Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[hrothgar]

Not sure whether Mueller or Trump is the one who buried the other two SARs

 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/missing-files-motivated-the-leak-of-michael-cohens-financial-records

 

If this was done at the behest of Trump or one of his cronies...

[Winstonm]

Treasury seems to lose a lot of paper...

 

Wall Street Journal:

 

By Richard Rubin

Sept. 28, 2017 6:41 p.m. ET

25 COMMENTS

WASHINGTON—The Treasury Department has taken down a 2012 economic analysis that contradicts Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s argument that workers would benefit the most from a corporate income tax cut.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-removes-paper-at-odds-with-mnuchins-take-on-corporate-tax-cuts-winners-1506638463

[y66]

From Gardiner Harris' NYT story about Rex Tillerson's commencement speech at VMI in Lexington, Virginia:

 

Former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson warned on Wednesday that American democracy was threatened by a growing “crisis of ethics and integrity.”

 

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom,” he said in a commencement address at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va.

 

“When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth even on what may seem the most trivial matters, we go wobbly on America,” he said.

The dude abides, for a day anyway, which is a start.

[hrothgar]

5 USC App. 4 §§101(a), (f)(1), 102(a)(4) & 104(a)(2)(B) make it a federal crime for the president to knowingly and willfully file a financial disclosure that fails to report a liability of more than $10,000 owed to a creditor.

[Winstonm]

Consolidating information from the Daily Beast:

 

A) On the day he arranged the meeting the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, Trump Jr. placed two calls to blocked numbers. After the meeting ended without the promised dirt, Trump Jr. placed another call to a blocked number.

 

B) The phone calls began on June 6, 2016. That morning, Trump Jr. received an email from Rob Goldstone, music producer for Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov. Goldstone wrote that the Kremlin “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary” and Trump Jr. should talk to Emin to arrange a meeting to obtain it.

 

C) Minutes after speaking to Emin, Trump Jr. placed a four-minute call to a blocked number.

 

D) Minutes later, Trump called Emin again, scheduled the meeting for June 9, and then placed another call to a blocked number that lasted 11 minutes.

 

E) Two days later, candidate Trump announced he would give a “major speech” the following week where “we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.”

 

F) The following day, June 9, Trump Jr. met Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower where she alleged Democratic donors stole money from Russia.

 

E) After the meeting ended without the promised dirt, Trump Jr. had a three-minute call with a blocked number.

 

F) Trump’s promised speech on the Clintons never happened.

 

G) When asked if his father used a blocked number on any phone, Trump Jr. told the committee: “I don’t know.” Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, on the other hand, testified that Trump’s “primary residence has a blocked [phone] line.”

 

Hey, Mr. Mueller,

Can you help me make this call?

The number on the matchbook is old and faded

He's livin' without friends

and his best third wife again

a woman that he never knew from a country he hated

[johnu]

G) When asked if his father used a blocked number on any phone, Trump Jr. told the committee: “I don’t know.” Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, on the other hand, testified that Trump’s “primary residence has a blocked [phone] line.”

 

This is very unfair to Don Jr. He probably barely knows Don Sr and probably doesn't even know if Don Sr owns a phone or where he lives and works. Is he supposed to know these things about anybody in the country?

 

I know that I frequently call blocked numbers without knowing why I called them and then talk for minutes without knowing who I am talking to. Doesn't everybody do this?

[Winstonm]

 

I know that I frequently call blocked numbers without knowing why I called them and then talk for minutes without knowing who I am talking to. Doesn't everybody do this?

 

I don't remember.

[Winstonm]

It used to be called the "protection racket".

 

Associated Press LOLITA C. BALDOR and ZEKE MILLER, Associated Press 7 hours ago

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump laid out a stark choice for North Korea's Kim Jong Un ahead of their planned summit next month: Abandon nuclear weapons and be rewarded with "protections," or risk being overthrown and possible death if the arsenal remains.

 

Don Trumpeone will make him an offer he can't refuse.

[y66]

From Does Calling Out Racism Change Anyone’s Mind? by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub at NYT:

 

When it comes to racism, should the rule be “see something, say something”? Or, in these fraught and polarized times, could that be counterproductive, causing a backlash that makes people double down on the language or behavior in question?

 

Obviously there are many reasons to talk about racism when you see it. You might want to distance yourself from the statement or act in question. Or to demonstrate solidarity with its targets.

 

But often, people criticize an act or statement of implicit racism because they want to change minds: to draw attention to the racism in order to prevent it happening again in the future, or to convince others to distance themselves from it.

