Month: February 2019

We must demand that the Mueller Report is made public

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

It would be depressingly ironic if Robert Mueller’s highly anticipated report were kept tightly under wraps as a result of James Comey’s decision to break long-standing Department of Justice rules in the Hillary Clinton email case. Comey’s announcement that Clinton showed “bad judgment,” even as the FBI recommended that no criminal charges be brought, has been rightly excoriated for changing the course of history in a deeply destructive fashion. In his confirmation hearings last month, Attorney General William Barr implied several times that he would not make that mistake again — which may very well redound to the benefit of his boss, Donald Trump.

It’s not that Barr is wrong on the merits of that policy. The government has tremendous power to dig into every aspect of a citizen’s life, on what are often thin pretexts. If investigators find evidence of a crime, they are tasked with bringing it to court, where it is subject to the judicial process to determine guilt or innocence. If there is not enough evidence to prosecute a crime, investigators are supposed to close the case and move on without comment. If they don’t indict, it’s not their job to offer their own opinions about whether or not the person’s behavior was up to their standards. That’s what Comey did and then — oops, he did it again! — compounded the error just 10 days before the 2016 election.

One imagines that any federal prosecutor would be especially vigilant about not breaking that rule again, and a partisan attorney general hoping to protect his president from political damage is very likely to see Comey’s precedent as a godsend. But it really isn’t that simple.

If the reporting is correct that Mueller is preparing to turn over his report to the Department of Justice as early as next week, it’s highly unlikely that he will include an indictment of President Trump regardless of the evidence against him. Relying on a 1973 finding from their Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the DOJ has determined that a sitting president is the one person in the whole country who cannot be indicted. So if Barr strictly adheres to the policy of not publicly discussing any evidence regarding a person who is not indicted, we may learn nothing about what Mueller uncovered about the president. That is a classic Catch-22.

That finding by the OLC, we should note, is not written in stone. Rachel Maddow reported on her show on Thursday night that it was originally conceived as a sort of cover to allow the attorney general at the time to threaten corrupt Vice President Spiro Agnew with indictment in order to force him to resign:

“It would be timely and appropriate for the Justice Department and Robert Mueller to reconsider the shaky policy regarding indictability of a sitting president first formulated 45 years ago.” pic.twitter.com/lSRzaL6Cij

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 22, 2019

It seems unlikely, however, that Barr will go so far as to change this policy. Considering that Trump has wriggled out of every jam he’s ever been in by the skin of his teeth, using an egregious loophole in this case would certainly fit his history. But this is no ordinary case, and that’s simply unacceptable.

If we were dealing with the investigations in the Southern District of New York pertaining to Trump’s alleged hush money payments or tax fraud or some other ordinary crime, one could make a case for requiring a president to waive the statute of limitations and waiting to prosecute until he or she is out of office. I don’t agree with that premise that the president cannot be a criminal suspect, but one might be able to rationalize it as the best way to uphold the concept that no one is above the law while preserving the prerogative of the Congress and the people to determine whether a president should be removed from office.

But this case is unique and the stakes are much higher. Unlike Richard Nixon, who was overwhelmingly corrupt and abused his power for political gain, this president is also suspected of conspiring with a foreign government to sabotage the election in his favor, and then using the power of his office to cover it up while tilting America’s policy toward that country as president.

If there is evidence that Trump did this knowingly, he will have betrayed the country and compromised national security. Even if he was an unwitting dupe, so naive and inept that he didn’t realize that he was betraying his country, and is so intellectually and psychologically unfit that he can’t understand why his subsequent actions were unethical, he is still compromising national security.

None of that is contemplated by the Justice Department policy that says a president can’t be indicted, nor of the corollary position that if he is investigated by law enforcement none of the details can be revealed. That is perverse and nonsensical.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out in a powerful column on Thursday that the emerging “savvy” hot take that everyone should lower their expectations about this report is just plain wrong. There is absolutely no requirement that Barr withhold the report from the Congress and the public, and not just because he is fully empowered to ignore that Catch-22 in the case of the president. The regulations themselves make it clear that the attorney general has discretion about what to do with the “confidential report” submitted by the special counsel. He must provide the bipartisan leaders of the judiciary committees in both houses of Congress with “an explanation” of the “conclusion,” which certainly doesn’t preclude him from releasing the full report.

MSNBC’s Ari Melber asked former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe what he thought Mueller would send to Attorney General Barr. He replied:

I expect that Director Mueller’s team will produce an all-encompassing report that details exactly what they found and exactly what they think about it. I think it’s unbelievably important that that that information is shared with the Congress and I’d also like to see it shared to the greatest extent possible with the American people.

He knows Mueller better than most, and I hope he’s right about the report. It’s going to be up to the public and the Congress to demand that Attorney General Barr do his duty and allow the nation to see it for themselves.

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Do-over!
by Tom Sullivan

Image via WECT Communities/Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0.

The NC State Board of Elections voted unanimously late Thursday afternoon to hold a new election in its 9th Congressional District. The vote ended a months-long inquiry into election fraud in the eastern end of the district in 2018.

The decision came at the end of four days of dramatic testimony that exposed what Kim Strach, the board’s executive director, described as “a coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” in Bladen and Robeson counties.

1. What happened yesterday in North Carolina was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in politics.

For months, Mark Harris claimed he was SHOCKED to learn a campaign operative was running an election fraud scheme

Then his son testified https://t.co/Dkof34zqZo— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 21, 2019

Dr. Mark Harris, the Republican candidate and Charlotte evangelical minister, spent much of the morning on the witness stand doing damage control after his son John’s devastating testimony on Wednesday.

The younger Harris, a U.S. attorney in the civil division in Raleigh, testified he had warned his father about hiring McCrae Dowless to run an absentee ballot program during the 2018 congressional race. Emails previously not produced as evidence supported his account. Whatever Dowless’ assurances to the elder Harris about the legality of his program, John Harris was convinced by his analysis of past race returns that Dowless was running an illegal ballot harvesting operation. It was a Perry Mason moment.

The elder Harris ignored his son’s warnings. In questioning, Harris said four times he had not told anyone he did not expect the John Harris emails to be made public.

