The Laws Delays Are A Guarantee Of Unequal Justice Favoring the Favored

As I said the other day Lawman Robert Mueller's reported friendship with William Barr after the first two of the three things on the Honorable Mazie Hirono's list of Barr's obstruction for a Republican president and administration was one of the things which led to me being skeptical of his sterling character.  We're not talking about just one lawyer paling around with a lawyer who was also a massive sleazebag, we're talking about a lawyer who had been a prosecutor, who had held several very high offices in federal law enforcement, who, certainly, had sent or would be entirely prepared to send nobodies, the powerless, the middle-class to destitute to prison for far lesser instances of covering up for much pettier criminals over far pettier instances of law breaking.  I would love to have a comprehensive list of the people who Robert Mueller either had put away or helped put away with the information to see what the financial condition of those criminals were as compared to William Barr and those who he helped get away with high crimes up to and including, literally, murder.   

Robert Mueller certainly knew that about William Barr by the time the Republicans and the corrupt judges on that infamous three judge panel set up Ken Starr to chase after Bill Clinton's penis looking for something they could whip up into an impeachable offense - their publicly funded campaign to find an actual crime the Clintons had committed coming up empty.  By that time the OLC memo that William Barr had suppressed over the matter of George H. W. Bush invading Panama to arrest Noriega had come out, it came out early in the Clinton administration.  And the George H. W. Bush's cover-up pardons penned by William Barr were always known.   I can't believe that Robert Mueller, Lawman, would have been social buddies with some other lawyer-gangster who had done things like that.  Call me skeptical, but I doubt he'd maintain a friendship with someone who did that for a Democrat, though, as we know from the Ken Starr investigation, no Democrat has committed those kinds of crimes.   Just like I heard Linda Chavez, as she declared herself a never-Trumper yesterday, praised what he and Mitch McConnell are doing to the judiciary.  I strongly suspect Republican Robert Mueller probably likes that kind of thing, as well.  There are few Republican never-Trumpers who I don't suspect of liking everything about this except the vulgarity and irregularity of it. 

The long, long drama we are sitting through in regard to Robert Mueller is turning into the longest, most absurd and frustrating production of a Becket play in history.  I'm beginning to suspect the godly Godot of this production is never going to get here.   Hearing someone talking on one of the talk shows about how these things take time made me remember another famous scene, the big one, Hamlet Act 3, scene 1

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes

I'm hard put to decide whether Mueller is an example of patient merit or unworthy, an example of the insolence of office or maybe it's that he's too proud of his professional reputation in the law to facilitate justice.  Or maybe he's not all that bothered by what Republicans have been doing in this regard his entire professional career. 

One of the biggest eye-openers for me in this disaster, is the sickening sentimentality that people who have worked as federal prosecutors, in the FBI, in the so-called Department of Justice have for those institutions,  I think someone who ever claims someone is "an institutionalist" within reach of my fist is going to feel it in their teeth.   It has to be willful blindness of the kind that Mueller had to have practiced to be friends with William Barr.  When former prosecutors on MSNBC express their disappointment in their former colleagues, they choose to be blind to the real character of people like James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, William Barr and countless others.  Not just Republicans either, a number of them have either been Democrats or of unknown party affiliation.  That those are the very same people who have set up Robert Mueller in similar terms makes me all the more skeptical of his actual character.  I'm about out of patience with St. Robert Mueller, I'm beginning to think the dragons he slays are more likely on the scale of geckos than Gekkos. 

I strongly suspect that once before the House Judiciary Committee, Robert Mueller will hold himself above the level of disclosure that will be necessary to move us towards safety.  I expect him to be more like a marble statue of justice, than a professional administering it.   The longer he is silent, allowing his buddy Barr to shape the narrative that fits on FOX, the longer he participates in letting Trump and his crime family get away with this and going on to do worse.  I'm fed up with him in a way that is tasting a lot like it was when I'd had enough of James Comey's posing and posturing. 

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The habit of media and insider babble sets up the legal arm of the federal government, the courts, and that overlap between the judicial and executive branch that is the bizarre and often bad Department of Justice as being above the vulgarity of politics, as higher than the Congress, of which the House is actually, set up as the most democratic part of the government.  That is the biggest load of crap there is.  I have been researching the history of attempts by Congress and legislatures to get the corrupting influence of money out of our politics and the long and disgusting history of the least democratic part of the government, the Supreme Court in destroying those efforts to clean big money and the influence of the billionaires and millionaires to control the government for their own benefit.  That history, alone, should shatter that absurd hierarchy of repute.  There have been corrupt Houses, we just had one under Paul Ryan, the Senate has always been far more prone to being a corrupt and anti-democratic through its anti-democratic constitution.   The presidency is more characterized by incompetence when it wasn't characterized by corruption.  But none of them have done more to produce the disaster we are in than the Supreme Court.   

Robert Mueller Is Giving Us Every Reason To Believe He's Not Better Than His Good Buddy Barr

The sleaze beneath the elite patina of Republican lawyers involved with the investigation into Trump's family, campaign and administration with the Putin crime family and the cover-up into that is seeping out and it stinks.  That is despite the assurances of other lawyers, Republican, of course, but also Democrats, that the lawyers,  Rod Rosenstein, William Barr and, yes, Robert Mueller who is close, professionally and personally to both of his fellow Republican lawyers and officials, were men of integrity who you could put your trust in.  

Dutifully, that is how the media, largely, covered all of them.   That was despite well known reasons to not trust Barr from the time of his service to George H. W. Bush.  Especially discrediting was Barr's participation in writing Bush I's pardons which were clearly issued to protect him from criminal involvement in serious crimes including terrorist killings in Central America in the Iran-Contra scandal.  That should have been enough for anyone to identify Barr as not only a sleazy lawyer serving a powerful Republican politician, but someone who was willing to lie about it.  

Rod Rosenstein, chosen to be Jeff Sessions #2 at the Department of Justice by Donald Trump, reason enough to have your sleaze sensors alerted, soon proved himself to be of dubious character by writing a memo in support of Trump's own admitted cover-up firing of James Comey.  I'm no lawyer but . . . no, the right word is probably "so" that was enough to lead me to not trust him despite all of that professional comity as expressed by his fellow connected DC establishment lawyers on talk shows and news interviews.  

Robert Mueller, who has the most cred of these three and, who knows, may actually be a man of the integrity attributed to him, has also been a member of the criminal administrations and, after the turn of the new century, Republican regimes.   His appointment by Rosenstein after Rosenstein had given the world every reason to not trust him made me skeptical of Mueller's reputation, along with his previous appointments by some of the worst presidents in our history.

Robert Mueller's reported close professional and personal relationship to William Barr, apparently right up to the present, leads me to wonder just how much integrity he could have.   The doubts I have about that are magnified because of the known sleaze committed while Barr was as a lawyer, an alleged law man who had used his credentials to enable powerful criminals in getting off.  I have my doubts that someone like Robert Mueller would socialize and have warm relations with a minor blue collar wrongdoer who had done far less and whose crimes hadn't harmed nearly as many people, whose real crime was not having elite educational credentials, power, money and a place in the DC-NYC establishment. 

And yesterday further reasons we shouldn't trust Barr at all and why Robert Mueller's relationship to him should diminish the automatic trust he's given came out.   Barr has lied to Congress, misleading it about serious matters in the past in pretty much the way he seems to be with Robert Mueller's report.  

On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.

When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

Read the whole thing and, while you're reading it, remember, this is all stuff that Robert Mueller would have known about for years.  It makes his Sphinx act in regard to his report into Trump wrongdoing go from seeming like professional propriety to being something quite a bit less reassuring. 

