is very important that the report be released as close to verbatim as possible. I am willing to allow for some brief blocked out items in the name of security if there is broad agreement from people of various political leanings that such redaction is absolutely needed, but it should be very little. An optimistic view is that we could all learn something useful here.

Ken
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#12404 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 13:24

 kenberg, on 2019-March-24, 12:14, said:

That is a very good article. Perhaps "very good"means that the author sees things in somewhat the same way as I do, but he knows more. Politics always has had and always will have some really ugly parts to it. In the 2016 election it seemed particularly ugly. Again it's true that I hadn't voted for the winner, but that's not the whole of it. I think I can distinguish between "I didn't vote for the guy" and "This is really ugly"..

So we will, I hope, learn more. Something about just how ugly it was, and, for that matter, just how ugly it wasn't. This is good, and I for one am very grateful to Mueller. And it is very important that the report be released as close to verbatim as possible. I am willing to allow for some brief blocked out items in the name of security if there is broad agreement from people of various political leanings that such redaction is absolutely needed, but it should be very little. An optimistic view is that we could all learn something useful here.


You won't get much cooperation for release from the right:

Quote

“I believe that we need to protect the innocent here, but to the extent that we cannot sacrifice national security interests and release as much information as possible, I certainly support that,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) told CNN.

“Typically, prosecutors do not release information that would be harmful to the innocent,” Meadows said. “We need to make sure that we protect the innocent here.”


There is such a vast gap between "innocence" and "unable or unwilling to prosecute" that it makes Meadows's claim ludicrous.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#12405 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 14:05

Leaving aside guilt or innocence, I just want to see what it says. Two years of work by serious investigators should not get buried, no matter what it shows or doesn't show. This applies to almost any inquiry about anything. I think this is the way to argue it. A great effort was made, we should see the results. Partisans can then take their partisan stands, I will start by seeing what was found.

We watched PBS for a bit on Friday night.. Basically it was
"I don't know what this means, what do you think it means?" "I'm not sure what it means, let's ask so and so what it means."
Etc.
We turned to some dumb recorded thing for a while, then turned it all off.

It's very difficult to say what a report means if we don't see the report.

Edit: As I wrote the above I was unaware of this
https://www.washingt...m=.3f49fbcfdab1
I give this a "so far so good" rating.

Ken
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#12406 User is offline   andrei 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 14:44

 cherdano, on 2019-March-23, 22:33, said:

It is? Can you provide a link?


Is this what you were looking for?
Kushner indicted
Don't argue with a fool. He has a rested brain
Before internet age you had a suspicion there are lots of "not-so-smart" people on the planet. Now you even know their names.
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#12407 User is online   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 15:19

 andrei, on 2019-March-24, 14:44, said:

Is this what you were looking for?
Kushner indicted


I was clearly wrong...
Alderaan delenda est
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#12408 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 15:21

 andrei, on 2019-March-24, 14:44, said:

Is this what you were looking for?
Kushner indicted

What's a Larouchie? Heheh ;)
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
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#12409 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 16:00

 hrothgar, on 2019-March-24, 15:19, said:

I was clearly wrong...

About that, about my being anti-semitic, about being a Larouchie, so, were you telling lies on purpose or.... right, right, good guys are allowed some "room" with the truth, whatever it may be.
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
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#12410 User is online   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 16:10

 Al_U_Card, on 2019-March-24, 16:00, said:

About that, about my being anti-semitic, about being a Larouchie, so, were you telling lies on purpose or.... right, right, good guys are allowed some "room" with the truth, whatever it may be.


Al, you openly admitted posting misleading and inaccurate information on a now deleted thread.

Almost all of your posts are nonsense.

I readily admit that I have gotten things wrong on occasions.
Unlike you, Andrei, and the like, I am mature enough to admit it
Alderaan delenda est
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#12411 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-March-24, 16:10

The braggarts do realize that there are still 6 investigations ongoing? Kushner, et al may not yet be out of the woods. Time will tell.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#12412 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 05:40

Matt Yglesias asks:

Quote

Would it have been so hard to make the headline BARR SAYS NO TRUMP-RUSSIA CONSPIRACY?