The Washington Post reports that after a lunch break Thursday that ran long, Harris had an announcement:

When the board reconvened, Harris took the stand again and explained that he had been mistaken about that recollection — and had in fact told his younger son, Matthew, in the phone conversation Tuesday evening, that he did not expect those emails to surface the next day.

Harris said the episode made him realize that he was not prepared for the “rigors” of the evidentiary hearing. He called for a new election, then promptly excused himself from the proceeding and walked out.

The State Board had heard plenty to convince them election fraud had occurred. There was no way under the national klieg lights the board of three Democrats and two Republicans could certify the election without adding humiliation to embarrassment. If they deadlocked, the U.S. House had the power to insist on a new election anyway. A unanimous vote was the only face-saving move and the right thing for voters. They voted 5-0 to call a new election and that was that.

As board chairman Bob Cordle noted, North Carolina now has two vacant seats in Congress in districts 3 and 9. The State Board with directions from staff has the responsibility for setting the dates for the do-over in NC-9. Gov. Roy Cooper will call a special election in NC-3 to fill the seat vacated by the recent death of Walter Jones. Presumably, the elections for the two races will occur on the same day. There will be significant review and increased oversight of procedures at the Bladen County Board of Elections.

Voter fraud vigilantes from Kris Kobach to Hans von Spakovsky have fallen silent. Donald Trump declared (after winning) in 2016 that the only reason he had lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes was because millions voted illegally, “Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”

Philip Bump writes:

There was no evidence that this happens. In fact, there’s no evidence that in-person voter fraud happens at any significant scale. But there’s recurring political benefit in claiming that this happens. For Trump, it allows him to soften the blows of political losses, as with the midterms and as with his loss of the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, after which he falsely claimed that millions of votes had been cast illegally. (Trump’s effort to prove the existence of such fraud by forming a commission early in his presidency soon collapsed.) For Republicans more broadly, claims of rampant in-person voter fraud have allowed them to advocate voter ID laws that have the happy side effect of tamping down turnout from communities that tend to vote for Democrats.

Yet here, where the alleged fraud involved absentee ballots (which an expert told me in 2014 was a potential threat to the integrity of elections), there has been almost no outcry from Republican elected officials. Trump hasn’t mentioned the situation in North Carolina. A review of congressional tweets shows no Republican officials who have linked the events in the 9th District to their party’s campaign against voter fraud — and plenty of Democrats who have noted that silence.

From voter ID to citizenship requirements to increased documentation to restricting voting machines and polling stations in minority neighborhoods, the GOP has devoted decades of effort toward shrinking the Democratic electorate — to borrow from Grover Norquist — down to the size it could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state and a member of the president’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, served with Kobach and von Spakovsky on the defunct panel. Their silence now reveals their “fundamental bad faith and hucksterism,” Dunlap writes:

We never, ever need to listen to the voter fraud charlatans again. They created a vivid voter fraud fantasy, conjuring up busloads of illegal immigrants or college students stealing seats from upright, patriotic Republicans and delivering them to undeserving Democrats across the nation. The truth is, the myth of voter fraud is nothing more than a ploy to justify laws that make it significantly harder for racial minorities and the poor, constituencies that often lean toward Democrats, to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

The only democracy the fraudsters support is one in which they control the outcome.

Update on one of the many scandals you haven’t heard much about

by digby

With any other administration, this would be a huge scandal. (Think about the lame Lincoln Bedroom scandal in the Clinton administration.)

The Trump Inaugural was nothing more than a pay to play slush fund:

It was January 2018, a year after the black-tie balls and candlelight dinners in Washington. Journalists were asking questions about how the Presidential Inaugural Committee had raised — and spent — a record amount of money. The committee, known as PIC, was set to release additional details about its finances in public tax filings. Complicating matters, a key committee staffer, Rick Gates, had months earlier been indicted for lobbying work he’d done with Paul Manafort in Ukraine.

To get everyone on the same page, a team reporting to inaugural chairman Thomas Barrack came up with more than 60 questions and answers to circulate among themselves. One question was particularly tricky.

“What did Rick Gates have to do with PIC?’’ staffers wrote in a late January draft. “[Need answer.]”

The draft document, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News, shows how the group prepared to defend its work as questions intensified about its reported $107 million haul. According to nine inaugural staffers and others familiar with the committee’s efforts, the process of planning for Trump’s big week was chaotic and opaque, dominated by staff culled from Colony Capital, the real estate firm founded by Barrack, and by ex-Trump campaign chairman Manafort’s circle of associates.

Many financial decisions were centralized in Barrack’s office, and Gates, dubbed “deputy to the chairman,” was Barrack’s right-hand man, with responsibilities spanning everything from finances to entertainment, according to several people with knowledge of his involvement.

Now, federal prosecutors in New York are asking their own questions about the inaugural committee, looking for potential money laundering, false statements, mail and wire fraud, according to a subpoena sent earlier this month, according to news reports. The New Jersey attorney general senta separate civil subpoena to the committee, ABC News reported.

In response to questions from Bloomberg News, Kristin Celauro, a spokeswoman for the inaugural committee, said in an email, “The PIC cannot address specific media reports due to the ongoing inquiry. However the PIC remains confident it has fully complied with all applicable legal requirements.”

Celauro said the committee received the subpoena from New Jersey and that “the PIC is in contact with staff regarding the inquiry.”

Tom Green, an attorney for Gates, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Gates is assisting prosecutors after pleading guilty to committing crimes with Manafort related to their work in Ukraine.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The inaugural inquiries are likely an uncomfortable turn of events for Barrack, an investing legend who has long been impervious to the various scandals and crises surrounding Trump, his decades-long friend. Some employees of Barrack’s firm have already been questioned by federal agents about Manafort as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russia election meddling, according to three people familiar with the inquiry.

Questions persist about whether foreign money improperly flowed into the inaugural fund. In August, Sam Patten, a Manafort associate, pleaded guilty to laundering a $50,000 contribution from a Ukrainian oligarch into the committee in exchange for tickets, saying he did so through an unnamed “straw donor.” At the time, representatives for the committee said they had limited tools to vet donors.