 

But does that work? Or does it just make people feel defensive, and therefore unwilling to listen to the critique at all?

 

That question has been coming up pretty frequently in the conversations and research we follow. We thought it might be helpful to round up a few key takeaways from some of the experts we’ve spoken to.

 

The bottom line: while there’s no evidence that calling out racism pushes people into defensively agreeing with racist views, the evidence on whether, and when, it’s possible to change people’s minds is mixed and very nuanced.

More ..

[y66]

From How Baby Boomers Broke America by Stephen Brill at Time:

 

Lately, most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, have been asking themselves some version of the same question: How did we get here? How did the world’s greatest democracy and economy become a land of crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government?

 

As I tried to find the answer over the past two years, I discovered a recurring irony. About five decades ago, the core values that make America great began to bring America down. The First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy. America’s rightly celebrated dedication to due process was used as an instrument to block government from enforcing job-safety rules, holding corporate criminals accountable and otherwise protecting the unprotected. Election reforms meant to enhance democracy wound up undercutting democracy. Ingenious financial and legal engineering turned our economy from an engine of long-term growth and shared prosperity into a casino with only a few big winners.

 

These distinctly American ideas became the often unintended instruments for splitting the country into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected overmatched, overran and paralyzed the government. The unprotected were left even further behind. And in many cases, the work was done by a generation of smart, hungry strivers who benefited from one of the most American values of all: meritocracy.

 

This is not to say that all is rotten in the United States. There are more opportunities available today for women, nonwhites and other minorities than ever. There are miracles happening daily in the nation’s laboratories, on the campuses of its world-class colleges and universities, in the offices of companies creating software for robots and medical diagnostics, in concert halls and on Broadway stages, and at joyous ceremonies swearing in proud new citizens.

 

Yet key measures of the nation’s public engagement, satisfaction and confidence – voter turnout, knowledge of public-policy issues, faith that the next generation will fare better than the current one, and respect for basic institutions, especially the government – are far below what they were 50 years ago, and in many cases have reached near historic lows.

 

It is difficult to argue that the cynicism is misplaced. From matters small – there are an average of 657 water-main breaks a day, for example – to large, it is clear that the country has gone into a tailspin over the last half-century, when John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier was about seizing the future, not trying to survive the present.

 

For too many, the present is hard enough. Income inequality has soared: inflation-adjusted middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, while earnings of the top 1% have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008 – which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings and jobs – was reserved almost exclusively for the wealthiest. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99% saw an uptick of less than half of 1%. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.

 

Meanwhile, the celebrated American economic-mobility engine is sputtering. For adults in their 30s, the chance of earning more than their parents dropped to 50% from 90% just two generations earlier. The American middle class, once an aspirational model for the world, is no longer the world’s richest.

 

Most Americans with average incomes have been left to fend for themselves, often at jobs where automation, outsourcing, the decline of union protection and the boss’s obsession with squeezing out every penny of short-term profit have eroded any sense of security. In 2017, household debt had grown higher than the peak reached in 2008 before the crash, with student and automobile loans staking growing claims on family paychecks.

 

Although the U.S. remains the world’s richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), behind only Turkey and Israel. Nearly 1 in 5 American children lives in a household that the government classifies as “food insecure,” meaning they are without “access to enough food for active, healthy living.”

 

Beyond that, too few basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air-traffic control system is more than 25 years behind its original schedule. The power grid, roads and rails are crumbling, pushing the U.S. far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K-12 education per capita than most other developed countries, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse globally. Among the 35 OECD countries, American children rank 30th in math proficiency and 19th in science.

 

American politicians talk about “American exceptionalism” so habitually that it should have its own key on their speechwriters’ laptops. Is this the exceptionalism they have in mind?

 

Perhaps they should look at their own performance, which is best described as pathetic. Congress has not passed a comprehensive budget on time without omnibus bills since 1994. There are more than 20 registered lobbyists for every member of Congress. Most are deployed to block anything that would tax, regulate or otherwise threaten a deep-pocketed client.

 

Indeed, money has come to dominate everything so completely that the people we send to D.C. to represent us have been reduced to begging on the phone for campaign cash up to five hours a day and spending their evenings taking checks at fundraisers organized by those swarming lobbyists. A gerrymandering process has rigged easy wins for most of them, as long as they fend off primary challengers–which ensures that they will gravitate toward the special-interest positions of their donors and their party’s base, while racking up mounting deficits to pay for goods and services that cost more than budgeted, rarely work as promised and are seldom delivered on time.

