Month: January 2019

Mueller probably doesn’t expect Stone’s cooperation

by digby

Former prosecutor Barbara McQuade makes the point that the charges against Roger Stone are serious in themselves, but then points to the evidence that says this is about much more than that:

While the indictment is a worthy pursuit on its own, it also hints at more charges to come. First, some of the language indicates that Mueller continues to explore coordination between the Trump campaign, WikiLeaks and Russia to interfere with the 2016 election.

Paragraph 2 notes that in June 2016, the Democratic National Committee “publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.” And paragraph 12 alleges that after WikiLeaks released some of the stolen emails in July, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information (WikiLeaks) had regarding the Clinton campaign.”

Together, these two paragraphs allege that when this directive was made, the Trump campaign knew that WikiLeaks was working with Russia. It further suggests that the directive was made by a high-level official in the campaign. Who would have the authority to direct a senior Trump campaign official but an even more senior Trump campaign official, or even Trump himself?

This allegation could support a charge against these individuals for violating campaign finance laws, which prohibit soliciting a “thing of value” from a foreign national. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an Australian native with Ecuadorian citizenship. If a campaign official asked Stone to obtain from WikiLeaks information that was harmful to Clinton, that information could be characterized as opposition research, certainly something campaigns regard as a “thing of value.” These allegations suggest that campaign officials could face criminal exposure for soliciting damaging emails about Clinton.

More 2016 fraud conspirators could be indicted

Second, the Stone indictment also suggests a basis for charging conspiracy to defraud the United States. The Stone indictment identifies two people only by description, “Person 1” and “Person 2,” identified as writer Jerome Corsi and radio host Randy Credico, respectively. This naming convention is used when the Department of Justice refers to people in an indictment without charging them. The fact that Corsi and Credico were not charged suggests that they are cooperating. If so, then they can provide Mueller with context behind some of the messages cited in the indictment.

For instance, the indictment alleges that Corsi and Stone discussed exploiting the released emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign by “suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke — neither he nor she well.” This kind of coordination could be evidence of their involvement in a conspiracy to defraud the United States by interfering with the fair administration of elections, the same theory that Mueller has used in the two indictments he has filed against Russians.

It is not hard to imagine a superseding indictment in the hacking case to add other individuals who participated in the conspiracy, defined by the special counsel not only as hacking into computers and stealing emails, but also staging “releases of stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Any Trump campaign members or associates who knowingly helped to coordinate the timing or messaging around the release of the emails could be guilty as co-conspirators.
Who else has lied to Congress?

Third, this indictment shows how Mueller regards lies to Congress. Mueller is likely scouring the transcripts of all other Trump associates who have testified before Congress, such as Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr., for statements inconsistent with other evidence. One other clue that suggests Mueller is looking at lies to Congress appears in the sentencing memorandum that Mueller filed in December in the case against Michael Cohen, in which Cohen admitted to lying to Congress about negotiations with Russia for a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The sentencing memo lists areas in which Cohen’s cooperation had been particularly valuable in the investigation, including information about “preparing and circulating his response to the congressional inquiries.” If Mueller finds that Cohen worked with other Trump associates to coordinate their lies, you can expect charges to follow.

Standing alone, the Stone indictment charges serious crimes. In context, it portends more charges to come.

As I’ve pointed out before, Nunes and the other Trump henchmen did these people no favors when they sent the message that lying was no problem (which they clearly did.) They could have immunized all them, as the congress did for Ollie North, which would have protected them. They didn’t. And now all these Trumpies who lied are facing legal problems.

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Supremely inappropriate

by digby

I mentioned earlier that Mulvaney is in way over his head as Trump’s chief of staff. Yep:

White House aide familiar with Ginni Thomas/Trump meeting depicted in NYT said it was “as wild as it was described.” Person says there are fewer controls to keep meetings like that from happening and that building feels “a lot like early 2017.”

