Last Call For That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

It's pretty clear from this week's NY Times team piece on Trump's acting AG Matt Whitaker that Donald Trump clearly expected Whitaker, who was running the Justice Department up until William Barr was confirmed last week, to end the Mueller investigation and fully take the lightning bolts for doing it.  He also wanted Whitaker to end the Southern District US Attorney investigation into Cohen (and into the Trump Organization, too). Whitaker didn't, and that only pissed off Trump even more, and all of it is part of a two-year plus long Trump effort to obstruct justice.

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Mr. Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to “jump on a grenade” for the president, knew he could not put Mr. Berman in charge, since Mr. Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. The president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.

Trying to install a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry is a familiar tactic for Mr. Trump, who has been struggling to beat back the investigations that have consumed his presidency. His efforts have exposed him to accusations of obstruction of justice as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, finishes his work investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s public war on the inquiry has gone on long enough that it is no longer shocking. Mr. Trump rages almost daily to his 58 million Twitter followers that Mr. Mueller is on a “witch hunt” and has adopted the language of Mafia bosses by calling those who cooperate with the special counsel “rats.” His lawyer talks openly about a strategy to smear and discredit the special counsel investigation. The president’s allies in Congress and the conservative media warn of an insidious plot inside the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to subvert a democratically elected president.

An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama. 

White House lawyers wrote a confidential memo expressing concern about the president’s staff peddling misleading information in public about the firing of Michael T. Flynn, the Trump administration’s first national security adviser. Mr. Trump had private conversations with Republican lawmakers about a campaign to attack the Mueller investigation. And, there was the episode when he asked his attorney general about putting Mr. Berman in charge of the Manhattan investigation.

Mr. Whitaker, who earlier this month told a congressional committee that Mr. Trump had never pressured him over the various investigations, is now under scrutiny by House Democrats for possible perjury.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said that the White House had not asked Mr. Whitaker to interfere in the investigations. “Under oath to the House Judiciary Committee, then Acting Attorney General Whitaker stated that ‘at no time has the White House asked for nor have I provided any promises or commitments concerning the special counsel’s investigation or any other investigation,’” said the spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec. “Mr. Whitaker stands by his testimony.”

The White House declined to comment for this article.

The story of Mr. Trump’s attempts to defang the investigations has been voluminously covered in the news media, to such a degree that many Americans have lost track of how unusual his behavior is. But fusing the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession. Mr. Trump has done it with the same tactics he once used in his business empire: demanding fierce loyalty from employees, applying pressure tactics to keep people in line, and protecting the brand — himself — at all costs.

The immediate question I have is "Does Bill Barr do what Matt Whitaker wouldn't and end the Mueller probe?"  He probably won't.

Probably.

Meanwhile, the FBI is confirming Andrew McCabe's account that it moved quickly to secure Russian collusion evidence after James Comey was fired.  It's precisely because there are so many angles of investigation into the corrupt Trump regime that makes shutting down the investigation tough,

Another Hat Lands In The Ring, Con't

As expected, Bernie Sanders will be running for President in 2020.  Whether or not it's on the Democratic ticket is anyone's guess.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose 2016 presidential campaign grew from a left-wing insurgency to a force that reshaped the Democratic Party, announced Tuesday that he will seek its nomination for president again in 2020.

Sanders wrote in an email sent to supporters Tuesday that he was building “an unprecedented and historic grassroots campaign” that would draw on people across the country.

“Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history. It is not only about winning the Democratic nomination and the general election,” he wrote. “Our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”

The senator, an independent, cited health care, climate change, student debt, the “demonization” of undocumented immigrants, income inequality, gun violence and the myriad problems of America’s needy as propelling him into his second presidential contest.

“In a sense, this campaign is a continuation of what we did in 2016,” Sanders said during an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning.”

Asked how this bid would differ from his first run, Sanders said, “We’re gonna win.”

During an earlier interview with Vermont Public Radio, where he first announced his bid, Sanders called Trump “an embarrassment to our country.