Barr's cover-up shouldn't have to wait years to be exposed, Congress should do everything necessary,  if the judiciary is as corrupted with Republican-fascists as Trump is putting his hopes in and, clearly Congressional Republicans along with him, Democrats in the House should use everything it can do to force it into the daylight.  I would include forcing Mueller to testify, both in closed session and in open session, as should key members of his investigative staff and others.  Barr should be investigated for corruption and, if Rosenstein participates in his cover up, he should be investigated too.  I, for the life of me, don't understand how Rosenstein's participation in the Comey firing isn't already the subject of a House investigation. 

I am sick and tired of seeing these kinds of people, Barr, Rosenstein, getting away with things far, far worse than would land a working class person, a poor person a person with nothing in prison for years.  I'm wouldn't be surprised if Rosenstein and Mueller felt very satisfied by putting people like that in prison even as they socialized and had cordial professional relationships with the likes of William Barr.  I don't respect that class of lawyers, and from now on only by those rare figures in that world who show the slightest amount of moral discernment and judgement.  This is a symptom of moral rot among the well connected and highly placed.  If Robert Mueller is such an exception is something of which I am increasingly skeptical.   If the cover up continues, if the Judiciary and Intelligence committees have to subpoena him to appear and blow the lid off of it, if his sense of petty professional propriety is not overcome by the outrageousness of Barr's and Rosenstein's cover up, he has never deserved the reputation given him by his fellow lawyers. 

We Will See If Robert Mueller Is OK With His Friend William Barr Turning The American Presidency Into A Crime Mob

One of the things that is clear from the truncated version of the Mueller Report is that it wasn't nearly a complete investigation.  As I think I recall from a long day of reading and listening, it was Adam Schiff who said that Mueller and his team left the massive issue of Trump's finances virtually untouched, which means all of those known and incredibly shady financial deals with Putin's oligarchs, the German bank which was laundering money for such oligarchs and others didn't go into informing Mueller's conclusions and decisions. 

Another thing we know, he didn't go after Donald Trump jr. Ivanka and the rest of Trump's family members who were thick as the thieves they are in it. He chose to not force their testimony to a grand jury.   The only person among the talking heads I heard who had the same reaction I did to that was Elie Mystal at The Nation, of all places:

Mueller didn’t subpoena Donald Trump. Or Donald Trump Jr. Or Ivanka Trump. Or Eric Trump. Or Jared Kushner. His failure to directly ask those five principles a single in-person question represents a failure of his investigation. It’s a failure that will haunt this country for some time.

Mueller’s reasons for not subpoenaing Trump are what the scientists would call “bad.” The report says that investigators sought a sit-down interview with Trump, but were rebuffed. It says that they received written answers from Trump’s team, but these were “inadequate.” The report includes those written responses, and Trump’s lawyers use the phrase “can’t recall” 37 times, which puts Trump’s memory on par with a goldfish. Mueller concludes that the cost of issuing Trump a subpoena that would delay the investigation as Trump fought all the way to the Supreme Court outweighed the benefits of securing his testimony.

That’s unacceptable. You can’t hold yourself out as a nonpolitical prosecutor only concerned about the facts, and then make a decision to not secure additional facts based on a purely political calculation. Getting Trump to testify under oath about Trump’s intention behind all of the acts he committed that look like obstruction of justice is crucial to the inquiry of obstruction of justice. You are just not investigating obstruction of justice if you do not attempt to get those facts, and saying, “Well, he’d resist,” is simply not what we deserved from the special counsel.

It was Mystal on one of the news shows yesterday who pointed out Mueller must have known that Donald Trump's mob boss manner of operating, the kind of gangster speak that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, laid out in his testimony to the House judiciary committee, meant if you were going to get him you had to go after the next generation of his crime family.  Something that Mueller chose not to do.

My question, asked before the truncated report was released was if Mueller or his boss for most of that time, Rod Rosenstein would have treated middle class or poor people the way they treated the Trumps and Kushner, I can't believe they gave the benefits, THE PRIVILEGES they granted to them to poor people who fell into their professional focus.  I doubt Robert Mueller would refuse to question a blue-collar class suspect because he thought he was stupid or that he would lie to him, one of the excuses for not going after Donald Trump jr.  I doubt they'd let a 17-year-old kid off like they did the scion of a mobster in his late 30s.  Elie Mystal sensibly asks why the people who Mueller prosecuted and got prison time shouldn't think they were unfairly treated with harsher justice as the Trumps were handled with kid gloves. 

I don't, not for a second, believe that Trump being a Republican is not a part of it, either. 

I do think Robert Mueller did, obviously, kick this over to the Democratic House which, as Mystal says, might have been better for Mueller but it is not better for the country.  In doing that Mueller certainly knew he was giving William Barr, a man he has known professionally and personally for a long time, he knows Barr's character as exposed in his past lying to Congress about his work for the Bush I administration and his devotion to giving Republican presidents fascistic power as a devotee of the unitary executive excuse for doing that.   Mueller also knows there is absolutely no chance that if impeached, Trump will not be convicted in the Republican controlled Senate.

There is some reason to sympathize with some of Mueller's decisions on a professional, lawerly basis, his decision to not come to the obvious conclusion that Trump, as he confessed to Lester Holt on national TV, that he fired Comey to end the investigation into Russian contact with his campaign, because of the Department of Justice policy to not indict a sitting president.  The very policy that that other deputed to be honorable man, James Comey violated when it was Hillary Clinton running as a Democrat.  That is the clear statement in Mueller's Report that William Barr, knowing lied about from two days after Mueller gave him his report.  The only reason Mueller gives to not state the obvious was that policy. 

But that policy, itself, is an invitation to a criminal like Trump to commit these kinds of crimes in office.  It should be changed. 

If Robert Mueller's chosen failure was him going along to get along in his own, Republican establishement or if it was part of a larger strategy may become clearer.   That's not important at this point.  What's important is that this report isn't a product of a complete investigation and it can't be sold as such, though that is how Barr has pushed it before it was publicly known and how the media will try to sell it in their own lazy-assed, Republican enabling manner.   I think it's necessary for Democrats to get Mueller on the record, in front of the cameras admitting that his investigation didn't completely investigate even the known crimes of the Trump regime and his crime family who are a part of that.

William Barr, clearly, supports the idea of a crime mob presidency, that's what the fascism of his unitary executive theory, cooked up in places like Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, ground zero in the destruction of American democracy.   The extent to which Robert Mueller is OK with that will be apparent for the length of time he stays silent on the preliminary character of his report.  Tic-toc, Mueller.   You've already let too much time go by.

"That's a dirty story! Bob Mueller doesn't want to have to tell that on TV"

Since the former governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld pointed out that both he and Robert Mueller had been friends of Donald Trump's taxpayer funded lawyer William Barr, what he said about the revelation that the model of rectitude, Robert Mueller's condition that he would only testify to the House Judiciary Committee in closed session on Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night was refreshingly honest.

Well, Lawrence,  I think that that Bob Mueller is totally up to testifying in public.  He was head of the FBI for twelve years, he was grilled by Congress, both parties many, many times.  And he was my deputy in the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston and I remember I went to dinner in New York where he was giving a speech, twelve years later after he had served so long and ably in the FBI.  He's a totally different guy, he's a very, very consummate, experienced guy, so he would be up to it [testifying to the House  Judiciary Committee].

I think what's going on here is Bob is so straight, he doesn't necessarily want to say how the process has been perverted and my reading of what happened behind closed doors - Bob Mueller's report says we decided not to make a traditional prosecutive judgment because we really couldn't.  

Translation: Bill Barr told me that he was going to squash any indictment I tried to bring against the president for obstruction.  That's a dirty story!  Bob Mueller doesn't want to have to tell that on TV and I think that's exactly what's going on here. 