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) January 27, 2019

This is the meeting they are talking about. Karoli at Crooks and Liars wrote it up:

The right-wing influence group “Groundswell” is alive, well, and thriving. Just last week, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas went to the White House and paid Donald J. Trump a visit, specifically to yell at him about transgender people and also to complain that he wasn’t appointing her friends fast enough.
It must be nice to have the ear of a Supreme Court Justice, eh? Just last week the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump’s transgender ban could be upheld while the case moved through the courts. I’m sure Ginni had nothing to do with that.

But it wasn’t just Ginni who marched into the Oval Office with a list of demands. She brought her posse with her, to demand that Trump immediately bend the knee to her demands, according to The New York Times.

Louie Gohmert’s Chief of Staff was one of the friends Ginni brought along, though she claimed Connie Hair was just a conservative columnist, nothing to see there at all. Nope, not a thing.

A central focus for Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas was administration appointments that they wanted made, and that they accused the president’s aides of blocking. People familiar with the situation indicated that the people Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas wanted hired were rejected for a range of reasons, and in at least one case, someone was offered a job and declined it because the position was not considered senior enough. Another complaint was that Ms. Thomas had not actually shared the full list of people to be hired, said those familiar with the meeting.

Others attending the meeting included Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for Security Policy who has advocated curtailing immigration and has repeatedly denounced Muslims, and Rosemary Jenks, who works for the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, according to the people familiar with the events.

If you’ve never heard of Groundswell, click this link.

The meeting came about because Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife had been over to the White House for a private dinner with the president.

That’s right. A Supreme Court justice, who is married to an important right-wing activist, was at a private dinner at the White House which led to another private meeting with a bunch of wingnut lunatics to complain that the Donald Trump wasn’t being looney enough. While the government was shut down.

Here’s the gist of the NY Times story, which I have to admit made me laugh. Here’s Trump in the middle of the shutdown, having demeaned himself to please the base on immigration being berated by a bunch of right wing extremists for failing them. Sometimes life is good:

For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.

It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.

A vocal conservative, Ms. Thomas has long been close to what had been the Republican Party’s fringes, and extremely outspoken against Democrats. Her activism has raised concerns of conflicts of interest for her husband, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the meeting, and Ms. Thomas did not respond to an email seeking comment.

During the meeting last Thursday in the Roosevelt Room, which was attended by about a half-dozen White House aides, one woman argued that women should not serve in the military because they had less muscle mass and lung capacity than men did, according to those familiar with the events. At another point, someone said that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court determined in 2015 was the law of the land, was harming the fabric of the United States. And another attendee was dismissive that sexual assault is pervasive in the military.

The meeting was arranged after months of delay, according to the three people. It came about after the Thomases had dinner with the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, the people said.

Ms. Thomas was an ardent supporter of Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, during the 2016 presidential primaries. But she shifted her support to Mr. Trump when he became the nominee and has forcefully denounced his political critics. [They didn’t mention that to trump and she portrayed herself as a big Trump supporter. lol.]
[…]
Ms. Thomas — whose group, Groundswell, was formed in 2013 to strategize against Democrats and the political left and meets weekly — joined others in prayer at the start of the meeting. Some members of the group prayed at different moments as the meeting continued. At one point, Mr. Trump pulled in his daughter Ivanka, a West Wing adviser, saying she would be beloved if she were serving a liberal president, instead of getting negative news coverage.

One attendee criticized Republican congressional leaders, saying they should be “tarred and feathered,” a person briefed on the meeting said. Mr. Trump defended the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, saying that they had held strong for nearly five weeks of a shutdown, and that it was not clear what else the attendees thought they could be doing.

Hahahahaha! Welcome to our world Trumpie!

Ms. Thomas, who was said to have opened the meeting by informing the assembled White House staff members that she feared being open because she did not trust the people there, has long been more conservative than her husband, and has often provoked controversy.

In 2011 she formed a government affairs firm called Liberty Consulting, which drew criticism for boasting on its website that Ms. Thomas would use her “experience and connections” to help clients.