 

...

 

It seems like a grim story. Except that the story isn’t over. During the past two years, as I have discovered the people and forces behind the 50-year U.S. tailspin, I have also discovered that in every arena the meritocrats commandeered there are now equally talented, equally driven achievers who have grown so disgusted by what they see that they are pushing back.

 

From Baruch College in Manhattan to the University of California, Irvine, more colleges are working to break down the barriers of the newly entrenched meritocracy. Elite Eastern institutions such as Amherst, Vassar and Princeton are using aggressive outreach campaigns to attract applicants who might otherwise be unaware of the schools’ generous financial-aid packages.

 

Entrepreneurs like Jukay Hsu, a Harvard-educated Iraq War veteran who runs a nonprofit called C4Q out of a converted zipper factory in Queens, are making eye-opening progress with training programs aimed at lifting those displaced by automation or trade back into middle-class software-engineering jobs. “Some of the smartest, hardest-working people I’ve ever met were soldiers who didn’t graduate from college,” says Hsu. (Disclosure: I am an uncompensated board member of C4Q.)

 

Even Washington is poised to benefit from the new wave of achievers. Issue One, a nonprofit ensconced in an office on lobbyists’ row on K Street, is fighting for campaign-finance reforms and pushing legislation that would limit the influence of lobbyists by reining in their checkbooks. The group is supported by a growing band of disillusioned politicians from both parties. Better Markets, a well-funded lobbying organization that squares off against the usual lobbyists and is filled with people whose meritocracy credentials match those of their adversaries, is going after continuing abuses and lack of accountability on Wall Street. Two other organizations, the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Partnership for Public Service, are preparing blueprints for civil-service reform, tax reform, better budgeting and contracting, and infrastructure investment–all of which can attract bipartisan support if and when our elected officials finally get pushed to act.

 

Although their work is often frustrating, the worsening status quo seems to energize those who are pushing back. “My kid complained the other day that he still couldn’t play the violin, even though he’d been practicing for two days,” says Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. “Well, yeah, that’s true, but you have to keep at it. Persistence is an underrated virtue.”

 

Stier and the others believe that the country will overrun the lobbyists and cross over the moats when enough Americans see that we need leaders who are prepared and intelligent, who can channel our frustration rather than exploit it, and who can unite the middle class and the poor rather than divide them. They are certain that when the country’s breakdown touches enough people directly and causes enough damage, the officeholders who depend on those people for their jobs will be forced to act.

 

The new achievers are doing what they do not because they are gluttons for frustration, but because they believe that America can be put back on the right course. They are laying the groundwork for the feeling of disgust to be channeled into a restoration.

[Winstonm]

Here is a comprehensive list of everything Don Jr. claims he doesn’t know, in his own words (with some partial quotes), regarding his 2016 meeting with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and an unclear number of Russians. There are 216 items in total.

[Winstonm]

This disgrace needs to be removed from office:

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

President Trump “personally pushed” the U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to “double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages,” sources told The Washington Post. Brennan has reportedly resisted Trump’s requests in various White House meetings and attempted to explain to the president the “bound by contracts and must be reviewed by a regulatory commission” and the “current arrangement with Amazon was beneficial for the Postal Service.” Trump has also met with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, and Domestic Policy Council Director Andrew Bremberg about “Amazon’s business practices.” This comes after Trump has repeatedly criticized the company, with claims that it is being “subsidized by the Postal Service” and that the Post serves as its “chief lobbyist” and “tax shelter.” Some administration officials told the newspaper that “several of Trump’s attacks aimed at Amazon have come in response to articles in The Post that he didn’t like.” The Washington Post is owned by a holding company privately owned by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.

 

This is not some banana republic where a dictator gets to determine state actions against personal enemies. This action is deplorable, and anyone who supports this clown is deplorable, as well.

[johnu]

Here is a comprehensive list of everything Don Jr. claims he doesn’t know, in his own words (with some partial quotes), regarding his 2016 meeting with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and an unclear number of Russians. There are 216 items in total.

 

Can you imagine what Dennison's responses will be like if he ever has to answer questions before a grand jury?

 

Q. What is your name?

A. I don't know

 

Q. Are you the POTUS?

A I can't recall

 

Q. What are the names of your children?

A. I plead the 5th

 

.....

 

I hope Dennison will take his testimony prep time seriously as these answers will take weeks to learn so they can be properly matched to the questions.

[Al_U_Card]

This disgrace needs to be removed from office:

 

 

This is not some banana republic where a dictator gets to determine state actions against personal enemies. This action is deplorable, and anyone who supports this clown is deplorable, as well.