Inaugural committees are non-profit organizations that are subject to little oversight. All of the them tend to be chaotic as they raise and deploy huge sums in a short period of time. Trump’s inaugural effort was particularly tumultuous, where a formal organizational chart was frequently ignored and where tensions with the Republican Party’s old-guard festered.

Several Republican operatives, who’d tried to broker truces with the candidate’s staff, found themselves pushed to the sidelines or boxed out entirely, according to four people familiar with the staffing plans. Others who got on the inaugural committee found that chains of command were often subverted by staff from Barrack’s office, three of the people said. But one person familiar with the committee defended its hiring practices, saying the lack of traditional fundraising infrastructure around Trump made it necessary for Barrack to rely on close allies.

One staffer described the stressful months as a “purgatory,” before they would be rewarded with jobs in the administration.

Barrack relished the title of inaugural chairman, but he found many of the tasks tedious, likening the position to that of a wedding planner, according to two people who heard the remarks. That left Gates playing a crucial role in almost everything the committee did, according to several people familiar with his involvement.

Gates’s role perturbed many, because he was known to have a rocky relationship with the president-elect, the result of a billing dispute from the campaign. Still, he was deeply trusted by Barrack, according to five people familiar with their relationship.

The two men centralized decision-making by hosting many meetings at Colony’s New York offices, according to five people with knowledge of the arrangements. As the events drew closer, Barrack would host regular dinners at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Only favorites got invites, according to two of the people.

Barrack and Gates were thrilled each time they passed another $10 million fundraising threshold. But as the New Year dawned in 2017 and the fundraising haul reached nine figures, they began to worry how to spend it, according to two people with knowledge of the finances. Gates asked vendors on at least two occasions if they’d consider accepting payments directly from donors, the people said. There’s no indication vendors took him up on the offer.

The sheer volume of donations to the inaugural fed the chaos. Rich donors and companies that had assumed Trump had no chance of winning saw the inaugural as a last-chance opportunity to be generous, according to a person familiar with the fundraising effort.

Colony employees and Barrack’s friends were frequent fixtures at the finance meetings. Doug Ammerman, an old friend of Barrack’s, served as treasurer. Ron Sanders, Colony’s general counsel, acted as secretary.
Problem Solver

One Colony executive had no formal role at all. Kyle Forsyth, a real estate executive who’d long worked with Barrack, was assigned to solve tough problems: interacting with the U.S. Secret Service, handling the choicest VIPs, and aiding in the preparation of complex outdoor events. He left Colony in February 2018 after more than 15 years with the company.

Barrack paid for the Colony employees’ time working on inaugural events, according to a person familiar with the arrangements. Ammerman and Forsyth didn’t respond to requests for comment. Through a Colony spokeswoman, Sanders declined to comment.

Ticketing procedures for the inaugural were handled by Laurance Gay, who’d previously worked with Manafort and Gates in political consulting. Frank Mermoud, who had Ukrainian business ties and knew Gates, oversaw participation by diplomats.

Gay didn’t have any known experience managing invitations, according to three people familiar with his role, but he’d overseen the Rebuilding America Now super-PAC that Barrack unveiled on CNN during the campaign. After the election, the political action committee continued to pay Gay, who is godfather to one of Manafort’s daughters, $35,000 a month even though the organization was inactive, Bloomberg reported last year.

Mermoud was charged with overseeing the event’s diplomatic corps. It was a reprise of a role he played at the Republican convention, which Manafort led for Trump. Overseeing diplomats was an especially important service at the inauguration, where they were guests of honor at a dinner hosted by Barrack, who’d built business relationships with sovereign wealth funds and others across the globe.

Days after the inauguration, Mermoud asked Barrack to help him obtain a leadership role in the State Department, according to people familiar with the matter. He’d hoped his experience, plus his attainment of the Eagle rank in the Boy Scouts, might be a plus with then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who’d helped lead the Scouts. Mermoud didn’t get a job.

Gay and Mermoud didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Q and A

Barrack, a calm, TV-ready presence, served as as an unofficial spokesman for Trump during the campaign, making the case for his outsider candidacy to reticent members of the financial and entertainment communities.

As the inauguration neared, he saw reason for celebration. But the vibes in New York and Hollywood, where he has many friends, were decidedly more grim. Barrack told inaugural staffers he would head up an effort to make a sea change of the negative coverage of Trump — personally overseeing interview requests and doling out surrogates to fill them. They’d be selling Trump, he said, and recommended focusing on the possibility of a more friendly business climate and lower taxes, according to people who described the pitch.

Shortly after the inauguration, Colony weighed a plan — that was never executed — to open a Washington office to parlay its White House and international ties into infrastructure contracts, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News and ProPublica.

A year later, as Barrack’s team prepared to publish the committee’s tax documents, that optimism was gone. It was time for damage control.

Barrack and his team provided advance notice of the tax filing to reporters who were described among staff as “allied,” according to people with knowledge of the exchanges, and the first stories about the document made scarce mention of the legally imperiled Gates. Instead, they focused on Stephanie Winston-Wolkoff, a New York event planner and friend of Melania Trump, who was let go as a volunteer staffer to the first lady after those stories were published, according to a report earlier this month in Vanity Fair.

Unpleasant inquiries from reporters were to be dealt with in curt fashion, the late January 2018 draft shows. For instance, if a reporter were to ask, “Who selected the staff?” The proposed answer was, “All staff were hired and vetted appropriately.”

When the inevitable questions came about why the Trump inaugural cost so much more than previous ones, the committee had a ready answer for that too: “We will not make comparisons to prior inaugurations.”

Tom Barrack is Trump’s Bebe Rebozo.

Fun fact:

John Dean, Nixon’s lawyer, testified before the House Judiciary Committee he was ordered to covertly direct government agencies to punish a journalist who called Rebozo “Nixon’s bagman.”

This case has nothing to do with Robert Mueller. It could be shut down by William Barr though, so perhaps we’ll never actually see justice. But it’s clear that this is was nothing more than a corrupt operation to provide access and line Trump’s pockets.

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Roger Stone’s Three Ring circus

by digby

Roger Stone leaves court…. unable to say anything because of the now-strengthened gag order. He didn't even dare do the Nixon victory salute. pic.twitter.com/DFCj6ZwZ8K— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2019

The hearing today was a trainwreck. For some reason his lawyers put him on the stand, which seems like malpractice to me.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson banned Roger Stone from making any public comments about his case Thursday, after holding an off-the-rails hearing about a threatening Instagram post he published bashing the judge. Berman Jackson indicated that if he violated her order, he could be thrown in jail before trial.