More recently, she hired as an assistant a woman fired by the conservative group Turning Point USA for texting a colleague a year earlier that “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.” The woman, Crystal Clanton, was on the list of people Ms. Thomas’s group asked to have attend the meeting, the people familiar with the sit-down said.

She has also drawn criticism for sharing social media posts promoting conspiracy theories, including one suggesting that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros was working against Mr. Trump and that Democrats had committed voter fraud during last year’s midterm elections. Shortly before the elections, Ms. Thomas also shared a misleading post about the caravan of migrants traveling toward the United States.

She’s as nutty as they come.

I don’t think I need to mention that the Republicans would impeach any liberal Justice whose spouse worked as a far-left activist of this type. It’s simply bizarre that this is ok. It’s not that a spouse doesn’t have the right to have his or her own job. But this kind of political activism should be off limits.

But hey — they do what they want. Rules are for losers.

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When they’re right, they’re right

by digby

In which the Fox & Friends weekend crew declare that "no one watching this program cares" about Russia collusion, break down laughing. pic.twitter.com/2J5eeFIDl9— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) January 27, 2019

That’s actually an unusually perspicacious observation on their part. It’s not that Republicans don’t believe it happened. They do. They just don’t care that a foreign country interfered in the election to help their president and their party. And clearly they are happy their leaders are covering it up so they can do it again.

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QOTD: Paul Begala

by digby

On CNN’s State of the Union he said to give Trump credit — he hit the trifecta and it isn’t easy to do.

He united progressives, alienated moderates, and betrayed conservatives.

That may be his greatest accomplishment.

And by the way, according to his Chief of Staff, he’s prepared to do it again:

.@margbrennan: "Is the president really prepared to shut down the govt again in 3 weeks?"@MickMulvaneyOMB: "Uh, yeah. I think he actually is. Keep in mind he's willing to do whatever it takes to secure the border." pic.twitter.com/XndvphkzHG— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 27, 2019

Speaking of the Chief of staff, there are numerous reports that Mulvaney is doing a terrible job, even worse than John Kelly and Reince Priebus. But that’s probably unfiar. Nobody could do a good job when the boss is Trump.

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Cohen is scared for good reason


by digby

My Salon column today:

Another week ended with yet another indictment of a close Donald Trump associate. I’m not sure what number we’re up to by now, but the way it’s going we’ll be in double digits before too long.

Roger Stone has been a close friend and confidant of the current president for decades. He’s been known as a master of dirty tricks for even longer than that, having been involved in nefarious Republican political activities since the 1970s. With his arrest on Friday for obstruction of justice, witness tampering and lying to the authorities about his possible coordination with WikiLeaks, Stone provides the direct through-line between the corruption of Richard Nixon and the presidency of Donald Trump.

I wouldn’t expect him to “flip,” as mobsters and the president call it. You can be sure that Stone seeks to be the G. Gordon Liddy of the Russia scandal — the loyalist who never broke omertà. Liddy ended up doing more time than anyone.

Former Trump Organization executive vice president Michael Cohen, on the other hand, is doing everything he can to reinvent himself as this scandal’s John Dean, and it’s tying him up in knots. Nixon may have talked like a mob boss at times in private. But Trump’s background suggests that he is much closer to actually being one.

Cohen’s saga took yet another turn this past week as the president’s onetime personal lawyer withdrew his offer to testify before the House Oversight Committee as planned. He had reportedly been troubled by the veiled threats coming from the White House that “someone” should “look into” Cohen’s wife and her father, but then Cohen’s family became very upset after a CNN appearance by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s current lawyer, last Sunday in which he came right out and claimed that Cohen’s father-in-law is a criminal.

TAPPER: Trump has repeatedly called for an investigation of Michael Cohen’s father-in-law. By your own definition, isn’t that obstruction, or an attempt to intimidate a witness?