Obama empowered the EPA to use secret science and regulation to declare both particulates and CO2 as existential dangers and their removal as monetary justification for the destruction of the coal industry as well as other draconian measures. Was that okay because it was virtue signalling and agrees with a progressive, environmentalist (Marxist?) perspective?

[johnu]

This disgrace needs to be removed from office:

 

 

This is not some banana republic where a dictator gets to determine state actions against personal enemies. This action is deplorable, and anyone who supports this clown is deplorable, as well.

 

Not just deplorable, but it looks like an impeachable offense. The 2nd article of impeachment of Nixon was:

 

repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.

 

One of the primary reasons for article 2 was that Nixon sent an enemies list to the IRS commissioner to audit and harass people on the list.

[y66]

From Why Germans Are Getting Fed Up with America by Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg:

 

Germans have never liked U.S. President Donald Trump, and the backlash against his actions is stronger than ever after he pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal last week. But there’s a growing gap between the German establishment and German voters: The former may be anti-Trump, but the latter are increasingly anti-American.

 

German Chancellor Angel Merkel vented her frustration with Trump in a speech in the North Rhine-Westphalia city of Muenster on Friday, saying his Iran decision “undermines trust in the international order.” “If everybody does just what they want, that’s bad news for the world,” Merkel said.

 

This outburst coincided with one of the most provocative covers Germany’s highly respected weekly Der Spiegel ever published — an outstretched middle finger bearing Trump’s likeness, with the English caption, “Goodbye, Europe!” Spiegel’s editorial to go with this image called on Europe to join the anti-Trump resistance:

 

The West as we once knew it no longer exists. Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership. President Trump has adopted a tone that ignores 70 years of trust. He wants punitive tariffs and demands obedience. It is no longer a question as to whether Germany and Europe will take part in foreign military interventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is now about whether trans-Atlantic cooperation on economic, foreign and security policy even exists anymore. The answer: No.

These are strong words. But of course, there was nothing in Merkel’s speech about dissolving Germany’s alliance with the U.S., and the Spiegel editorial only calls on Europe to “begin preparing for a post-Trump America and seek to avoid provoking Washington until then.” The German establishment appears to believe that Trump is the problem and that the time-honored European approach — waiting for the problem to go away, as Europe is already doing with its conciliatory plan to stave off Trump’s threatened steel and aluminum tariffs — is the best bet.

 

Europe’s defense dependency on America also serves as a reality check. No matter how many times Merkel may tell Trump that Germany plans to raise its defense spending to the 2 percent of gross domestic product demanded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, her government’s current budget proposal only increases it to 1.29 percent of GDP in 2019 from 1.24 percent this year — and envisions a drop to 1.23 percent in 2022. “One must say, quite simply, that Europe alone isn’t strong enough to be the global peacekeeper,” Merkel said in Muenster.

 

German voters, however, don’t care so much about that. The Pew Research Center and Germany’s Koerber Stiftung recently compared Americans’ and Germans’ views of bilateral relations and found that while Americans say security and defense ties are the most important aspect of the relationship, to Germans economic ties and shared democratic values hold more significance.

 

In general, according to Pew Research and Koerber Stiftung, a majority of Germans — as opposed to only a small minority of Americans — appears to believe the U.S.-German relationship is “bad.” That share has increased since Trump’s election, but Germans were more negative about the U.S. than most Europeans even when Barack Obama — who was popular in Germany — was president.

 

Germany avoided being dragged into the Iraq war but couldn’t resist U.S. pressure to get involved in Afghanistan against most Germans’ will (now, a majority still wants the troops out of that country). Germans, who had done their best to shed their violent past, watched aghast as the U.S. used torture, extralegal detention and blanket surveillance — practices that were instituted under George W. Bush and partly survived in the Obama era.

 

Even before Trump settled in the White House, Germans began learning that the U.S. doesn’t handle economic and trade ties in the same ways as they do. The U.S. punitive attack on Volkswagen following its cheating on exhaust tests began under Obama, and it far exceeded anything the company had to face at home or anywhere in Europe; Trump’s complaints about the German auto industry merely continued the same line.

 

Now, another incomprehensible economic spectacle is unfolding parallel to Trump’s pressure on European steel and aluminum exporters. National Security Adviser John Bolton is threatening sanctions against European companies for dealing with Iran — and, at the same time, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is promising U.S. investment in North Korea if it denuclearizes. Wasn’t that what the Iran deal was about?