To which I say, Robert Mueller is entirely too full of himself if that's really his reason, if that's his real reason, we'd better know about that and depend on the judgement of those who know the case but are ready to put American democracy before a crooked pal. "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country," might make an overly clever line for for some second-string scribbler like E. M. Forster to pen, it might make it for sustaining a class-ridden Britain, American democracy can't survive it.

As both O'Donnell and Bill Weld pointed out, Robert Mueller has made a lifetime career of serving in the government, being appointed by presidents, being hired on the basis of his identity as a Republican to fill posts in Republican administrations, he has testified IN PUBLIC at hearings before, he has basked in the adulation of politicians and had his highly vaunted integrity lauded over and over again.  For him to belatedly get shy about presenting the findings of his most important work - the object of which is merely saving American democracy from its enemies foreign and domestic - is not credible, it is certainly not honorable, his given reason is certainly not straight.

I think that as Bill Weld said, he doesn't want to have to say that his good buddy Barr said he'd refuse to bring an indictment of the very indictable Donald Trump, that Barr said or made known to him that he was not to call for an indictment, that he would have to reveal Barr's very political ratfucking in league with the enemies of American democracy, domestic, for sure, in league with those who are foreign enemies, that he did so in pursuit of his fascistic conception of a Republican-fascist presidency with the power to break any law with impunity, the last Constitutional resort of impeachment being about as real as Donald Trump's hair color.

Robert Mueller's pose of integrity is anything but that if he doesn't carry this through IN PUBLIC ON TELEVISION.  If he refuses to lay out all of the filth that he has witnessed, including by Barr, it is him putting a buddy of his same political orientation, of his political party above the good of the country.

For him to strike that pose after seeing what Barr has been doing to his report for the past two months is an act that deserves to go down in history as among the more infamous betrayals of public trust.   I am not good buddies with Robert Mueller, I don't have any reason to trust the common DC - NYC media and establishment consensus on his reputation. Even some of those I might have some regard for are way too quick to treat those in power with entirely too much deference and a pose of respect. 

In Robert Mueller I see a man who may have not been the worst of Republican-establishment apparatchiks but one who, in this crisis, has chosen his sides knowing better than almost anyone else what that means, ducking the full measure of the responsibility that he assumed when he agreed to conduct this most important of jobs.

Update:  I should have added the very last sentence of what Bill Weld said in that passage,  "He's such a gentleman!"  Well, the old saying goes, "The devil is a gentleman."   If that's what a gentleman does, to hell with such gentlemen.

We've Got To Take High Level Law Enforcement Out Of The Hands Of Republicans

I believe I'm right that the FBI has never had a director who wasn't a Republican.  I've looked and other than Andrew McCabe, who may or may not be a Republican, every other one seems to have been.  I just thought I'd lead with that.  That I couldn't find out what party Andrew McCabe belongs to may speak to his ethical superiority in removing his personal political identity out of his work,  of all of the figures from within the Department of Justice during the Trump era, he's the only one I can muster respect for. 

I doubt that if Robert Mueller had been reporting on the crimes of a Democratic President he would have done his Sphinx act in the face of Barr's cover-up of his report into seriously harmful and dangerous criminal acts by a president and his campaign mixed up into the Putin regime's corruption of an American election, I doubt if Barr hadn't been one of his long time Republican colleagues that he would have held back for MORE THAN A FRIGGIN' MONTH, he wouldn't have if another, especially a Democratic Attorney General, misrepresented what he had found in his investigation. 

In thinking about the leaked letter he sent to Barr  A FRIGGIN' MONTH AGO! complaining that he was misrepresenting the Mueller Report, I can't believe that Robert Mueller would have acted so weakly if Barr was not one of his Republican colleagues of long standing, reportedly a (maybe former) personal friend.  How anyone who values equal justice before the law could have been friends with Barr after his role in the George H. W. Bush cover-up pardons, A FRIGGIN' LAW MAN, FOR PETE'S SAKE, is something I don't understand.  I've broken with people over far smaller points of morality. 

As this drags on the repeated, rote assertions as to the professional excellence and sterling character of Robert Mueller ring increasingly dull.  I will point out that until a couple of weeks ago, a lot of those people issuing those encomia were lauding Rod Rosenstein, someone who I had figured for a sleaze all along.  Many of them gave us assurances that William Barr's professionalism and devotion to the Department of Justice would keep him from being a lump of crap. 

The excuse that is being given that Mueller is currently an employee of the Department of Justice is something that Mueller could fix with a resignation letter.  I wonder why someone who feels the way he claims to about the handling of what might be the most important work he's ever done figures that the Trump DoJ is going to be moved by anything but the House taking decisive action, decisive action that is awaiting the testimony of Robert Mueller.  

I'm not impressed with Robert Mueller's pose of professional restraint, it has already only aided the Trump cover-up for one crucial month, dragging it out until May 23rd will only help the Trump cover-up more.  I would expect that the Honorable Jerrold Nadler had reasons for setting that date for Mueller's testimony, I wonder if that date didn't have something to do with Mueller's schedule and not one set by Nadler.  The longer this cover-up goes on the more it helps Trump run out the clock.  If there is a more subtle plan in this that ends up with Trump and Barr and the rest of these criminals and sleazes indicted and, hopefully, convicted, I don't see any sign of that.  I trust Congressman Nadler, certainly to the extent that he can control things, I am sure there are things he can't control in this.  I'm not so sure I trust Robert Mueller's judgement,  his reported friendship with the always sleazy cover-up master William Barr and his party membership as a Republican in 2019 are enough to arouse my skepticism.

I think one of the things we need to do is force Democratic presidential candidates to promise to not appoint another Republican to high positions in law enforcement.  The character of that party, the criminality of the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, administrations, the Bush II regime and now, the most florid corruption of the Trump regime (not to mention Republicans in the Congress) should be enough to impeach the ethical character and judgement of anyone who would retain membership in it.  That's especially true of those who are legal professionals.  William Barr who probably adds treasonous inclinations to the kind of corruption that John Mitchell practiced,  should be the poster boy of that brand. 

Barack Obama has reportedly said that James Comey to head the FBI was the worst appointment he made,  it's one of those rare occasions I'd agree with him.  Certainly one of Bill Clinton's worst was Louis Freeh as the head of the FBI, I remember the lobbying for them from the media and the DC insider class.  The next Democratic President should take those two instances of Democratic presidents being suckered like that to heart and find a dependable professional who isn't part of the indigenous criminal class that the Republican Party 2019 is.   No more Republican FBI directors, they've held that office way too long, already. 

On The Naivety Of Robert Mueller

Yesterday's attempt by Robert Mueller to set things right right in a nice, orderly, legalistic manner after nine weeks of his good buddy William Barr doing everything he could to ratfuck the public understanding of Mueller's report was widely praised but it was disgustingly inadequate.  I, to tell you the truth, found some of my worst fears about Mueller confirmed when he tried to exonerate the actions of Barr.  Considering the renewed howling for Democrats in the House to open an impeachment hearing that Mueller's short speech set off, it's remarkable that he doesn't seem to see that his buddy Barr's actions are no less clearly deserving impeachment.   

I heard Ari Melber with two former DoJ prosecutors who mildly criticized Mueller for his naivety which, considering how long Mueller was at the top of politically appointed positions IN LAW ENFORCEMENT!, I don't buy that for a second.  His reluctance to face the facts about another highly placed Republican who he worked and played with for decades is not based in innocence, it's based in a double standard, perhaps one similar to the one that another in those circles practiced, James Comey during the election of 2016. 

Mueller's reluctance to testify in public is not an act of integrity, it's an act of grotesque irresponsibility.  Suddenly, when it comes to this, the most important thing he has done to defend democracy and the rule of law, a guy who has testified numerous times to get those jobs, to report on his work to Congress in line with the requirements of the offices he held, the granite monument of integrity gets shy about doing that?