GIULIANI: “No, he’s defending himself. If you make that obstruction, I can’t defend anybody.” pic.twitter.com/ymvghDJeS0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 20, 2019

Most former prosecutors were appalled by Giuliani’s comments (and well as various others this week), since they seemed to provide yet another obvious example of obstruction of justice. Giuliani’s story about Cohen being afraid to testify about his father-in-law sounded like another way of telling Cohen to keep his mouth shut if he doesn’t want something to happen to his family. These suspicions of witness intimidation were not allayed by the president, who said this on Wednesday that Cohen has “been threatened by the truth. He doesn’t want to tell the truth from me or other of his clients. I assume he has other clients than me.”

Unless he’s talking about Sean Hannity and Elliott Broidy — who, according to the federal court, were Cohen’s only other clients — Trump is clearly suggesting that these “other clients” are the alleged organized crime figures associated with Cohen’s wife and in-laws.

Most of the analysis of these exchanges has indicated that Cohen was rattled by these threats because it sounded as if Trump were issuing an order to the Department of Justice, or perhaps his minions in the Senate, to go after Cohen’s family. Since Trump’s Attorney General-designate, William Barr, is on record saying he thinks it’s fine for a president to ask for investigations — and new Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham is champing at the bit to deliver some blowback on his patron’s behalf — that’s probably a legitimate worry.

Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, said late last week that he also fears vigilante justice, citing the August 2017 violence in Charlottesville as an example of the kind of people who might take it upon themselves to hurt Cohen or his family. I suspect that thought goes through the mind of anyone who is perceived as a threat to Trump, especially after all those mail bombs were sent to news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities last fall.

Davis brought up something else that I suspect is much more real, and which one can assume Cohen would take seriously. This was Thursday morning on MSNBC:

When the president of the United States, and it’s amazing I’m about to say this, calls somebody who tells the truth a “rat” and then praises people who are refusing to tell the truth, you are sending a signal of lawlessness from the highest office in our country. So Mr. Cohen is concerned that when you’re labeled a rat, and you’re in federal prison, there could be some danger from other people.

We have recently seen a high-profile example of that very thing happening to notorious mobster Whitey Bulger, who was beaten to death in prison because he was an FBI informant — that is, a “rat” — for decades. Plenty of people in federal prison might want to make a name for themselves by doing harm to Trump’s No. 1 enemy. More important, there are probably people in organized crime who might think that getting rid of Cohen would be doing a Trump a solid. Trump himself has done business with the mob for years, after all, both domestic and foreign. He’s practically one of them.

A tricky bit of magic
by Tom Sullivan

Like a difficult potion brewed at Hogwarts, synthesizing a conscience is tricky. A con man might have more luck playing at being president than a computer programmed by scientists might immitate a saint.

Even deciding what values to prioritize in a machine conscience, if one could model them, would speak volumes about our own. Honor, self-sacrifice, charity, wisdom? What values would a mass-market consumer product prioritize anyway?

Assuming all the external sensors function properly, driverless cars will have no problem with reaction time. What they do with it in a life-or-death emergency requiring a snap judgement is something else. But where there is consumer will, there will be a way. In 2016, Media Lab began collecting data via a Web site game called Moral Machine. You’re the driver. An emergency arises. Pedestrians are at risk. Do you select for killing the fewest pedestrians? Which ones? Do you kill yourself and your passengers instead? Do you do nothing?

The New Yorker examines the quest not for a car with a brain, but with a moral conscience:

The paper on the project was published in Nature, in October, 2018, and the results offer an unlikely window into people’s values around the globe. On the whole, players showed little preference between action and inaction, which the scientists found surprising. “From the philosophical . . . and legal perspective . . . this question is very important,” Shariff explained. But the players showed strong preferences for what kinds of people they hit. Those preferences were determined, in part, by where the players were from. Edmond Awad, a research fellow, and Sohan Dsouza, a graduate student working with Rahwan, noticed that the responses could be grouped into three large geographic “clusters”: the Western cluster, including North America and Western Europe; the Eastern cluster, which was a mix of East Asian and Islamic countries; and the Southern cluster, which was composed of Latin-American countries and a smattering of Francophone countries.