Roger Stone said he was “heartfully sorry” for the post earlier in the hearing. Speaking from the stand, he said the Instagram post was a “stupid” lapse “of judgement.”

“I am kicking myself over my own stupidity,” Stone said.

Throughout the first part of the hearing, which lasted nearly an hour, Stone repeatedly apologized as Berman Jackson grilled Stone, expressed her exasperation with him, and called him out for contradicting himself in testimony. She also zeroed in on comments Stone made to the media about the Instagram post, which she said undermined his apologies for it.

“Mr. Stone could not even keep his story straight on the stand — much less one day to or another,” she said when she decided to expand Stone’s gag order.

When announcing her decision, Berman Jackson said Stone had chosen to use his public platform in a way that could “incite others” and noted her duty to protect court employees, prosecutors, witnesses and judges themselves.

She called Stone’s testimony “evolving and contradicting” and said that his apology rang “hollow.”

“You apparently need clear boundaries so there they are,” Berman Jackson said, before rattling off an extensive list of places he’s banned from making public commentary about the case. She said he only allowed to promote his legal defense fund and state that he was pleading not guilty.
[…]
Stone blamed the lapse of judgement on the stress he’s under as a result of the charges that have been brought against him by special counsel Robert Mueller.

He said he is facing “acute financial distress,” and that he had exhausted all of his savings.

“I have television commentators talking about the possibility I will be raped in prison,” Stone said.

He told Berman Jackson that he was “sorry I abused your trust,” and later acknowledged, “Perhaps I speak too much.”

Berman Jackson questioned Stone specifically on the crosshairs symbol. She asked whether he could have used Google to find an image of her that did not have that symbol. They then engaged in a back and forth about Stone’s claims to the media this week that the symbol was actually a celtic symbol or a symbol of the occult.

As she handed down her decision, she noted the symbol again.

“Roger Stone fully understands the power of words and the power of symbols and there is nothing ambiguous about crosshairs,” she said.

Jonathan Kravis, a lawyer for the government also got a chance to question Stone on the stand.

Stone said that the image he chose was among two or three picked out for him by volunteers who have been assisting him. He said he chose it “just randomly.”

“You closed your eyes and picked?” Berman Jackson interjected to ask.

The judge was also interested in media interviews Stone gave after taking down the image where he made comments undercutting the apology his lawyers had filed in the court. She suggested that those comments were not “consistent” with the apology he filed to the court on Monday.

There was also an extended discussion of who was involved in creating the post. Stone named a few people who work as volunteers for him but couldn’t say which one sent him the photo. The image “was either emailed, texted or saved on my phone,” Stone saidHealso claimed that he deleted the other one or two images of Berman Jackson he had on his phone that he considered using for the post.

Kravis asked him to name all the people who have been working with him and who may have had access to his phone when he posted the Instagram. Stone said he couldn’t remember everyone who may have come and gone around him in the last few days.

“It’s a revolving situation,” Stone said

Stone’s lawyer, Bruce Rogow argued that the gag order and his conditions of release should stand as is, and that Stone deserved a “second chance.”

At the end of his argument, Rogow called the post “indefensible.”

“I agree with you there,” Berman Jackson said.

Kravis meanwhile argued that there should be a tougher gag order and said that Stone’s testimony was “not credible.”

Berman Jackson brought Rogow back in front of her and demanded that he explain what would get Stone to stop talking, if not a court order.

“You and me telling….” Rogow started, before Berman Jackson interjected, “I am the court order.”

“How would you craft a court order that he would find clear enough to follow?” she asked Rogow.

There’s a chance that the “volunteer” who gave Roger the image was a Proud Boy. He’s on the board. They know what the crosshairs mean and they know how to access images from Stormfront. That’s where the image of the judge and the crosshairs likely came from.

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“Right now, the California Republican Party is as dead as you can imagine. … It’s ashes.”

by digby

According to Politico, “California’s establishment Republicans are making their final stand.” What a shame…

After decades of decline and a devastating 2018 election cycle that gutted an already decimated state party, the GOP’s more moderate wing is gearing up for a state convention this weekend that some argue is its last opportunity to avert collapse.

A battle over the state party chairmanship offers two competing visions for the future. One embraces President Donald Trump; the other focuses on the nuts and bolts of party building and organizing.

The two approaches aren’t complementary. Trump, who lost California by 30 percentage points in 2016, is highly unpopular there: Nearly two-thirds of California’s voters disapprove of his performance as president.

“What it really comes down to is whether a party’s first obligation is to motivate its base — or to reach out beyond that base,’’ said Dan Schnur, a former GOP strategist and adviser to Sen. John McCain who is a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and is now an independent. “We’ll see what they decide.”

As it stands, the Republican Party in the nation’s most populous state is barely breathing. The midterm elections saw the landslide victory of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrats win supermajorities in both state legislative chambers and the flipping of seven GOP House seats.

Whomever California Republicans elect to succeed Jim Brulte, the former state senator who has led the party for six years, won’t be able to reverse the party’s fortunes anytime soon. But he or she might be able to halt the downward spiral. For weeks, candidates have been lobbying, mailing, phoning and campaigning up and down the state to offer their prescriptions.

Jessica Patterson, the CEO of the California Trailblazers — a candidate-recruitment program blessed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — has racked up the lion’s share of endorsements from the state’s GOP elected officials.

A Latina from a Southern California working-class family, Patterson voted for Trump. But she argues that her leadership of Trailblazers has armed her with the experience and the strategic knowledge necessary to build the state party back to its former strength — and reassure key donors regarding its rebound.

In her view, Republicans must “stay on message” — jobs, economy, education, pro-business policies — and concentrate on the damage the ruling party has done in Sacramento.

“Some people have already given up on my party, and they say it’s not salvageable,’’ Patterson told POLITICO. “I don’t accept that. I love my party too much.’’

But the two conservative grassroots activists who are challenging her lay the blame for the 2018 battering at her feet.