As we are constantly told these days, as Mueller implied yesterday, impeachment is not a judicial but a political act.  As Mueller pointed out in defense of his refusal to bring an indictment, the DoJ regulations takes the prosecution and removal of a president out of the hands of those in the judicial and legal arm of the government and places it exclusively in the hands of Congress, especially the House, where that would have to start.   Though that fact from Mueller, himself, makes his reluctance to inform that political action publicly an act of monumental irresponsibility.  

I think Mueller's insistence that he gave the Congress everything they needed and now it's all up to them is irresponsible, as well.  Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff and others in the leadership of the Congress have watched Democrats lose control of the House and regain it, only to have that pissed away by first Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich and then Barack Obama to Paul Ryan, only to be regained again.  They know better than almost anyone else possibly could what is required, now to protect and defend American democracy. 

THEY KNOW IN THE END THAT STOPPING THE DANGERS TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY THAT MUELLER PARTIALLY EXPOSED WILL REQUIRE HIM TELLING WHAT HE KNOWS NOT ONLY TO THE HOUSE BUT TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE THE ULTIMATE JURY THAT HAS TO BE CONVINCED.  

Perhaps Mueller needs to be taken down a peg or two, made to dismount his high horse or wised up or to face the fact that his friend, Barr, is a clear and present danger to democracy and the United States because he pursues a strong-man fascist view of the presidency.   Maybe it's one of those things or maybe it's a combination of some or all of them.  I can tell you that I've had about enough of the myth of Robert Mueller. 

I know that whenever I say that someone says "but he's a Vietnam vet," generally a line that comes from people who I suspect have no one within their families or close associates who were.  I've got several family members who were and all of them seem to understand this situation better than Mueller.  None of them enjoyed careers like the one Mueller clearly has enjoyed having with the financial and social and public advantages he has had.  

And I will repeat something I've been saying over and over again WHY ISN'T THE MEDIA PUTTING PRESSURE ON THE GODDAMNED REPUBLICAN SENATE TO DO WHAT THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO DO TO PROTECT THE UNITED STATES FROM ITS ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC.  I'm getting sick and tired of even Rachel Maddow's mantra on that.  

Cut Out The Tall Silent Type Act Mueller, It's Just Part Of The Cover Up At This Point

“He just did his job. For Mueller, it’s always about the work, and never about him.”   

That's what Sally Yates, the acting top official of the Justice Department, during an all too brief period when you might call it that without a sense of sarcasm, said about Robert Mueller today.  She said it in praise or the head of the Mueller Investigation, just the latest layer in the banana split of sweetness heaped on him.  

I have respect for Sally Yates but, as I said yesterday, I have a lot less for the lawyers in and around the Department of Justice with each passing day, with each passing day as Mueller is going in to work to adjust the report he wrote so William Barr can release and, we now know, spin what Mueller concluded about his investigation into criminality in the Trump campaign and regime by people close to Trump and Trump himself.   

With all due respect to Sally Yates, though, "always about the work" is not nearly enough when it comes to these issues.  What is needed is the protection of democracy from a fascist strong man of obvious amorality and depravity and if "about the work" doesn't do that then what Robert Mueller was a part of will have furthered the goal of Trump and Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordan, Lindsay Graham, you could name a list of those trying to impose a one, Republican-fascist party rule on the United States through corrupting the elections process, rigging the anti-democratic features embedded into the Constitution and, most of all, stacking the courts with their fellow Republican-fascists.   

Sally Yates, today, called Robert Mueller the “the inverse of the man he would ultimately come to investigate,” even as he's participating in William Barr's obvious manipulation of his report, participating in covering up what the House Democrats see of it and, probably of more importance, the supporting evidence of what Mueller and his team wrote.   If he didn't know it before, he knows today that Barr and Rosenstein are going to further spin what is released, knowing that Barr's Department of "Justice" has been keeping the Trump regime informed of what the Report says even as he stiffs the Congress and the American People. 

In such a circumstance, what she also  says about Mueller, that he is, “Distinctly apolitical, he confounds those who can’t comprehend a person driven by his all too uncommon values: honor, integrity, humility, service,”  I'll believe it when I see the full Report.  

I can't remember which lawyer it was who I heard say something the other night, something I'd thought but hadn't heard anyone else say,  How could Mueller have declared his work finish without getting a number of figures before a grand jury to answer questions or even to give a deposition,  Donald Trump sr. the major one of those.  Other information that has been coming out leads me to think he left major issues in this untouched, we may or may not know if that's the case.  If that's true and he doesn't address that deficiency of his report, I don't trust him.  If he leaves that as a dead letter as his report is peddled as a complete exoneration of Trump, as Barr is spinning it and as I have every expectation that Rosenstein will bare himself as the kind of Republican of repute who will do that for Trump, Robert Mueller's golden reputation is just more PR spin.  I remember being told similar things about James Comey.   The one person I didn't hear it about from top flight lawyers was Andrew McCabe and of all of them, he's the one who has come out least damaged in my thinking, so far.  He's the one who lost the most, too. 

Mueller Needs To Come Forward In Public Now Or His Reputation Should Be Considered A Fraud

Last week I pointed out that the Robert Mueller who so many have put their hopes in is reported to have been a close buddy of William Barr, the man who obstructing justice in withholding the Mueller Report and the underlying evidence.  I read how "the Muellers and the Barrs" are close friends who socialized frequently.  That was, I assume after Barr acted as a pillar in the cover-up of crimes in the Bush I administration, drafting Bush I's ass-covering pardons of criminals, some of them admitted criminals, one of them the convicted criminal who is working for the Trump regime and who, after his pardon, lied about serious matters to Congress.

Clearly Robert Mueller's sense of smell enables him to be buddies with the likes of William Barr, which is one of the reasons I have always been a lot more skeptical of his investigation than many others.   I would be skeptical of anyone who could remain a Republican after the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I - Bush II and now Trump regime crimes, especially someone who is a several times sworn law man.    When some Republican like Mueller is held up as a man of the highest principles, any honest and reasonable person has to wonder how a man like that could remain within such a totally corrupt institution.   One of those things is nothing like the other. 

After Barr's disgusting testimony before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, his declaration that he is going to obstruct to protect the most criminal of all these criminal regimes, AFTER SAYING THAT MUELLER COULD LEAK HIS OWN REPORT DIRECTLY TO THE CONGRESS BUT HE WASN'T GOING TO RELEASE IT AND CLAIMING THAT MUELLER IS WORKING WITH HIM IN HIS OBSTRUCTION, Robert Mueller should be judged by his continued scrupulosity in being a good old boy, someone who follows the letter of the law and rules as he is claimed to be participating in the assassination of its spirit.   And that's not even getting into his absolutely disgusting and dishonest spewing of words over him trying to throw tens of millions of people out of the healthcare system.  

If Mueller doesn't publicly call for the release of his report to the Congress along with the supporting evidence and the grand jury material, Robert Mueller should be considered yet another in the long line of Republicans who have disgraced themselves on behalf of Trump, other Republican criminals and the most criminal party in the history of the country.   Even late 19th century corruption in the Republican Party had a balancing rump of honorable men in office.  That's not the case now.   Mueller's honor will either be exercised in opposition to Barr's obstruction of justice or it will be proven to be a false front. 

Update:  "He's a Vietnam vet."  So is my brother-in-law whose skeleton is disintegrating due to Agent Orange exposure,  if he was covering up for William Barr I'd be asking the same questions about him. 

Prelude To The Pavane Of Prevarication By Propriety

I strongly suspect that in a little over 24 hours we are going to find that Robert Mueller is at least as much a Republican Party man as he is an "institutionalist" which I think will be seen most realistically as a word that means "ass coverer".  Remember Rod Rosenstein was also touted as an "institutionalist" when he was enough of an ass coverer that James Comey noted that.  Only he said he was worried about him because he was a "survivor". 