We should be wary of drawing broad conclusions from the geographical differences, particularly because about seventy per cent of the respondents were male college graduates. Still, the cultural differences were stark. Players in Eastern-cluster countries were more likely than those in the Western and Southern countries to kill a young person and spare an old person (represented, in the game, by a stooped figure holding a cane). Players in Southern countries were more likely to kill a fat person (a figure with a large stomach) and spare an athletic person (a figure that appeared mid-jog, wearing shorts and a sweatband). Players in countries with high economic inequality (for example, in Venezuela and Colombia) were more likely to spare a business executive (a figure walking briskly, holding a briefcase) than a homeless person (a hunched figure with a hat, a beard, and patches on his clothes). In countries where the rule of law is particularly strong—like Japan or Germany—people were more likely to kill jaywalkers than lawful pedestrians. But, even with these differences, universal patterns revealed themselves. Most players sacrificed individuals to save larger groups. Most players spared women over men. Dog-lovers will be happy to learn that dogs were more likely to be spared than cats. Human-lovers will be disturbed to learn that dogs were more likely to be spared than criminals.

We cannot even decide as a culture whether or not it is moral to torture prisoners or cage migrant babies snatched from the arms of their mothers or let people die because they cannot afford health insurance. This should be no problem at all.

Should scientists program their vehicles to be culturally sensitive or risk “a form of moral colonialism”? Should manufacturers allow autocratic leaders to tweak the code? A German commission on driverless vehicles insists, “In the event of unavoidable accident situations, any distinction based on personal features (age, gender, physical or mental constitution) is strictly prohibited.” Would other countries with different histories make that choice? But in a world where people make snap judgments about others based on fleeting impressions and subconscious biases, how does a computer sort that out that exactly? How do technicians code to avoid biases of which they themselves are unaware?

The Nature article acknowledges, “Asimov’s laws were not designed to solve the problem of universal machine ethics, and they were not even designed to let machines distribute harm between humans … And yet, we do not have the luxury of giving up on creating moral machines.” Says who?

Because nor were Assimov’s laws set up to decide whether or not because a thing might be done it should be done.

Never in the history of humanity have we allowed a machine to autonomously decide who should live and who should die, in a fraction of a second, without real-time supervision. We are going to cross that bridge any time now, and it will not happen in a distant theatre of military operations; it will happen in that most mundane aspect of our lives, everyday transportation. Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms, and to the policymakers that will regulate them.

We’ve been here before and failed to do just that. Nearly 30 years ago (IIRC), Paul Harvey ran a noontime program in which he told of a millionaire couple that had perished when their private plane crashed. The childless couple had been trying to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization. The “heirs” to their fortune were frozen at the clinic. As Harvey told the tale, women began coming forward to volunteer to carry the little dears to term for a piece of the action. Technology chronically outruns our ethics.

Invariably, the moral algorithms of commercial products will reflect commercial imperatives. Consider that.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Born with the safety off: The Ted Bundy Tapes (***)

By Dennis Hartley

“Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself, please. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity as I’ve experienced in this courtroom. You’re a bright young man. You would have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don’t feel any animosity toward you. I just want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself.”

— Judge Edward Cowart to Ted Bundy after sentencing him to the electric chair for the Chi Omega murders.

“For everything he did to the girls–the bludgeoning, the strangulation, humiliating their bodies, torturing them–I feel that the electric chair is too good for him.”

— Eleanor Rose, mother of victim Denise Naslund.

I have avoided pasting a photo of serial killer Theodore “Ted” Bundy at the top of my review of the Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes for a couple of reasons. Foremost, in such sensationalized killing sprees there’s a tendency to bury the victims in a figurative sense; i.e. regardless how many they number (Bundy confessed to snuffing out the lives of 36 young women), they are lumped together and enshrined as “the victims”, which is dehumanizing (no one aspires to be a “victim”). The women he murdered had names. They had people who cared about them. They had lives.