Posted Image
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#12413 User is online   hrothgar 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 06:14

 Winstonm, on 2019-March-24, 16:10, said:

The braggarts do realize that there are still 6 investigations ongoing? Kushner, et al may not yet be out of the woods. Time will tell.


I hope that you are correct.
I am feeling depressed this am. (Especially wrt the coverage I am seeing in the Times and the like)
Alderaan delenda est
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#12414 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 06:35

"What does it ["it"= Mueller Report] mean" seems to be the question of the day, here and elsewhere. I have a practical suggestion. It means that the Dems have to nominate someone for president and then explain to the voters why they should vote for their nominee. Of course, you might say. But I think there has been a not so subtle hope/expectation that the legal system would take care of this. The report would be sufficiently damning so that impeachment would readily follow. I never thought this likely. Leading up to the 2018 election I spoke against having Dems run on an impeachment platform. Now, Dems must accept that this will not happen. Sure, I can't predict the future with any more certainty than can anyone else, but it's past time to look at the probable future that there will be no impeachment and Trump will be running for re-election in 2020.
So: I voted for Clinton. Other people, not so very different from me, voted for Trump. Dems need to find a way to keep me voting for their candidate, and to convince enough 2016 Trump voters to change their minds. This has always been true, but the Mueller report puts it in plain sight.

No doubt the Mueller report has many other meanings, but the Dems are making a serious error if they do not put this meaning front and center.
Ken
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#12415 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 07:42

 Winstonm, on 2019-March-24, 16:10, said:

The braggarts do realize that there are still 6 investigations ongoing? Kushner, et al may not yet be out of the woods. Time will tell.

What is the over/under on the number of years that "investigations" into Trump and his "cohorts" will last? Imagine the carnage if he gets a second term! They'll be investigating his childhood sweethearts... and we know why this is coming about.

Meanwhile, if you have a couple of hours to listen to the last great American hero, it is worth it for the insight.
https://youtu.be/KJSnT0JaAhE
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
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#12416 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 10:41

 kenberg, on 2019-March-25, 06:35, said:

"What does it ["it"= Mueller Report] mean" seems to be the question of the day, here and elsewhere. I have a practical suggestion. It means that the Dems have to nominate someone for president and then explain to the voters why they should vote for their nominee. Of course, you might say. But I think there has been a not so subtle hope/expectation that the legal system would take care of this. The report would be sufficiently damning so that impeachment would readily follow. I never thought this likely. Leading up to the 2018 election I spoke against having Dems run on an impeachment platform. Now, Dems must accept that this will not happen. Sure, I can't predict the future with any more certainty than can anyone else, but it's past time to look at the probable future that there will be no impeachment and Trump will be running for re-election in 2020.
So: I voted for Clinton. Other people, not so very different from me, voted for Trump. Dems need to find a way to keep me voting for their candidate, and to convince enough 2016 Trump voters to change their minds. This has always been true, but the Mueller report puts it in plain sight.

No doubt the Mueller report has many other meanings, but the Dems are making a serious error if they do not put this meaning front and center.

I suspect a lot of people, not all Dems, were hoping Mueller would marshall sufficient evidence "rising to the level of a prosecutable crime" to make impeachment clear cut and would agree with your practical suggestion to put the impeachment hearings in mothballs and focus on defeating Trump, who is clearly unfit for office in the eyes of all thinking people and animals, at the polls.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#12417 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 10:56

 hrothgar, on 2019-March-25, 06:14, said:

I hope that you are correct.
I am feeling depressed this am. (Especially wrt the coverage I am seeing in the Times and the like)


I think Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare had this right the whole time. The Mueller probe was a counterintelligence probe rather than a criminal investigation. Many questions left unanswered go to that end rather than specific criminal charges. The only big charge that would have fit would have been conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Mueller stated he could not hind evidence that occurred.

The sleazy things that happened were more likely about business dealings - although Mueller apparently did not probe the possible quid pro quo of the Moscow Tower project and sanctions relief on Russia.