I think Robert Mueller was looking for an excuse to not answer questions when he sought Department of William Barr guidance on his upcoming testimony, testimony he was on record as being reluctant to give and which, at this point, the House Judicial and Intelligence committees should compel if he stonewalls as I expect him to.   I think Mueller's testimony is what must be the last straw before they go after Barr and the rest of his crew of Trump lawyers on the public dime.  They should go after their pay and other personal benefits, including their retirement, money being the one and only value that such gangsters have.  They should lay a good case for the disbarment of Barr and others who are involved with obstruction of justice.  If it means anything to him, they should be ready and willing to take down Mueller if he does anything more to obstruct justice.  

I suspect we are less than 48 hours from finding that the faith placed in Robert Mueller was unwise wishful thinking, daddy issues fantasy, that like the sterling character so many of his colleagues were willing to give James Comey and Rod Rosenstein, it wasn't worth the air it was declared in.  I've mentioned before that Republicans have been repeatedly had such claims made about them, when was the last time you really saw one of those live up to the hype?  

Robert Mueller should never have needed to be subpoenaed to testify to the House on these matters, he should never have needed to be negotiated with or have needed the members of the House to do the courtly little pavane pantomime of propriety with him.  At this point, if he turns out to be anything like the man of honor he's sold as instead of the Republican hack I am expecting him to continue to prove himself to be, I'll buy a hat and eat it.

Mueller Had Better Get Beyond His Professional Scruples If He Wants To Save His Reputation, If He Is The Genuine Article

When I read about Rod Rosenstein covering up for William Barr in the interview he gave to The Wall Street Journal I went back to check what I'd said about Rosenstein here and was glad to see that I never mentioned him without, at the very least, being skeptical about his sterling reputation with the class of DC, NYC, etc. lawyers and government officials who get on talk TV and radio.   And that's the most charitable thing I said about Rosenstein.  The truth is, I don't trust him, I don't believe he is more than careful about not getting himself in trouble at work.   I doubt he has any deep sense of morality. 

I don't believe anyone who is a Republican in the time of Trump or, in fact, since Bush II could have a deep sense of morality.  And as this post-Mueller investigation period continues, that includes the man Rosenstein hired to conduct the investigation Trump's own and his inner-circle's alarming and clear criminality made mandatory,  Robert Mueller.   I don't think anyone who knows the workings of the current and past Republican regimes on the intimate level that Rosenstein and Mueller must and who has remained a Republican, who has witnessed, close up, the political corruption among Republicans in Congress, Mitch McConnell and maintains membership in that party can be honestly believed to believe that it isn't a criminal operation, a collection of criminal operations.  

If Robert Mueller conducted an honest investigation, one which he, himself, reportedly concluded leads to reasonable conclusions that Donald Trump obstructed justice, a serious crime committed to shield serious crimes, and he is participating either actively, according to Barr, or passively, just sitting by as Barr and Trump use a distortion of his report, his life as a sworn law man makes his either malfeasance or nonfeasance on the basis of DoJ RULES a thing that condemns his actual character, perhaps even more than Rod Rosenstein's in his cowardly covering up for the outrageous behavior of Barr,.  Clearly Rosenstein is a practiced careerist, what seems to be the real meaning of the word "institutionalist", I'm beginning to suspect Mueller's sterling reputation is based in the same thing Rosenstein's is among people so used to seeing amorality that they can't tell the difference. 

I can tell you one thing, if any blue collar, minimum wage worker behaved like this no one would think of them as anything but a sleaze, the kind that neither Rosenstein nor Mueller would grant the benefit of the doubt like they have Trump or, now, Barr.  If the weekend goes by without Robert Mueller putting a stop to Barr and Trump's use of his reportedly thorough report, I don't think any better of him than I did Rod Rosenstein and I haven't trusted that little sleaze since finding out his participation in giving Trump an excuse to fire Comey, another deeply ambiguous and rather grimy Republican. 

The Watchman As Human Being Instead Of Heroic Monument

I wouldn't normally pay as much attention to Michael Wolff's claims about Robert Mueller and his claims about Mueller's investigation but watching on while Mueller let his thug mafia lawyer pal,  William Barr trash his work, obstruct Congress, ATTACK THE INVESTEGATORS ON BEHALF OF THE PRESIDENT WHO MUELLER CERTAINLY KNOWS OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE AND VERY LIKELY IS PUTIN'S INSTRUMENT IN THE PRESIDENCY! makes me far more open to considering if the celebrity journalist has a more realistic picture of Mueller and the weakness that Trump and his thugs have been able to take full advantage of.   I think the biggest question isn't that Mueller's public persona of integrity made him the right man for the job, I think think the bigger question is the borders and soft edges that are certainly there.   Real people, such as every human being has ever been, is not a damned granite statue, they're not movie-TV cartoon heroes, they're not goddamned Atticus Finch-Gregory Peck* or Albus Dumbledore.  We all have feet of clay and if not feet some other part of us will crumble or wash away.   That's especially true of anyone who could have remained a member of the Republican Party of the United States in the last several decades as it has descended ever more rapidly into the edges of fascism where we are now.

I don't remember who wrote or said in the past week that if Wolff's picture is even close to accuracy - I don't have any doubt about Wolff's weak spots - then one of the most vulnerable things about Mueller is his devotion to institutions, his devotion to the FBI, the Department of Justice and, as Wolff has said, his own investigative team's existence.   I have already, several times, mentioned Mueller's decades long habitation in the habitat of insider DC as a source of my skepticism about him.   He may, indeed, be the best of his local sub-species but he is still of that species.

There is a very real difference between a person put up as a hero and an actual hero and one of the real differences is in how much they are willing to sacrifice to do the right thing.  Real heroes would sacrifice the appearance of stability in the rotted out edifice of the law and the institutions of government that have been becoming obvious since the turn of the century.   The Bush v Gore imposition of one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States THROUGH THE MOST INSTITUTIONAL OF INSTITUTIONS OF ALLEGED JUSTICE, THE SUPREME COURT, held up by the establishment media as well as the gutter, Murdochian media,  was certainly enough to indicate that anyone who could be called "an institutionalist" as a compliment likely was in on that other corruption to some extent.  Now, with Trump imposed on us through the Supreme Court striking down every attempt by elected officials to protect our very electoral process from the kind of corruption that has produced a Trump that title, "institutionalist" is, itself holding corruption up as a virtue. 

Mueller's own history is a mix, included with actions in law enforcement that are uncontroversially seen as positive, he has been associated with dubious actions.  He was involved with the prosecution of Manuel Noriega, after George H. W. Bush invaded Panama to abduct him - killing, by credible estimates, more than six hundred People, many of the civilians - the cover up of which Mueller's friend William Barr conducted, That is something I have little doubt that Mueller knew about at the time, certainly he knew it after it became public.  His appointment to head the FBI was done by the illegitimate president,  George W. Bush. He gave Senate testimony that was clearly part of whipping up the invasion of Iraq, though it was hardly the most extreme example of lying, of the kind that another monument in simulated granite, Colin Powell engaged in, it was clearly part of it.   I see his appointments by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as little more than their acceptance of institutional Washington, parts of their choice to be weak presidents hankering after the title "bi-partisan," a title the virtue of which seems to be held out as exclusively applying to Democratic presidents. 

His actions which are pointed to as admirable, his refusal to go along with the worst programs of torture and dubious prosecution during that time, look to me, in retrospect, mostly done in the interest of protecting HIS institution, the FBI.  And, no doubt, it was done to protect his own reputation with respectable Washington and the respectable press, some of those who, now that it is in service to the center of power in the Trump regime, are turning on Mueller as the gutter press that is the more explicit branch of the media doing the billionaire oligarchs ground work, already has. 