 

“So, American firms will soon be able to do business in North Korea, but not European ones in Iran,” commentator Mark Schieritz wrote on Twitter. Schieritz published a column in Zeit Online arguing that the U.S. was no longer a partner but a rival for Europe. He argued that time had come for Europe to confront the U.S. and respond to its “blackmail” in a tit-for-tat format — something the more sober Spiegel editorial didn’t advocate.

 

The cautious German elite, led by Merkel with her preference for compromise in any situation, has been holding back the anti-American sentiment so far. But that position may become untenable as Germans realize their country isn’t getting much out of being a U.S. ally. A majority can’t imagine a situation in which U.S. soldiers would need to defend Germany against aggression, and as the values gap with the U.S. grows and the economic benefits of partnership shrink, anti-Americanism can become an increasingly attractive political card to play.

 

Germany has done the U.S. a favor by not seeking a leadership role in the decades since its reunification. There’s no guarantee, however, that post-Merkel it won’t take a more assertive stance, using the European Union as a vehicle for its ambition. Even if a post-Trump U.S. government walks back some of his unilateralism, the mistrust that’s been building up for years won’t go away overnight.

[PassedOut]

From Why Germans Are Getting Fed Up with America by Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg:

Well, you know that the motto for lots of folks is, "Real men don't think things through." That's why those folks love Trump and hated Obama.

[Winstonm]

From Yahoo:

 

“Mueller already has everything that they have requested and the only point of a presidential interview is to set a perjury trap,” Hannity said in comments posted online by Media Matters. “This witch hunt is now a direct threat to this American republic. Mueller is causing irreparable damage to the rule of law in this country.”

 

I really would like to hear a genuine defense of this claim. How is it possible that following the law does irreparable damage to the law? How can a lawful inquiry threaten the American republic?

 

And as a first amendment question, isn't this a bit like yelling, "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire?

[y66]

From The Untold Story of Robert Mueller's Time in Combat by Garrett Graffe at Wired:

 

ONE DAY IN the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam.

 

After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam.

 

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

 

Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t be a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of combat, and later that year Mueller found himself assigned to a desk job at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he discovered something about himself: “I didn’t relish the US Marine Corps absent combat.”

 

So he headed to law school with the goal of serving his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He led the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became director of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and stayed on to become the bureau’s longest-serving director since J. Edgar Hoover.

 

And yet, throughout his five-decade career, that year of combat experience with the Marines has loomed large in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me worthy of leading other Marines,” he told me in a 2009 interview.

 

Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black comedy of Trump’s Washington, as an epic tale of diverging American elites: a story of two men—born just two years apart, raised in similar wealthy backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both star prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated—who now find themselves playing very different roles in a riveting national drama about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals—Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit.

 

Those divergent paths began with Vietnam, the conflict that tore the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960s. Despite having been educated at an elite private military academy, Donald Trump famously drew five draft deferments, including one for bone spurs in his feet. He would later joke, repeatedly, that his success at avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating numerous women in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

 

Mueller, for his part, not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to heal so he could serve. And he has said little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was leading the FBI through the catastrophe of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crushing stress, saying, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other times his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight home from an official international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early battles in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and observed, “Pretty accurate.”

 

His reticence is not unusual for the generation that served on the front lines of a war that the country never really embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d avoided talking about Vietnam until recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long conversation, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.”

 

Yet for almost all of them—Mueller included—Vietnam marked the primary formative experience of their lives. Nearly 50 years later, many Marine veterans who served in Mueller’s unit have email addresses that reference their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, ­PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even references Mutter’s Ridge, the area where Mueller first faced large-scale combat in December 1968.

 

The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of discipline and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marines taught him was to make his bed every day. I’d written a book about his time at the FBI and was by then familiar with his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I laughed at the time and said, “That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small daily gesture exemplifying follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it—do it,” he told me. “I’ve always made my bed and I’ve always shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve put money in the bank in terms of discipline.”

 

Mueller’s former Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls recalled how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little patience for subordinates who questioned his decisions. He expected his orders to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battlefield. In meetings with subordinates, Mueller had a habit of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide: “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.”

[johnu]

From Yahoo:

“Mueller already has everything that they have requested and the only point of a presidential interview is to set a perjury trap,” Hannity said in comments posted online by Media Matters. “This witch hunt is now a direct threat to this American republic. Mueller is causing irreparable damage to the rule of law in this country.”