Former gubernatorial candidate Travis Allen, a former state assemblyman and a fire-breathing favorite of tea party activists, derides Patterson as part of a status quo that has “produced a record of abysmal failure in GOP politics in California.”

“The GOP establishment has told Republicans for years that they need to look and sound more like Democrats — to be Republican-lite,” he said.

Allen argued that the GOP establishment has not shown the robust support for Trump that the president deserves — and that he contends would fire up and energize the GOP base.

“Clearly, the Republican Party must stand for Republican values — and the Republican president,’’ he said. “This is truly a Republican president who has delivered — and among the 4.5 million Republicans in California, I have yet to find a room that is not overwhelmingly in support of him.’’

Allen, who backs Trump’s anti-illegal immigration rhetoric and his call for a border wall, is reprising the populist rhetoric that marked his failed campaign for the 2018 GOP gubernatorial nomination — and helped him amass an unprecedented mailing list of 25,000 activist GOP donors and supporters.

The nominee, the more moderate multimillionaire businessman John Cox, admitted he didn’t vote for Trump and lost in a landslide to Newsom.

“I’m the candidate who has the energy to take back the entire state,’’ he said. “We need excitement in today’s California Republican Party … a bold new vision that is built by Republicans, for Republicans — and who believe in Republican values.”

But Allen may end up splitting the conservative grassroots vote with another anti-establishment Republican, Stephen Frank, the publisher of the conservative newsletter California Political Review.

A former party official whose roots in state GOP activism go back decades, Frank lambastes the current state party leadership, saying it “has unilaterally disarmed,’’ failed to mount competitive candidates and voter registration campaigns, and was outplayed by the Democratic Party in the 2018 elections, in which Democrats flipped House seats with aggressive practices like ballot harvesting.

Worse, he said, the state GOP lacked a cohesive message on key issues like education and job opportunities — even while it ran away from President Trump.

“We were being told Trump is so poorly liked in this state that we shouldn’t talk about him,’’ said Frank, who’s a regular on conservative radio stations. “We should have been talking about the miracle of the economic recovery under Trump, his willingness to stand up in trade negotiations, his ability to stop ISIS, and his creation of 400,000 manufacturing jobs. …We were so afraid of saying ‘Donald Trump’ that they forgot the great stuff that Trump did.”

Yeah, most Californians don’t quite see it that way. Because it’s bullshit. The economic recovery was underway for years before Trump took credit for it. His “ability” to stop ISIS is in his own fevered imagination. His trade negotiations are destructive and likely to taint relations with other countries for years to come.

And that’s just the supposedly “good stuff.” Californians know very well how horrific all the rest of it is, which Republicans either think is all some giant conspiracy or don’t know about it because they live in the alternate universe of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

And it’s not just California:

Those divisions mirror the battles waged within the national Republican Party, he said, in which Trump’s base defends the president’s positions and sees his leadership as the key to future electoral successes even as some mainstream Republicans in elected office wince at his rhetoric and effects on the GOP brand.

GOP consultant Robert Molnar, advising Frank, said 2018’s results put the problem in stark relief. “We have lost seats every cycle. … How are you touting that a success?’’ he said. “It’s been a total failure. They’re not even an opposition party at this point. Right now, the California Republican Party is as dead as you can imagine. … It’s ashes.”

Leading Republicans say the situation will deteriorate even more if either Allen or Frank claims the chairmanship. Former Assembly Minority leader Chad Mayes pushed back against Allen’s jabs at the GOP establishment and elected officials. He tweeted a prediction that if Allen wins the chairmanship, “more sitting legislators will leave” the California Republican Party.

“Winning in politics requires addition,” Mayes said. “Demagoguery and division proves to be a losing strategy.”

Well, 90% of Republicans worship Donald Trump so it looks like the Party doesn’t care. After all, California Republicans have been in the wilderness for a very long time now. And they just can’t quit doing it. It’s who they are.

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How many of us truly live in a bubble?

by digby

Emma Green at The Atlantic runs down an interesting new study by the magazine and PRRI about the political and cultural divide:

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

One of the many questions the Trump era has raised is whether Americans actually want a pluralistic society, where people are free to be themselves and still live side by side with others who aren’t like them. U.S. political discourse is filled with nasty rhetoric that rejects the value of diversity outright. Yet, theoretically, pluralism is good for democracy: In a political era when the vast majority of Americans believe the country is divided over issues of race, politics, and religion, relationships across lines of difference could foster empathy and civility. These survey results suggest that Americans are deeply ambivalent about the role of diversity in their families, friendships, and civic communities. Some people, it seems, prefer to stay in their bubble.

In terms of both geography and culture, America is largely sorted by political identity. In a representative, random survey of slightly more than 1,000 people taken in December, PRRI and The Atlantic found that just under a quarter of Americans say they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their partisan affiliation. Black and Hispanic people were more likely than whites to describe their lives this way, although education made a big difference among whites: 27 percent of non-college-educated whites said they seldom or never encounter people from a different political party, compared with just 6 percent of college-educated whites.

Even those Americans who regularly encounter political diversity don’t necessarily choose it, however. Democrats, independents, and Republicans seem to mingle most in spaces where people don’t have much of an option about being there. According to the survey, roughly three-quarters of Americans’ interactions with people from another political party happen at work. Other spheres of life are significantly more politically divided: Less than half of respondents said they encounter political differences among their friends. Only 39 percent said they see political diversity within their families, and vanishingly few people said they encounter ideological diversity at religious services or community meetings. Traditionally, researchers have seen these spaces as places where people can build strong relationships and practice the habits of democracy. The PRRI/Atlantic findings add to growing evidence that these institutions are becoming weaker—or, at the very least, more segregated by identity. “If you’re thinking from a participatory democracy model, you would hope to see these numbers much higher,” said Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI.

Green’s piece is well worth reading for the overview.

I found this part of the PRRI release equally interesting:

Spotlight on the Great Lakes States

The 2018 Election

Views of President Trump

Like Americans as a whole, residents of states in the Great Lakes region have an unfavorable view of the president overall.[8] Less than four in ten (37%) Great Lakes residents have a favorable view of the president, while more than six in ten (60%) view the president unfavorably. Similarly, 36% of Americans overall have a favorable view of the president, and 59% have an unfavorable view.