Secondly, the late Mr. Bundy requires no help from me to assure that his cult of celebrity remain steadfast. I admit being a “true crime” buff, but I wouldn’t call myself a “fan” of his. Or Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Gary Ridgway, David Berkowitz, or Richard Ramirez for that matter. The fact remains that many such monsters do have a fan base—for reasons yet to be adequately explained to me via logic or science.

This likely explains the interest surrounding Joe Berlinger’s 4-hour documentary (which premiered on Netflix this past Thursday) as well as festival buzz regarding Berlinger’s upcoming companion piece, the narrative film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile (starring Zac Efron as Bundy). 2019 also marks the 30th anniversary of his execution.

The fitful sleep I suffered after binge-watching all 4 episodes the other night confirmed my suspicions going in that Mr. Bundy’s grave will never be cold enough for those of us “of a certain age” who couldn’t escape ubiquitous media coverage of his 1978 Miami murder trial (which holds distinction as the first nationally televised court proceedings).

His 1978 arrest (initially on a completely unrelated charge) signaled the end to a horrific orgy of violence that began in Seattle in 1974 (possibly earlier) and ended with the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach in Lake City, Florida. Bundy had already been on the radar of investigators in Washington State, Utah, and Colorado for a few years but was so wily and slippery that no single law enforcement agency had enough evidence to directly connect him with any specific missing person or murder case (it wasn’t as common then for police departments in different states to share information).

Berlinger had a trove of archival interview footage at his disposal; Bundy (a classic narcissist) not only loved to parade in front of cameras at every opportunity afforded him but also left behind 100 hours of audio interviews, granted exclusively by the condemned killer to journalists Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth as he sat on Death Row.

In Bundy’s twisted, egocentric view, the interviews were for his “biography”, but what co-authors Michaud and Aynesworth were after was a peek inside the psyche of a serial killer. Keep in mind that Bundy had only been legally proven responsible for the deaths of two Florida coeds and Kimberly Leach; at the time he’d yet to confess to any criminal acts, period (and he still held firm to his “not guilty” plea regarding the Florida murders).

It didn’t take long for it to dawn on the journalists that they were being played by Bundy, who was doing a lot of talking about sunny childhood memories and such but really saying nothing regarding culpability in any of the crimes he had been convicted and/or suspected of committing. Confronting him directly that this obfuscation nullified their original deal only made Bundy dig his heels in deeper, threatening to clam up altogether.

The impasse was broken by a brainstorm. What if they stroked Bundy’s ego, asking him to lend his third person “insight” on helping them build a psychological profile of this “person” who did commit all these heinous crimes (they knew Bundy had taken psychology courses in college and fancied himself quite the expert). It worked like a charm-Bundy was more than happy to put his two cents in (and a couple of extra nickels).

Berlinger’s strategic interjections of Bundy’s “observations” adds an extra degree of creepiness to the proceedings. While this is a clever device, it does beg a question: was it necessary to double down on the already creepy nature of Bundy’s deeds (which are of a particularly repellent and diabolical nature, even when judged by serial killer standards)?

The overall vibe is more horror show than historical documentation. Otherwise, it’s engrossing enough to hold the interest of true crime aficionados, although it doesn’t offer any new insights or revelations that haven’t already been parsed through the decades. As for the Big Questions like “Why?” or “Nature or Nurture”? don’t hold your breath. Perhaps it’s as one interviewee says; some humans are simply “born with the safety off.”

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

Quote of the week

by digby

“The Stone indictment is yet another indictment of a person close to Trump working with the Kremlin,” said Neal Katyal, a top Justice official in the Obama administration. “Either Trump was in on it, or he goes down as the most clueless boss and president in the 242-year history of the Republic.”