I also think Barr had a lot to do with the end of the investigation and some of the decisions. Barr's summary was quite lawyerly. Not being able to conclusively prove is much different than having a great deal of evidence of. It is the latter that Congress and the American people need to see. Keep a close eye on Manafort. If he is "rewarded" with a pardon, we will know he was the key piece of evidence that could not be turned. It's hard to convict the Don without a Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.

I appreciate your feelings, though. It feels as though we are now living in an American version of a Russian oligarchy who is in bed with the American Christian Taliban.

Hopefully, 2020 will show elections can still matter.

Edit: Speaking of Barr's sleight-of-hand, this is a good read:

Quote

In giving Trump the all-clear on obstruction charges, Barr appears not to have considered whether Trump obstructed the actual crime in question. He instead considered whether the president obstructed a different crime. This is the legal sleight of hand that has allowed Barr to proclaim that Trump will not be charged.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#12418 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 12:40

 kenberg, on 2019-March-25, 06:35, said:

"What does it ["it"= Mueller Report] mean" seems to be the question of the day, here and elsewhere. I have a practical suggestion. It means that the Dems have to nominate someone for president and then explain to the voters why they should vote for their nominee. Of course, you might say. But I think there has been a not so subtle hope/expectation that the legal system would take care of this. The report would be sufficiently damning so that impeachment would readily follow. I never thought this likely. Leading up to the 2018 election I spoke against having Dems run on an impeachment platform. Now, Dems must accept that this will not happen. Sure, I can't predict the future with any more certainty than can anyone else, but it's past time to look at the probable future that there will be no impeachment and Trump will be running for re-election in 2020.
So: I voted for Clinton. Other people, not so very different from me, voted for Trump. Dems need to find a way to keep me voting for their candidate, and to convince enough 2016 Trump voters to change their minds. This has always been true, but the Mueller report puts it in plain sight.

No doubt the Mueller report has many other meanings, but the Dems are making a serious error if they do not put this meaning front and center.

Given that the Democractic presisdential candidates have talked about nothing other than Trump, Trump, Trump and Russia and Trump, I can really understand your frustration and hope that they consider your advice and radically rethink their approach to the campaign.
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#12419 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 16:26

Mark Steyn calls it as it is:

"For two years, the prefatory "Russia" has been intended to give the word "investigation" more heft, to make it seem as if there was something more than let's-get-Trump-on-anything. But even the unlimited resources of a wretchedly corrupt federal justice system couldn't keep that going without something more than Michael Cohen's taxi medallions (only in America) and a few Russian troll farms, one of whom has amusingly decided to push back in court against Mueller and his showboating cronies.

Other than that, there are, as I said almost two years ago, no Russians in the Russia investigation - and what foreign "interference" with the 2016 election there was from Russia seems to have been amateur and minimal, unless you count MI6 spook Christopher Steele working his Moscow Rolodex on behalf of Hillary Clinton and her Deep State allies. There was, however, extensive domestic interference with the election, in that at the behest of the sitting administration the most powerful figures in the permanent bureaucracy set to work on a sophisticated surveillance operation against its political opposition: "Republics" in the Americas have been invariably prefaced by the qualifier "banana"; it just took Washington a little longer to sign up.

I'm tied up with trial preparation this weekend, but I don't really have much to say that I haven't said in the previous two years. We will see in the next few days whose version of these last three years prevails - mine or, say, John Brennan's. We begin in November 2016, on the morning after the election night before:

Mostly she was mad - mad that she'd lost and that the country would have to endure a Trump presidency... Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. 'She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,' this person said.

No problem, because oddly enough that was what virtually the entire leadership of the DOJ and FBI were planning anyway, and indeed had been working on for months. And one of the most idiotic features of "the peaceful transfer of power" gave them all the cover they needed:

During the stupid and anachronistic two-and-a-half-month electoral "transition", the outgoing Administration worked round the clock to de-legitimize and cripple their successors.