“I think he is a pathological liar,” Sanders said. “I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”

Sanders, who has held dozens of political rallies across the country since the 2016 election, enters the race with the biggest social media following — and biggest mailing list — of any candidate for the Democratic nomination. His decision came after a number of groups that spun out from his 2016 run, such as Our Revolution and People for Bernie, held house parties to mobilize his old supporters, and to find new ones.

After coming a few hundred delegates short of victory in 2016, Sanders begins a 2020 race with some advantages. He is one of the best-known and most admired figures in Democratic politics, though he is not a member of the party. He built campaign operations in every primary and caucus state.

But unlike Hillary Clinton, who recovered from her 2008 primary defeat to become the party’s front-runner in 2016, Sanders has not built on his support from the prior campaign. In early polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he won 50 percent and 60 percent of the vote, support for the senator from Vermont has ranged from the low teens to 30 percent.

The problem for Sanders this time around is that Hillary Clinton isn't in the race, and he lost to her anyway.

The field is wide-open and he has a lot more competition now, on top of the fact that he still has all the old baggage from 2016: we still haven't seen his tax returns, he still undervalues black and Latino voters, and most importantly he's still expecting to be nominated for a party he refuses to join outright.

Case in point from his interview this morning with Vermont Public Radio:

When asked by VPR's Bob Kinzel about concerns that he no longer best represents "the face of the new Democratic Party," Sanders, 77, said:

"We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age," Sanders said. "I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for."

"Representation doesn't matter" is a hell of a message, Bern.

We'll see what happens.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Trump's base now feels it can safely and publicly call for the return of the KKK to "clean out enemies of America", which of course was the point all along.

The editor of a small-town Alabama newspaper published an editorial calling for "the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again" against "Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats [who] are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama."

Goodloe Sutton — who is the publisher of the Democrat-Reporter newspaper in Linden, Alabama — confirmed to the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday that he authored the Feb. 14 editorial calling for the return of a white supremacist hate group.

"If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we'd all been better off," Sutton said.

Asked to elaborate what he meant by "cleaning up D.C.," Sutton suggested lynching.

"We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," Sutton said.

When asked if he felt it was appropriate for the publisher of a newspaper to call for the lynching of Americans, Sutton doubled down on his position.

"... It's not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we're talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?" Sutton said.

This is what every single Republican means by "making America Great Again", an America where they rule, and the rest of us are suffered to exist only by the grace of their tolerance.  We're not Americans to people like Sutton, not even people, only obstacles to be slaughtered in genocide, meat to be burned, skin and bones to crackle and split in the flames.

In the newspaper editorial, Sutton wrote:

Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama. They do not understand how to eliminate expenses when money is needed in other areas. This socialist-communist ideology sounds good to the ignorant, the uneducated, and the simple-minded people.
When asked if he recognized the KKK as a racist and violent organization, Sutton disagreed, comparing the Klan to the NAACP.

"A violent organization? Well, they didn't kill but a few people," Sutton said. "The Klan wasn't violent until they needed to be."

Sutton said he didn't know any Klan remaining in the area, stating most died out after the 1960s.

The editor said he welcomed people to call him, write him a letter or boycott him.

The time to start killing Democrats is at hand, according to this man.

Would that I believed for a second that Donald Trump didn't agree with him, 100%.

StupidiNews!

• California and fifteen other states have officially filed a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump's emergency declaration for border wall money, several NGO groups have also filed suits.
• The sailor kissing a woman in Times Square in an iconic Time Magazine V-J Day photograph from 1945 has died at the age of 95, George Mendonsa died after a seizure Sunday.
• Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to step down from his position in mid-March, the Mueller investigation will continue to be overseen by newly confirmed AG William Barr.
• China aims to make Hong Kong and Macau into the new Silicon Valley with a major infrastructure project dubbed "The Greater Bay Area".
• With more American streaming video rather than watching on Blu-ray discs, Samsung says it will no longer make Blu-ray players for the US.