As to Mueller's position as a hero, I don't buy it.  His service in Vietnam was him choosing to be a part of the military that was rare for those of his class at the time, I don't know his motives.   He was certainly no more heroic for that than many of the kids I knew who were drafted and sent there, some of whom suffered a lot more than Mueller did, any of whom I have to wonder about how they'd have been treated by Mueller the law man as opposed to someone like Barr. 

I have to form an image of Mueller based on his entire record, most of all on how he has acted as a public official and as the leader of his latest investigation and in his handling of Barr's obstruction.   And in that, in his continuing reticence at openly testifying about what he found and, most tellingly, how far he was willing to try to go and why he might have chosen not to, I can't say that I respect him.  

I think the adulation given to Mueller and the faith that was put in him have been far too much and that naive trust, itself is a symptom of the denial of reality.  I think what we are seeing in this as in all aspects of the Trump regime, the Republican-fascist ratfucking of our elections, including their refusal to protect the United States from Putin and other foreign gangsters, the Supreme Court's decades long assault on the integrity of our elections in favor of big money, Republicans gerrymandering to prevent democracy in ways that I think would make the Brits nauseated, the widespread dissemnination of overtly fascistic propaganda to directly corrupt the morals and minds of The People, the first and last target for those who want to kill legitimate government, egalitarian democracy by an adequately informed People OF GOOD-WILL, consideration of all of that might be the lens to view Robert Mueller through.  It is, I am convinced, the only one that will give you an accurate instead of a phony show-biz view of the world we live in and will likely die from. 

* I will always remember how when Harper Lee's first version (second published) and far more true-to-life Set A Watchman incarnation of Atticus Finch as an upper class racist of the 1950s as seen by a more evolved adult daughter facing his real character for the first time was met with such hurt outrage, even legal attempts to suppress its publication - EVEN BY THE ALABAMA STATE GOVERNMENT!.  That the peddler of mid-brow civic piety Aaron Sorkin has redone To Kill a Mockingbird for Broadway is probably not a good sign.  I read the books, I won't be seeing the Sorkin version.  I found Watchman Atticus more believable than Mockingbird Atticus.  That in the one it was the child Scout who saw him and in the other it was the adult Scout who did is certainly relevant to how Harper Lee wrote him.  As Flannery O'Connor noted, Mockingbird is a children's book.  I wonder if Atticus - Gregory Peck, most peoples' version of him - might not contribute dangerously to the delusional construction of such heroes as Mueller instead of looking realistically at the extent to which they are compromised by the privileges they enjoy.  

I'm Not Connected To Power And I've Got Lots Of Unanswered Questions

Ari Mulbers interview with Ken Starr's successor in the prosecution of Bill Clinton, Robert Ray, expressed hope that the American People would come to trust the results of the Mueller investigation, that they would trust the integrity of it, which is odd because I doubt there are many honest people who thought the Starr-Ray investigation met the most basic of requirements of trust and integrity.  Ray's antics on Mulber's special coverage of the Muller Report were sheer hackery. 

Today we don't know much more about Robert Mueller's report, we know what William Barr, a political hack whose previous statements about the investigation should have required him to recuse himself from having anything to do with the investigation, whose holding the position of Attorney General was a product of Trump shopping for his "Roy Cohn" is claiming about the results.  

While I don't fully trust any Republican in 2019, we don't have any basis of judging Robert Mueller's investigation and report unless the full report is made public and all of the evidence that he developed his conclusions on are made available to the Congressional committees who should have been the ones conducting an honest investigation worthy trust due to its integrity from the start. 

If there's one thing I don't trust it is the tendency of long time members of the legal establishment, the members of both parties who are what gets called "institutionalists" who all went to the same kinds of schools and who have a relationship to power that is too willing to give each other and those who are powerful a level of courtesy they don't give to the powerless.  

If I were on a congressional committee that had, say, Robert Mueller answering questions on his investigation, I would ask him if he had ever sought an indictment and prosecuted some relatively or totally powerless person on the same level of evidence or less evidence than there is that Trump was asking Russia to interfer with our elections to his benefit - who made that request before an audience of millions - whose children and son-in-law and those running his campaign met with Russian government agents who were offering to interfer in our election - who, after he fired the head of the FBI (hardly someone who had clean hands in rigging the election FOR Trump) because he wouldn't stop an investigation into his campaign and at least one person, Mike Flynn, who was known to be compromised, etc. etc. etc.  I would like to know if he had ever chosen to not prosecute someone who had given people so much obvious reason to believe he was guilty of criminal activities.  And I would want to know what the basis of him deciding whether or not to prosecute the powerless was made on. 

The rich and powerful are allowed to get away with things that those without money or power would never get away with.  That's not news.  It's also not news that Republicans get a far different treatment and similarly deferential treatment in the media and in politics, and sometimes by the law.  I remind you that I began with Ken Starr's successor.   William Barr participated in a particularly infamous incidence of that when he wrote up the Bush I pardons that shielded George H. W. Bush from his likely criminality.  I'd like to know if Robert Mueller gave Trump that kind of deferential treatment or if he can show that he deserves our trust due to his past and current practice of equal treatment before the law.  

I don't trust any of it without full enough transparency, without knowing enough to know if its worthy of trust. 

Quick, Almost Random Thoughts On The Mueller Show.

The expectations that Robert Mueller was going to put the case for impeachment over the top, or even that he was just going to kick-start it was ridiculously unrealistic.  The common as dirt movie plot gimmick of the savior daddy figure has made even educated people extremely unrealistic, that unrealism is ubiquitous, apparently.   

The very things that made Mueller's reputation, of being a well-functioning cog in the machine of the legal establishment is what makes him unwilling to go beyond the specifications of his functioning to keep it from driving off a cliff.  For crying out loud, he was OK enough with the oozing sleaze and manipulation of the law of his friend William Barr whose known history has been as an engine of Republican-fascist corruption and criminality, no doubt if pressed to give an answer Mueller would come up with some legalistic - bureaucratic  babble to excuse Barr's conduct.  

Well, I've been warning you for a time about that kind of annoyingly respectable boy-scouting based on following rules to the letter, it's been obvious for a long, long time that the rules as written, and as corruptly interpreted by courts and lawyers who figure their job is to find ways to do as much bad as you can while not technically breaking the law as written are what brought us here.  All human made systems are imperfect, even with the best of intentions, such legal types are trained in finding out how to not only break but to smash the clear moral intent of the law in order to allow those able to do what they want to.   Or who have the money to hire those who will do it for them.  There's a reason that Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen is in prison for doing things that Trump ended up in the White House, ordering him to do them. 

The system as it is got us to this, the law as interpreted down the centuries by that engine of such legalistic loophole finding and expanding and cutting through to allow worse, the Supreme Court, other courts, is not what's going to save us.  A master of it - which I don't think Robert Muller is, though he is a student of the masters - is not going to admit that the system, itself, is inadequate to protect egalitarian democracy.  

---------------------------

My biggest annoyance in this is that the media, from top to twitter level, is putting the blame for Trump still being in office IN EXACTLY THE WRONG PLACE.  It isn't House Democrat's fault that Trump was put there, it isn't their fault that it is next to impossible for them, in their position in the Constitutional system UNDER REAL LIFE CONDITIONS, to get him out of there no matter how obvious his criminality, no matter how obvious his dangerous unfitness for the position that Republican voters put him into.

The carping at Democrats in the House when it is Republicans in the House and the Senate and in the media and who vote in elections who gave us Trump is symptomatic of the even bigger defect in American democracy, the corrupted electorate.  Since it is the media that has lied and corrupted the morals of enough Americans to produce presidencies by a series of corrupt, criminal Republican administration and two completely illegitimate regimes put into office by minority vote, for them to blame Democrats is just them continuing their practices that got us here.  