That is not an either/or proposition. It’s pretty clearly both. Criminals are often dumb.

Let’s be clear. No one with Trump’s financial history and criminal exposure would have ever put himself under this level of scrutiny if he had a brain in his head.

But he did. And here we are.

There is no limit to the bad faith of the House GOP

by digby

The new leadership on the House intelligence committee is eager to revive the panel’s probe into the connections between Donald Trump’s camp and Russia, an urgency underscored by the latest indictment of a Trump associate accused of lying to its investigation. But three weeks into the Democratic-controlled Congress, House Republicans haven’t taken a critical step necessary for the committee to begin any work at all.

The House Republican leadership has yet to name the intelligence committee’s Republican membership for the new Congress, with the exception of retaining Devin Nunes as ranking Republican. Without doing so, the committee is stalled—no hearings, no internal business meetings. Democrats announced their membership roster on Jan. 16, adding Val Demings, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Sean Patrick Maloney, and Peter Welch to their ten extant members. (This Republican intransigence was first noted by The Rachel Maddow Show.)

It’s not clear what the holdup is. “That will be announced when it is ready,” said Matt Sparks, a spokesperson for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who did not address the reasons for the delay. A representative for Nunes – who does not pick the membership – did not respond to Daily Beast inquiries.

Thus far, Democrats on the panel are not accusing the House GOP of deliberately dragging its feet on the committee appointments. Some Democrats are hopeful the GOP will name its roster by next week. But, a Democratic committee aide said, “There is an urgency in getting all of our transcripts to Mueller that we cannot ignore.”

Friday’s indictment of Trump adviser Roger Stone underscored both that urgency and the stakes of the holdup. Among the offenses Mueller accuses Stone of committing are obstruction and false statements arising from his September 2017 testimony to the House intelligence committee, then under GOP management. Stone is the second such person to be indicted related to lying to the committee’s Russia probe, after ex-Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

Committee Democrats suspect others of having lied or otherwise giving them misleading testimony. One, identified by Connecticut Democrat Jim Himes, is Erik Prince, the founder of mercenary company Blackwater. (Some on the panel want several witnesses back for additional testimony, including Donald Trump Jr., while stopping short of saying those others lied as well.)

Adam Schiff, the new Democratic chairman of the committee, has said for months that an early order of business for the panel is to provide Mueller with every transcript of every witness before its Russia inquiry, which may lead to additional indictments. That hasn’t happened yet – and, until the Republicans formally join the committee, it can’t. Schiff, in a Friday statement following Stone’s indictment, called the transcript provision “the first order of business” facing the panel – when it can get down to business, that is.

“We’re ready to get going,” Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat on the panel, told The Daily Beast. “We are hopeful those appointments will be made early next week, and as soon as they are, we will get to work.”

The Stone and Cohen indictments show that Mueller doesn’t need to have the transcripts in hand to determine if witnesses before the House committee uttered indictable falsehoods. But the transcripts are likely to aid Mueller, whom attorney general nominee William Barr said was in the terminal phase of a historic criminal probe surrounding the president.

Then there’s everything else the committee intends to do to restart its Russia investigation. Schiff is preparing the committee to look at money launderingrelated to Trump, and particularly at Trump’s ties to Deutsche Bank, which has a history of connections to laundering and which lent Trump money when other banks didn’t consider him creditworthy. Schiff is also seeking to subpoena documents and additional testimony from witnesses before the probe.

And that’s on top of everything the committee oversees: namely, the operations of the CIA, National Security Agency, and the rest of the sprawling U.S. intelligence apparatus.

All of that is in a holding pattern for now.

Don’t be surprised if they drag this out a lot longer. After all, this is a party that held open a Supreme Court seat for over a year for partisan purposes.

And, by the way, they don’t care if the Democrats complain or if the media gives them a hard time. If this isn’t just laziness or ineptitude and they really are pulling a fast one, it will take some other kind of parliamentary maneuvering (I have no idea what) to get them to do what they are supposed to do.