However, there are some notable distinctions between Americans overall and residents of various Great Lakes states. In Ohio, for example, opinions about Trump are somewhat rosier than among the national population. Nearly half (47%) of Ohio residents have a favorable view of Trump, while 51% have an unfavorable view. By contrast, Illinois residents are less likely to have a positive perspective on the president: only 28% have a favorable view of Trump, while 68% have an unfavorable view. Other Great Lakes states track more closely with Trump’s overall favorability numbers.

They explore all the questions with specific focus on these Great lakes states and the upshot is that Illinois is more liberal than average and Ohio is more conservative with the rest of the states pretty much falling along the same lines as most of the country.

Surprise? Not really. It does seem to me that Ohio is likely a full-blown red state now and out of reach for Democrats. But other than that, these states aren’t particularly unique.

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Pompeo knew too, of course

by digby

Wow. Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director when FBI opened counterintelligence investigation into Trump in May 2017, refuses to answer questions about if he knew about it.

Bizarrely, he ends his non-answer by referring further questions to Vladimir Putin. pic.twitter.com/9eO6RsYcSa— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2019

It’s not bizarre. For all we know, Trump has briefed Putin personally. And Putin certainly knows more than we do. But then, so does Pompeo.

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Some different scenarios for the big finale

by digby

Now that it seems the Russia investigation is starting to get real, it’s tempting to assume that we are going to know “the whole story” very soon.

Maybe. But this piece by Garrett M. Graff at Wired shows there are a number of scenarios that might unfold:

The tea leaves around Mueller in recent weeks seem especially hard to read—and they’re conflicting at best. CNN’s special counsel stakeout has spotted prosecutors working long hours, through snow days and holidays—just as they were in the days before Michael Cohen’s surprise guilty plea last fall for lying to Congress—yet there’s also been no apparent grand jury movement since Roger Stone’s indictment. So even as CNN’s stakeout spotted DC prosecutors entering Mueller’s offices—the type of people who Mueller might hand off cases to as he winds down—and the special counsel’s staff carting out boxes, there’s also recent evidence that Mueller still has a longer game in mind. The Roger Stone prosecution is just getting underway. Mueller is still litigating over a mystery foreign company. And he’s pushing forward trying to gain testimony from a Stone associate, Andrew Miller.

What does “wrapping up” even look like?

In fact, the list of loose threads at this point is, in some ways, longer than the list of what Mueller has done publicly. There’s conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi’s aborted plea deal; would-be Middle East power broker George Nader’s lengthy cooperation with Mueller, which has resulted in no public charges; the mysterious Seychelles meeting between Blackwater mercenary founder Erik Prince and a Russian businessman; and then—of course—the big question of obstruction of justice. Add to that the host of recent witness testimony from the House Intelligence Committee that representative Adam Schiff has turned over to Mueller’s office, in which other witnesses, Schiff says, appear to have lied to Congress. And besides, there are a host of breadcrumbs that Mueller left in the more than 500 pages of his court filings that would all prove superfluous if further action didn’t lie ahead.

Open questions remain, too, about bit characters like Carter Page. The seemingly hapless, hat-wearing onetime foreign policy aide was one of the starting points of the entire Russia probe—and the controversial FISA warrant that targeted him was renewed twice, in 2016 and 2017, meaning that investigators found evidence at the time that he was still being targeted by foreign agents. And yet he’s nearly disappeared from the public radar of the Russia probe. Does he reemerge—or is Page merely destined to become the Rosencrantz or Guildenstern of the Russia probe?

Or what about the odd communications between a Trump organization computer server and a server belonging to Russia’s Alfa Bank, which The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins dove into last October?

There remain many open questions, even as the consensus around Washington appears to be zeroing in on Mueller “wrapping up.” But what does that really mean? Are we just hours away from a sweeping indictment that makes public the pee tape and explains every intimate detail of a years-long plot to co-opt Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset that dates all the way back to 1987, as Jonathan Chait has argued? Or are we heading to what the president’s lawyers have argued all along—that, as awful as all the unrelated criminality of Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Michael Cohen was, none of it amounted to “collusion,” and this entire enterprise has been a worthless Witch Hunt by 13 Angry Democrats?

And what does “wrapping up” even look like? Robert Mueller has written a “Mueller Report” once before, examining the Ray Rice domestic violence incident for the NFL, one of his first projects after leaving as FBI director. It was a 96-page report that overwhelmed with the tenacity and thoroughness of Mueller’s investigation. Five pages of the report focused on how packages were signed for in the NFL mailroom, and Mueller’s team tracked down all 1,583 telephone calls that went in or out of NFL headquarters during the period in question. Yet its conclusions were narrow, and left many critics of the league frustrated. Mueller stopped well short of the sweeping pronouncements and indictments that many had hoped he’d bring against the NFL’s culture of coddling alleged abusers.

In some ways, that report helps illustrate just what we might expect in the hours, days, weeks, or months ahead as Mueller “wraps up.” In broad strokes, there are seven scenarios that “Mueller wrapping up” could really mean:

1. Mueller sends the attorney general a simple “declination letter,” telling Bill Barr that he’s concluded his work as special counsel, the related grand jury has charged all identified crimes worthy of prosecution, and that there are no further cases to come. In some ways, a letter this simple—which itself would represent a stunning anticlimax to the most politically charged investigation in modern American history—would be the most “Mueller-like,” an understated and quiet end to the probe by a man who has always preferred to let his work speak for itself. If Mueller stops here, with no further meaty comment or additional charges, his probe will still rank as one of the most significant and eye-opening counterintelligence probes in American history—even though it would have failed to identify any direct “collusion” between Trump and Russia.

2. Mueller compiles a detailed “roadmap,” providing Congress with an annotated bibliography or index of sorts outlining impeachment-worthy presidential “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and others pried out of the National Archives the analogous document that the Watergate special prosecutor created to help Congress charge President Nixon, a detailed guide to evidence and grand jury testimony that could inform an impeachment trial. This might be the most compelling conclusion for Mueller if he’s abiding by the Justice Department policy that the sitting president can’t be indicted but he has identified criminal behavior by the president himself. It may be similarly attractive if Mueller has found compromising actions by the president that fall short of a chargeable federal crime but that nonetheless represent political behavior or collusion that a healthy democracy cannot abide in its leaders or candidates.