Thus Susan Rice and Samantha Power, neither of whom is Judi Dench in the Bond pics, began frantically "unmasking" hundreds and hundreds of surveilled individuals all the way up to high noon on inauguration day. The object was to turn an improper months-long investigation of the outgoing administration's political opponents into a years-long investigation of the incoming administration's non-existent "collusion" - a brilliantly chosen term because it has no legal meaning. So the same people who'd been running the Trump investigation ordered up a new set of business cards - and hey presto, welcome to the "Russia investigation":

It started in April 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination. The Hillary campaign and the DNC gave millions of dollars to Marc Elias, a Clinton lawyer, who in turn hired Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Why use Mr Elias as a cutout? Because Hillary and the DNC could then itemize the expense as "legal services" rather than list payments to Mr Steele, which would be in breach of federal law...

Steele's dossier was passed along to the FBI. It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an "FI" (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump's associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.
But that's all you need. The dossier is a remarkable thing. It self-regenerates and corroborates itself as it ricochets back and forth between corrupt bureaucrats, biddable hacks and rubber-stamp judges:

At the FISA court, the FBI, to bolster their reliance on the Steele dossier, pointed to newspaper stories appearing to corroborate aspects of it - even though, as he subsequently testified under oath at the Old Bailey, those stories were in fact fed to those reporters by Steele himself. Nevertheless, it works like a charm on gullible FISA judges. You take one thing and you make it two things. Or even better, you take nothing and you make it a thing: Here, from yesterday's letter by Senator Ron Johnson, are McCabe, Sally Yates and other FBI/DOJ honchos arranging for Comey to brief Trump on the Steele dossier for the sole purpose of giving CNN a news peg for leaking details about what's in it.

If you've ever been in the most piddling nothing civil suit in the District of Columbia, you'll know how quickly the paperwork piles up. Here a mere thirty-three pages of thinly sourced gossip was enough to support a three-year multi-gazillion-dollar investigation that destroyed the real lives of real people. It's thin stuff:

'Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate's campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.'

Evidently not as much as Christopher Steele 'both hated and feared' Donald Trump. Whoops, sorry, my mistake: Donald TRUMP. We want it to look all official and dossier-like, don't we? Christopher STEELE said that he was 'desperate that Donald Trump not get elected'. He told this to Bruce OHR, the now demoted Associate Deputy Attorney General - the one who failed to disclose that his wife was one of a mere seven employees of Fusion-GPS and the one charged with working on Trump oppo research for the aforementioned Hillary CLINTON.

But put that aside. The above paragraph would not be admissible in your county courthouse - because it's several degrees of hearsay. What it means is that a) Christopher STEELE was told by b) an unnamed Russian that c) an unnamed 'ethnic Russian close associate' of Donald TRUMP passed on to him that d) Paul MANAFORT was using e) Carter PAGE to 'co-operate' with 'the Russian leadership'. In a functioning justice system it would have as much value as you standing up in court and saying that Smith was told by Jones that Bloggs assures him that Christopher STEELE has sex with goats.

But we're in 'national security' court here, where due process is honored institutionally in the breach.

And so caps-lock DRIVEL by a misfit foreign spy was dignified by the number of DC A-listers willing to endorse it - DoJ bigshots, FBI counter-intelligence honchos, FISA judges, media grandees, and ultimately the straightest-shooting straight-arrow the G-men's collective quiver, "independent" counsel Robert Mueller:

Let me start with an immigrant's observation: My sweetly naïve understanding of an 'independent counsel' is that he should be 'independent'. For example, even in the presently desiccated condition of the Commonwealth, it's generally understood that, when you've got a problem and you want someone independent to investigate it, "independent" means outsider...

There isn't even the figleaf of 'independence' when you appoint a career swamp-dweller like Robert Mueller, a man who has relationships with every player in Washington going back decades. The parade of hacks infesting the cable shows to inform us solemnly that they've known Mueller for years and he's the very apotheosis of a straight shooter is, in fact, the strongest evidence of why he should never have been appointed: he's the insiders' insider. When Mueller decided to stage his pre-dawn swoop on Paul Manafort's bedroom, for example, he was raiding the home of a longtime client of his own law firm, WilmerHale...