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“Sometimes they gave a little party before they did it…”

by digby

Michael Corleone was a murderous psychopath. I can’t believe anyone has to make this clear but I guess they do.

Apparently, some people are thinking that when Roger Stone told Randy Credico to be like Frank Pentangeli, he was just telling him to do the right thing. Uh, no:

According to the indictment, Stone also suggested to Credico that he “should do a ‘Frank Pentangeli’ ” during his testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The reference was to a character from “The Godfather, Part II,” who “testifies before a congressional committee and in that testimony claims not to know critical information that he does in fact know.”

That’s a handy summary written by some cinephilic member of the Mueller team, but here’s a bit more. In the movie, Pentangeli, who is played by the actor Michael V. Gazzo and goes by the nickname Frankie Five Angels, runs the New York operations for the Corleone family. After a dispute with the boss, Michael, played by Al Pacino, Pentangeli is nearly murdered. He thinks that the hit was ordered by Michael, and so he agrees to enter witness protection and testify against the don in the government’s ongoing Senate investigation of the Mafia. (They were trying to get Michael on perjury.) But on the day of his testimony Pentangeli’s brother Vincenzo arrives in the hearing room, looking sad and a bit baffled, having been hustled over from Sicily by the Corleone family to sit in the audience. Vincenzo’s appearance gives Frank cold feet, and he recants his earlier sworn statement, saying, “I don’t know nothing about that,” and adding that he made up a lot of stuff to get a deal from the F.B.I. The hearing adjourns into chaos.

Every two-bit hustler in America seems to love the “Godfather” series, and most, especially the ones who get arrested by the F.B.I. in early-morning raids on their homes, learn the wrong lessons from it. You can see the appeal of the Frankie Five Angels moment for the likes of Roger Stone. After looking his brother in the eye, Frank can’t bring himself to rat out the family. The pesky government, reaching for a perjury charge, gets thwarted by the old omertà codes of honor and loyalty. Later in the movie, when Michael’s wife, Kay, asks what really happened in the Senate hearing, he tells her, of Frank, “His brother came and helped.” Kay asks, “All he had to do was show his face?” Michael responds, “It was between brothers, Kay. I had nothing to do with it.” For years, tough guys everywhere have seen this moment as one in which one brother helped another to do the right thing.

But Michael, of course, is a liar. If Frank had testified against the Corleones, his brother Vincenzo and his children would have been hunted down and killed. All the movie’s oft-quoted axioms—“Don’t ever take sides against the family,” etc.—are bunk, made clear by the fact that Michael routinely kills family members who betray him. (See his brother-in-law Carlo and, of course, his brother Fredo, whose death in a dinghy on Lake Tahoe marks the story’s final descent into tragedy.) The cold truth of that moment in the Senate hearing emerges later in the movie, when Michael’s lawyer and adopted brother, Tom, visits Frank in jail, and the two men negotiate a grim compromise. Speaking of Roman times, they reflect that when someone made a failed move against the emperor, a person’s family might be spared and looked after—“taken care of,” as Frank tells Tom—if that person went home quietly and killed himself, making no more trouble. And so that’s what Frank agrees to do. “Don’t worry about anything, Frankie Five Angels,” Tom tells him. The last time we see Pentangeli, he’s dead in a bathtub, having slit his own wrists.

You can see why Stone’s suggestion to Credico might have seemed less than appealing, and even menacing. The subtext here, if we want to call it that, is that there must be a kind of screw-you-copper honor among thieves. The problem for the likes of Stone, Credico, and all the other “Godfather”cosplayers out there—those adjacent to Trump and elsewhere—is that they forget that there is only one boss, and it ain’t them. They are further down the ladder, exposed and expendable. These men imagine themselves to be regal antiheroes—to be the Vito or the Michael of their story. Really, they’re just the Fredos and the Frankies.

Roger Stone is smarter than Fredo and Frankie. But he’s just another hitman, exposed and expendable.

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