In the end Trump is in office, placed there, maintained there by the electorate, by the effectively managed parts of the electorate that produced Republican majorities in the Senate, large enough margins of Republicans who will never vote to impeach and remove Trump from office - we have never had a Republican minority large enough to remove a Republican criminal from the presidency, the one chance that might have happened, Nixon, is unknown because it was not tested.  It is just possible there were enough semi-honest Republicans in 1974 to have removed him from office, though it is just as possible that that would have failed.   We like to imagine it would have happened, then, it is sheer delusion for anyone to think it would have happened in any of the forty-five years after that AND TODAY'S REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE MOST CORRUPT IT HAS BEEN AT ANY TIME IN THE COUNTRIES EXISTENCE, EVEN THE MOST CORRUPT CONGRESSES AND SENATES OF THE 19TH CENTURY CAN'T SURPASS IT IN CORRUPTION.

The demand that the Democrats in the House do what can't be done because of Republicans is, itself, a demonstration of unreality, exactly the kind of unreality that got us here.  It is a product of most peoples' civics education coming from Hollywood, from entertainment that isn't required to give us an image of reality. The late night comedians*, even those who do a good job, aren't likely to tell you the truth about that, they're as part of their system as Robert Mueller is.   That they are frequently the foremost truth tellers in 2019, Trump ridden America is a demonstration of the problems we have gotten into.  

The Hebrew prophets describing the corruption of ancient Israel have a lot to teach us about what got us here.  Their descriptions of corrupted People and the governments that inevitably arise when People are led astray and the wide ranging consequences are going to tell you more than even Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee will, and Colbert and Bee will tell you more than anyone in the journalistic side of things.  Much as I like her work most times, Rachel Maddow, one of if not the smartest of them was holding the torch for Mueller so long that I think she must have felt it burn her hand yesterday.  

We are in a mess that the habits and traditional mechanisms of American democracy won't get us out of, it is what was manipulated to get us here.  The media that lied to us and corrupted us by selling us what we most wanted instead of what we most needed, scientifically taking advantage of our strongest weakenesses was how we were corrupted.  TV, other media are the vehicles that drove us over the cliff, the fantasy cop-daddy figure of Robert Mueller isn't going to save us.  I don't think he would be willing to break the rules to do it.  He will not be blamed for the systematic inadequacies that created this catastrophe.

The Permission Given To American Billionaires To Destroy Democracy Is What Putin's Mob Used To Do What They Were Doing

I have been stating for a number of months now that the exclusive concern over the Russian billionaires of Putin's crime regime interfering in American elections is too narrow, it's not all that much worse when a gang of Russian billionaires do it than when American billionaires do it.  That's not to say what Putin did was any less of a danger, it is to point out that when American billionaires are allowed to do it, under the First Amendment, it is as dangerous to egalitarian democracy. 

If you might argue that when the courts and the laws allow American billionaires to sway elections they at least have the foreign policy interests in common with the good of the United States that is certainly not true.  Many of our worst and most consequential disasters in foreign policy have been at the behest and in the interest of wealthy oligarchs, disasters that have cost enormous numbers of lives, enormous numbers of people maimed, and enormous expense in rapidly descending order of moral significance.  

The critics of the Citizens United ruling warned before it was handed down that it opened up the United States to the manipulation of foreign powers - something the "Justices" voting in favor of that soi disant free-speech ruling certainly knew of when they made that ruling.  It clearly didn't bother them that they were opening up our country like a sardine can, why would it, they've been doing that for domestic oligarchs and gangster-billionaires their entire careers.   And, as can be read in briefs filed by such so-called civil liberties groups as the ACLU, it doesn't really much bother them, either.  Since I am a liberal and I write from the far left of traditional American liberalism, I am never going to not point out the collusion of the pseudo-left as embodied in the ACLU with the fascists in this matter. 

I have also, in recent weeks, expressed my show-me skepticism that a fixture in the same legal establishment as all of the above, a Republican insider law man, Robert Mueller will turn out to be the savior of American democracy that so many are holding him up to be.  Even if he were one of those legendary "good Republicans, good conservatives" of the kind that so many were holding Rod Rosenstein out as being, I doubt he has the inclination to really consider the depth of danger that we are under from billionaire-millionaire attacks on democracy, I think his prep-Ivy league credentials make that far less probable, not mitigated by his atypical military service.   I think it will turn out that someone like Robert Mueller is not who is needed to save us.  

Though, now that he is the focus of Republican-fascist attack, perhaps he will understand more fully the level of danger we are in and have been in for much of the post-WWII period.  Perhaps his good friend William Barr's behavior will be what wakes up the guy in his eighth decade and he will redeem himself from skepticism like mine and he will sacrifice his official respectability to achieve something far greater and tell the truth, the whole truth about what he did find, what he looked for, what he did not look into and what he gave to other entities to look into because he lacked the time or he wanted to distance them from the corrupt clique at the head of Trump's Department of Justice so as to preserve evidence.   And if he really wants to achieve that level of greatness, I doubt he's going to do it by sticking to "just the facts, ma'am" he's going to have to give an honest analysis of what it means, if someone of his background is able to imagine that.  If I were having this conversation with him, I would point out the limits of imagination shown by so many of his former Department of Justice colleagues when it came to imagining William Barr and Rod Rosenstein's willingness to damage American democracy for the likes of Donald Trump and his agenda.

One of the more velvet glove attacks on Robert Mueller I've seen or heard was on the Lawfare site, posted by one of its co-founders Jack Goldsmith.*  It is a good example of how a lawyer can defend the indefensible, William Barr's conduct in regard to the Mueller investigation and Report, using all of those outs and dodges that lawyers are trained to find to turn its clear purpose around to face the other way.  I think that's what Jesus meant when he said the letter of the law leads to death even as its spirit gives life.   I don't think a better case can be made for William Barr, ignoring the fact that he blatantly lied, blatantly deceived, blatantly misled Congress while under oath and that he is clearly part of the cover-up Trump hired him to conduct.  The excuse that under William Barr's interpretation of Article II of the Constitution, the president has dictatorial powers of the kind the Founders wanted to avoid as they wrote it, is no excuse at all.  The Constitution made the president merely the executor of laws the Congress made, Congress, the entity to whom Barr lied, was clearly the superior authority under the Constitution.  The Congress is (allegedly) given the power to remove a president or a Supreme Court justice, no president nor even the Court is empowered to remove Congress.  

I have heard a lifetime of conservatives whining about the authority given to departments of the executive on the basis that their rules and regulations lacked congressional adoption and now, under the unitary executive, even more expansive powers, even to break the law, even to sell us out to enemies foreign and domestic, are claimed for the same executive.  

No one should be under any, possible impression that any of that right-wing discourse has been honest and above board, it has been, all along, academic babbling towards the end of destroying democracy in favor of oligarchic domination, changing completely, depending on the desired result.  The "unitary executive" theory that Barr holds is a view of things that is an overtly fascistic view of the presidency.  According to Goldsmith, that view of things has been common on the right:

Barr’s views on executive power are not shared by everyone, of course, but they basically reflect a standard conservative legal interpretation of Article II for almost fifty years now. 

I would imagine that if you point out the fascistic nature of the unitary executive its proponents would point to the mythic power of impeachment of the president, something which has never been followed to fruition in the conviction and removal of a sitting president, something which requires a super-majority in the Senate to accomplish and which in reality will never be achieved as the history of that alleged power proves.  Those who are clamoring that the House impeach Trump are both right and wrong, he is eminently impeachable, they are wrong if they say that House Democrats will be giving up the power of impeachment if they don't impeach, that power to accomplish the removal of a president doesn't exist in reality.  As a protection against the overtly fascistic nature of the unitary executive view of presidents as articulated by William Barr and all of the rest of the Ivy League trained lawyers and law scholars, impeachment is a figment of the imagination.  The unitary executive theory is one that is so dangerous and, according to Goldsmith, so widely held by conservatives that unless and until it is abolished by law, by constitutional amendment, if necessary, it is as dangerous to us as Citizens United and Buckley v Valeo are.  