3. Mueller authors a detailed novelistic narrative, akin to what the 9/11 Commission wrote or what Ken Starr authoredat the conclusion of his Whitewater hearing, a document that could stretch to hundreds of pages and provide in rich, narrative detail—with footnotes aplenty—the be-all and end-all story of the Russian attack on the 2016 election and the role that Trump associates may or may not have played in helping it. While this document is most similar to what many Americans have long believed the “Mueller Report” would look like, in some ways this seems the least likely outcome simply because it’s the most sweeping, which would go against Mueller’s inherent instincts.

4. He offers both a final round of “his” indictments as well as a detailed report like #2 or #3. Mueller’s existing court filings point to the idea that he’s considering or building toward a final overarching conspiracy indictment, one that connects Americans to the Russian attack on the election—either via WikiLeaks, Russian intelligence asset Konstantin Kilimnik, or other avenues. If this is the final outcome, it’s possible that Mueller has already told us precisely what he’s doing. After all, last summer’s GRU indictment began with the charge that “GRU officers … knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the “Conspirators”), to gain unauthorized access (to “hack”) into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 US presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.” That language could easily encompass Americans who participated, and since both the GRU indictment and the IRA indictment are “conspiracy” cases, Mueller could wrap up by simply filling in some more of those “persons known … to the Grand Jury,” e.g., Americans who participated in the plot.

5. He offers a report, but not the report, something more akin to a progress report rather than a single, definitive one. This scenario could also include multiple reports—concerning perhaps not just the Russian probe but broader investigations into foreign influence in Washington. The Daily Beast hinted in December that Mueller was preparing a special report on Middle Eastern influence in the 2016 election, which might or might not be separate from the question of Russian influence in the campaign. This progress report could also announce that’s he finished investigating the “Big Question” (e.g., Russia’s role in the 2016 election) but that he intends to continue sorting through ancillary matters—like, for instance, the Roger Stone case, the House witness transcripts, or the foreign mystery defendant—for perhaps months or even years.

6. He closes up shop but refers numerous active cases to other prosecutors—similarly ensuring that his probe lives on for years to come. Again, this could be because he feels like he’s answered his main charge—Russia—even though he’s uncovered much ancillary criminality. Schiff has begun hinting in recent weeks that he feels Mueller has been too narrow in his investigation, and that he intends to dive deep into Trump World’s money laundering and past business deals. The special counsel construct and mission was never perfect—and Mueller, if the Ray Rice case is a guide, may indeed have interpreted his charge narrowly, leaving big and worthy questions to be examined by prosecutors in DC, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and counterparts in DC and Virginia, have already picked up at least half a dozen ancillary cases among them.

7. Mueller unseals one or more long-standing sealed indictments. The media and bloggers have regularly trackedthe abnormally large number of sealed indictments filed over the last year in DC federal court, the jurisdiction where Mueller has been worked, including 14 added between August and November—a period where Mueller was theoretically “quiet” around the midterm election—and four recent sealed indictment that seemed to parallel the Stone indictment. Whether any relatee to Mueller remains to be seen, but in some ways the idea of piling up sealed indictments would have been the smartest way for Mueller to ensure that if he was fired, his case lived on.

While the seven scenarios above capture the broad outlines of what the end of his probe might look like, the truth is that he could choose some of one and a bit of another, meaning that there are almost infinite variations of how the case could unfold from him in the days ahead.

Yet it’s also worth noting that the Mueller probe—however it ends—represents a shrinking percentage of Trump’s potential legal troubles, as a total of at least 18 investigations surround Trump’s world, led by at least seven different prosecutors and investigators. (Since WIRED’s original tally of 17 distinct investigations in December, we’ve seen news of a state and federal probe looking at undocumented workers at Trump’s New Jersey golf club.) And all of that doesn’t count any of the work by the new Democratic-led House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ongoing work, nor any of the other probes led by other House committees. Even a complete and total clean exoneration by Mueller on the Russia question would represent only a tiny ray of legal sunshine for the president.

And yet there’s good reason to believe that Trump won’t get that total exoneration, as Mueller’s conspicuous silences in court filings on the collusion question seem to indicate he’s building toward something. Indeed, there have only been two immutable truths thus far in the Mueller probe: First, every move has surprised us, both in timing and content; second, every court filing has been more informed, detailed, and insightful than anyone imagined, and shown us that what we knew publicly was only the tip of the iceberg. There’s no reason to think that Mueller’s denouement will be anything different.

At this moment, we really have no idea what is going to come down but it does seem that something is.

Keep in mind that Cohen will be testifying in public next week as well. And we have Roger Stone facing the judge he threatened on Instagram and Manafort’s sentencing on Friday which may lay out the contours of the conspiracy case.

As I read this piece I was also reminded of this timeline from the Watergate scandal:

The congress and the Nixon White House fought over the tapes for a while, but the writing was on the wall from the moment that happened.

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Won’t get pwned again
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from “The Kids Are Alright” (1979).

There are libraries filled with things I don’t know. Let’s get that out of the way. I’m not as smart as I think I am.

Keeping those two things in mind is good practice as a general rule.

Believing themselves too smart to be fooled is one way very smart people get taken in by claims of the paranormal on the part of clever hucksters, as magician/skeptic/debunker James Randi well knows. A Randi colleague, Jamy Ian Swiss, put it this way:

Any magician worth his salt will tell you that the smarter an audience, the more easily fooled they are. That’s a very counterintuitive idea. But it’s why scientists, for example, get in trouble with psychics and such types. Scientists aren’t trained to study something that’s deceptive. Did you ever hear of a sneaky amoeba? I don’t think so.

So, a word of caution for progressives who pride themselves on their education, command of the issues, and their political savvy: vandals are already out there actively trying to mess with you. Best not to fall for it.

There is an emergent effort on the Internet to divide and conquer the left. Again. Early targets are Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), Politico reports:

A POLITICO review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms, as well as interviews with data scientists and digital campaign strategists, suggests that the goal of the coordinated barrage appears to be undermining the nascent candidacies through the dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation and distortions of their positions. But the divisive nature of many of the posts also hints at a broader effort to sow discord and chaos within the Democratic presidential primary.