 

When Hannity says the interview is a perjury trap, what he really means is that it is a self-incrimination trap if Dennison answers truthfully. It is only a perjury trap if Dennison is planning to lie. Hannity is obviously expecting Dennison to lie and commit perjury.

 

The obvious solution is for Dennison to plead the 5th amendment. Oh wait, Dennison has previously said, “The mob takes the Fifth, If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” when talking about a State Dept ee in the Clinton email debacle.

 

Of course, that 5th amendment ship has already sailed. During his deposition for his divorce from Ivana, he is reported to have claimed the 5th amendment 97 times.

[Winstonm]

Another layer of the onion is peeled back.

 

May 19, 2018

WASHINGTON — Three months before the 2016 election, a small group gathered at Trump Tower to meet with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. One was an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation. Another was an emissary for two wealthy Arab princes. The third was a Republican donor with a controversial past in the Middle East as a private security contractor.

 

The meeting was convened primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over the coming months — past the election and well into President Trump’s first year in office, according to several people with knowledge of their encounters.

 

Erik Prince, the private security contractor and the former head of Blackwater, arranged the meeting, which took place on Aug. 3, 2016. The emissary, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. that the crown princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president. The social media specialist, Joel Zamel, extolled his company’s ability to give an edge to a political campaign; by that time, the firm had already drawn up a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help elect Mr. Trump.

 

Source: NYT

[johnu]

Another layer of the onion is peeled back.

May 19, 2018

WASHINGTON — Three months before the 2016 election, a small group gathered at Trump Tower to meet with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. One was an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation. Another was an emissary for two wealthy Arab princes. The third was a Republican donor with a controversial past in the Middle East as a private security contractor.

 

The meeting was convened primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over the coming months — past the election and well into President Trump’s first year in office, according to several people with knowledge of their encounters.

 

Erik Prince, the private security contractor and the former head of Blackwater, arranged the meeting, which took place on Aug. 3, 2016. The emissary, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. that the crown princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president. The social media specialist, Joel Zamel, extolled his company’s ability to give an edge to a political campaign; by that time, the firm had already drawn up a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help elect Mr. Trump.

Source: NYT

 

The presence of Erik Prince and the UAE emissary has added interest. In January 2017, Erik Prince was meeting with UAE officials in the Seychelles and "accidentally" met with Russian oligarch and Putin associate, Kirill Dmitriev.

[barmar]

Not just deplorable, but it looks like an impeachable offense.

Bill Maher talked about this topic during his final rant last night.

 

Trump can commit all the impeachable offenses he wants, because he's totally safe from prosecution. If he's impeached, it will take a 2/3 vote of the Senate to convict him and remove him from office. And even if we get a blue wave in November, it won't be enough for Democrates to get enough seats to achieve that.

 

He also theorized on Trump ignoring Mueller's request for an interview. Mueller might then subpoena him, but how would that be enforced? It could go all the way to the Supreme Court, but they don't have any way to enforce their rulings, either.

[Winstonm]

Bill Maher talked about this topic during his final rant last night.

 

Trump can commit all the impeachable offenses he wants, because he's totally safe from prosecution. If he's impeached, it will take a 2/3 vote of the Senate to convict him and remove him from office. And even if we get a blue wave in November, it won't be enough for Democrates to get enough seats to achieve that.

 

He also theorized on Trump ignoring Mueller's request for an interview. Mueller might then subpoena him, but how would that be enforced? It could go all the way to the Supreme Court, but they don't have any way to enforce their rulings, either.

 

Which is why there has been talk of a Constitutional crisis.

[hrothgar]

Bill Maher talked about this topic during his final rant last night.

 

Trump can commit all the impeachable offenses he wants, because he's totally safe from prosecution. If he's impeached, it will take a 2/3 vote of the Senate to convict him and remove him from office. And even if we get a blue wave in November, it won't be enough for Democrates to get enough seats to achieve that.

 

He also theorized on Trump ignoring Mueller's request for an interview. Mueller might then subpoena him, but how would that be enforced? It could go all the way to the Supreme Court, but they don't have any way to enforce their rulings, either.

 

Support for Nixon within the Republican House and Senate was near absolute until one day it completely collapsed.

 

At some point in time, something will happen that fractures Republican support for Trump. For example, someone might consciously drive a wedge between Trump and his evangelical base.

 

Hypothetically, we might discover that that $1.6M payout for the playmate's abortion was to cover Trump rather than the RNC bigwig...

(You know, the playmate that looks just like Ivanka...)

 

That would probably be enough get the evangelicals thinking that President Pence might be a good change of pace.