Goldsmith's article is a skilled construction meant to obfuscate the real character of the Trump obstruction as executed by William Barr.  It is a lawyer's argument for why the most obviously wrong things should be allowed, a defense of the indefensible.  It is the kind of thing that, I hope, will become moot as the Congressional investigations subpoena the Mueller Report and Trumps financial records and whatever else they need to do things that I am entirely confident Mueller didn't and wouldn't do.  Things that the Department of Justice regulations and the oversight of Rosenstein and Barr would have impeded him from looking at.  I hope that Willaim Barr is prosecuted for the perjury he committed under oath while holding the office of Attorney General acting as Trump's mafia lawyer.  

But until the full danger of billionaire-millionaire manipulation of our politics and the media are ended, this is going to happen again and again until they succeed in totally destroying the possibility of equality under the law in a democracy. 

I don't know if Robert Mueller is one of those conservatives who held the same view of the presidency that his friend William Barr did.  If he did, I hope he sees where that leads, now.  Maybe he'll be asked about that, maybe he'll talk about it.  If he doesn't condemn it, I wouldn't count on him getting to the root of what is so dangerous about having a president working hand in glove with the Putin crime regime.  It wasn't much better when we had one working hand in glove with American billionaire gangsters. 

*  To give you a good idea of where he's coming from, here's his bio from Lawfare:  Jack Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003.

Donald Trump Treasonous Robber Baron As President

Wow, Trump is apparently on a path that will become a super Saturday Night Massacre in the entire Justice Department, going after everyone from his own Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General he appointed and also the Acting Director of the FBI and the special council investigating the treason Trumps campaign committed with the Putin crime regime.   Trumps excuse for implying he might fire any or all of the above is that the Robert Mueller investigation is looking into Trump crime family finances.  Obviously, there is something even someone as stupid and demented as Trump knows is illegal in the records Mueller is either in possession of or which he might soon be in possession of.  My suspicion on that isn't that Trump would have realized that, himself but that a lawyer or some advisor such as Steve Bannon or, who knows, some Russian attorney or official has told him that his fat ass might well be in a sling unless Trump gets rid of the line of his own appointees that stand between him and Robert Mueller.

This is literally the robber baron MO transplanted from the late 19th century to 2017, the kind of robber baron who would tell a lawyer that he didn't hire him to tell him how to follow the law but how to break the law and get away with it.   This is the robber baron, traitor as president doing that.

Donald Trump and his criminal son and son-in-law, arguably his daughter, perhaps other members of his family and inner circle, must be investigated, his statements that are coming out from his interview with the New York Times, overnight, are more outrageous than anything Richard Nixon ever said.   It is certain that there are things that are being discovered by Robert Mueller that Trump knows about which Trump doesn't want revealed.  It is certain that some of those are at least a total outrage and very likely felonious.

Donald Trump is going to go down, the only protection any of the members of his criminal family have is for him or Mike Pence or whoever might become president pardon them.   It's way past time for the Constitution to be amended to make the pardon of a president who commits treason with a foreign adversary impossible.  It should have been amended when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon but with Trump that possibile way for him to ultimately win the cover up has to be removed.  Mike Pence is as much in danger as some of the members of the Trump family, he has certainly lied about what he knew about Russian collusion during the campaign.  There are a few classes of crimes possible by those at the very top of the government which are so dangerous that anyone who commits them should know there is no possibility of getting off as Nixon did.  That is a lesson we now know that those who drafted the provisions of the presidential power of pardon didn't know.  No president should have the power to pardon other presidents when they commit treason and the kinds of covering up of their crimes that Trump is openly talking about doing.  Future Trumps should know they have no way out, it might impede their tendencies to commit treason.   If  Trump gets away with it, don't be surprised if, within the next two decades, we get another one doing it.

I would put Jeff Sessions on that list of people who should go down and be imprisoned if it is found he committed the crimes I, at least, suspect him of.   In his case, with his abuse of power as a prosecutor, a politician and now Attorney General, he deserves whatever bad comes his way.

The Shit Values Of The Department of Justice and FBI

As I wrote last month, I was struck at the contrast between the carrerists of the Department of Justice and FBI and those in the State Department who defied orders to testify to the House Intelligence Committee late last year.  The actions of the "Justice" hacks are, of course, exemplified by Robert Mueller's refusal to stick his granitic chin out in order to reveal the presidential treason* of Donald Trump, other members of the same circles such as Rod Rosenstein, and James Comey**, the kind of members of the DC legal establishment who their colleagues, even those who left in horror and disgust at the antics of Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and William Barr call honorable "institutionalists" who "love the Department of Justice" or the "FBI"  and who could be counted on to do the right thing due to that devotion to the departments that employed them.  Though in the popular culture and imagination, the diplomats are presented as the caviar and champagne reception set, what was on display in their willingness to patriotically, out of principle and morality, defy  orders in order to tell the truth about the Trump corruption and criminality was courage, valor and high principle as compared to the ass-covering refusal of the "lawmen".   If you want a sharp reminder, a lot of the same "never Trumper" former DOJ lawyers were assuring us we could count on their colleague Rod Rosenstein to do the right thing, a line of bilge bought hook, line and sinker by even some of the smartest members of the press, such as Rachel Maddow. 

If you're at all curious about where good ol' Rod is these days:

Rod Rosenstein still believes he’s one of the good guys. In fact, he filed a Declaration saying just that last Friday in FBI agent Peter Strzok’s wrongful termination lawsuit. He had to secretly release his employees’ personal texts in the dead of the night with strict instructions that reporters should attribute them so as to imply that they were leaked by Congress. Because if he hadn’t breached every department norm and thrown his employees under the bus, then surely Lisa Page and Peter Strzok would have been ritually humiliated by congressional Republicans. If you think about it (but not too hard), Rosenstein really did them a big favor.

Yes, that’s really the line they’re going with here.

I have to say that I am pretty well entirely sure that Robert Mueller must have known that it was his boss during his investigation, the guy who stood like a glass eyed dummy behind William Barr as he started the cover-up, distortion of the Mueller Report, the same Robert Mueller who, then, pretty well refused to back up his own work by talking about it when he, finally, reluctantly, after giving Barr the chance to bury his investitation with a mountain of lies for weeks and weeks, knew about what we're finding out about Rosenstein's leak now. 

I would leave you with this discussion chaired last night by Rachel Maddow in which the classified memo by Jennifer Williams that as put in the Senate record might be revealed by a Senator, something that Senator Claire McCaskill says she wouldn't be surprised if a Senator, realizing the importance of it becomming public didn't make it public.  It's the former Department of Justice stalwart, Chuck Rosenberg who sounds like a nervous nellie who just can't imagine someone putting themselves at risk considering the terrible peril the country is in. 

Such is the ass-covering, corrupt culture of the DoJ and FBI that they can't imagine someone putting patriotism, democracy, morality above their carrerist interests. 

*  The dangerously narrow confines of the Constitutional definition of treason needs to be amended to make what Donald Trump as president do by way of colluding with the enemies of the United States for his personal gain officially and legally treasonous.  The enormous power stupidly ceeded to the presidency makes it necessary to make presidents subject to an enhanced level of legal control on their behavior.  That our Constitution will make that virtually impossible merely exposes the kinds of defects that lawyers who study it looking for ways they and their client can game it can find all through it.  Even those provisions presented with the most absurdly discredited piety are raked over for making crimes legal, some of them among the worst of crimes. 

**  As of this time, about the only leadership of the FBI in its history who I have any respect for is Andrew McCabe.  From what I can see he has, actually, acted heroically.