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Rather than use bots this time, cyber propagandists are identifying real people already pushing anti-left memes. Guardians.ai identified approximately 200 accounts coordinating to spread the mind toxins. The same cluster “was the driving force behind an effort to aggressively advance conspiracy theories in the 2018 midterms, ranging from misinformation about voter fraud to narratives involving a caravan coming to the United States, and even advocacy of violence.”

Be careful what you share. If it’s derogatory about a candidate who is a threat to your preferred candidate, just don’t. There is a fair chance it is propaganda. Don’t traffic in it. Don’t get pwned. You are too smart to act like your crazy, right-wing uncle.

Also, you children don’t put your lips on dirty media narratives. You don’t know where they’ve been.

Democrats need to keep the public focused on their proposed solutions to real people’s problems. Republicans want to play “gotcha.” Paul Waldman snarks, the media would rather ask, “Are Democrats at risk of being labeled socialist socialists with all their socialist socialism?”

Again, many smart progressives’ first instinct is to respond, meaning opponents set the terms of debate. We’re the Hermiones always throwing their hands in the air to offer an answer. We are so eager to show off our smarts we do not notice we are campaigning on our opponents’ terms.

When Kamala Harris says, “I strongly believe that we need Medicare-for-all,” some reporter is going to ask, “Do you think that’s socialist or not?” Waldman observes:

The proper answer is, Who cares? Like any policy idea, it’s either good or bad. The fact that the term “socialism” has become so fluid, with so many people using it to describe different things, makes it even less meaningful to just ask whether an idea is or isn’t socialist.

Devoid of their own ideas, propagandists love a bogeyman. Donald Trump is nothing if not a propagandist. He is backed by a cable network of professional propagandists and an ad hoc assembly of enthusiastic wingmen. A wise man once said, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

If he’s innocent, shouldn’t the president order the Mueller Report to be made public?

by digby

Rush Limbaugh had an interesting theory about the Mueller report today:

Mueller’s gonna have to say something to somebody, but his point was that we’re not gonna see it. It goes to the Justice Department and Congress, and it’s up to whoever to make it public, and it may not ever be made public, he thought, because Mueller’s got nothing. And the Mueller whatever it is — the investigation report, whatever — is much more valuable unreleased.

If there’s nothing in it, why report that? If you’re this bunch of people running this coup, if you are this bunch of people trying to get Donald Trump’s numbers down to 30% or lower, and you finish the investigation and you haven’t found any evidence for your original premise of collusion, why would you announce that? You’re not gonna announce that! You’re gonna say, “Well, it’s ambiguous or it’s something,” and there won’t be a report and you’ll have the media clamoring for it — and what will we get?

We’ll get leaks from this report nobody has seen, and it will be the continuing death by a thousand cuts. It will be one lie after another amplified by others, and it will just be continuing this looped process that we’re in. Or there might be a report. In case there is a report, everybody under the sun has been warning us that expectations — has been warning the left that expectations — are not gonna be met. The latest is Clapper. Listen to him again. This is this morning on CNN. He was asked, “When you hear McCabe say that it’s possible that Trump is a ‘Russian asset,’ what is your reaction?”

Listen to his reference to the report that Mueller has coming out in this bite.

CLAPPER: I would — and have — added the caveat “whether witting or unwitting.” And, uh, I think that’s an important distinction. You consider Putin’s background as a trained, experienced KGB agent and how he would approach somebody that he is trying to co-opt or influence or gain leverage over. In that sense, in that context is, uh, what I think of when, uh, I mean potential unwitting asset. I think that the hope, uhhh, is that the Mueller investigation will clear the air on this issue once and for all. I’m really not sure it will and the investigation, when completed, could turn out to be quite anti-climactic and not draw a conclusion with that.

RUSH: Now, he’s just the latest. He’s about the tenth person in the past eight weeks or so who has alluded to the fact that the Mueller report’s gonna let a lot of people down. I want to warn you: That could be a well-coordinated, gigantic sandbag. You know, you learn these people, you witness ’em the way they do things one time, and you never forget it. I’ve cited this example before. During the taped deposition that Bill Clinton gave in the Paula Jones case, it was videotaped, and it was to be played for the public later.

A day or two before this deposition was to be made public, Clinton allies flooded the media with stories of how the president just lost it when the question of the cigar came up, and they were very worried about how this was gonna look. “The president, apparently, just lost it!” So we all are primed, and when they are going to play the videotaped deposition, we are all tuned in — and guess what?

Clinton did not lose it. His eyes just got big for a split second and then he rolled on. He was totally unfazed. We had been totally set up, and I want to warn everybody that we may be being set up again. These people have been lying from the beginning. McCabe is out there. You think McCabe doesn’t know what Mueller’s got? I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. You think McCabe does not know? I guarantee you he does know!

These guys all know they’re all in on it. These are conspirators in this whole hoax, and if McCabe is out there saying, “I think Trump is still a Russian asset,” then I’m not gonna be surprised if Mueller says that. Why would these people do all of this, and then in the two years prior to the 2020 election release a report that’s basically blah, blah, “Eh, nothing to see here”?

You got Clapper here talking about “unwitting.” So I’ll tell you what I think now — and I’d be very happy to be wrong about this. I think this report is gonna name Trump, and I think this report is going to position Trump as a dupe. It’s exactly what Clapper has said here, that Trump is so stupid and so unqualified and so unprepared for this job that we should never, ever elect another president like this. This man has been unwittingly duped by not just Putin.

I’d guess he’s setting up the idea for the Trump cultists that if the Mueller Report is kept secret they shouldn’t assume that the congress is going to close up shop and let the whole thing go? (Because the idea Trump is a cretinous moron (which is obvious) might be even worse than being an actual foreign agent.)

Whatever Rush’s reasoning it’s really an argument for releasing the report to the public.

In fact, if Robert Mueller finds nothing worth prosecuting beyond what we’ve already seen and he finds no evidence of wrongdoing by the president and his henchmen, shouldn’t Trump want it made public? After all, I’m pretty sure he has the power to do that.

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