My advice is that, whenever lifelong swampers assure us of the integrity of any individual, assume 'straight arrow' is Beltway-speak for 'slimey duplicitous permanent-state operator' and you can't go wrong.

Thus, the FBI has 35,000 employees. But oddly enough the same indispensable guy, Peter Strzok, gets assigned to run the Hillary investigation, and then the Trump investigation, and - surprise! - is immediately appointed by Mueller to the "Russia" investigation. And the straight-arrow eagle scouts immediately start throwing the book at everyone for the crime of misremembering to the FBI. Me fifteen years ago:

Martha [Stewart], it seems, will be going to jail for telling a lie. Not in court, not under oath, not perjury, but merely when the Feds came round to see her about a possible crime. They couldn't prove she'd committed a crime, so they nailed her for lying while chit-chatting to them about the non-crime. And for that they're prepared to destroy her company.

It's true that it's an offence to lie to the Feds. But, as my New Hampshire neighbours Tom and Scott, currently in my basement stretching out a little light carpentry job to the end of the winter, are the first to point out, the Feds lied to the public about Waco and Ruby Ridge (another bloodbath) for years. If the Feds can lie to the people, why can't the people lie to the Feds?

But even supposed rock-ribbed "constitutional conservatives" make no serious challenge to the iniquities of this "process crime" - "process" in this case being a coy euphemism for an utterly disgusting federal criminal justice system in which prosecutors win 97 per cent of their cases without ever bringing them to court. So Michael Flynn is broke and ruined, while the corruptocrats Comey and McCabe are working the talk-show sofas plugging their books.

And, notwithstanding Mueller closing up shop, the most disturbing questions remain: Forget the Russian trolls and Macedonian content farmers; this is a story not of foreign subversion of the election, but of domestic subversion of the election, by powerful figures able to reach out and entrap its marks at Cambridge conferences and London wine bars. In old-school banana republics, the coup happens quickly: "The rebels have seized control of the radio station," as the BBC's Africa bureaus used to announce every fortnight through the Sixties, and next thing you know this week's president-for-life is being carried out by the handles. But in America everything's more protracted and expensive. That, however, should not blind us to what happened: a cabal of Deep State bigwigs reverse-engineered a foreign cover for their own interference in self-government by the people. Show me the man and I'll show you the crime, boasted Beria. America's Berias aren't quite that good yet, but they're getting there:

This bloated pseudo-investigation is the very embodiment of Washington dysfunction: The less there is, the fewer real American lives it has any connection to, the further it recedes in the rear-view mirror, the more the Swamp is invested in it. They've already been on it for a year, and, if there were any "collusion", it would have been leaked months ago: If Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, the "Russia investigation" is a nullity wrapped in an absence inside a void, now shimmering in the black hole of the billable hours of fifteen lawyers and the expense accounts of a hundred FBI agents.

But tally-ho! The Great MacNuffin Hunt goes on - because in the Swamp all the most luxurious gravy trains are rear-view only. Putin must be laughing his head off. For the next three years they'll be so busy investigating the 2016 election, they won't even notice he's already moved on to stealing the 2020 election...

Trump Tweeted his way out of the Deep State's grip. I doubt any other Republican president would have proved so wily: It's not difficult to imagine President Jeb deciding to do the right thing and resign for the good of the country - without ever being able to figure what it was he'd done wrong. We have witnessed an extraordinary sustained attempted coup in which senior officials of the "justice" department shoot the breeze about wearing a wire to get the goods on the elected chief executive. If there are no consequences to that, it will happen again."
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
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#12420 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2019-March-25, 20:51

 cherdano, on 2019-March-25, 12:40, said:

Given that the Democractic presisdential candidates have talked about nothing other than Trump, Trump, Trump and Russia and Trump, I can really understand your frustration and hope that they consider your advice and radically rethink their approach to the campaign.


Thanks. I am not expecting a phone call !It's a tricky business. The investigation is/was serious, and it turned up some serious charges. But there is still an election next year. The election will be where much is decided.

Ken
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