Thursday, March 28, 2019

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

The Trump regime cover-up of the full Mueller report continues, and five days after declaring in massive headline font that MUELLER FINDS NO TRUMP-RUSSIA CONSPIRACY, the NY Times once again that it may have been had by Trump.

The still-secret report on Russian interference in the 2016 election submitted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, last week was more than 300 pages long, according to American officials with knowledge of it, a length that raises new questions about Attorney General William P. Barr’s four-page summary.

Mr. Barr wrote to Congress on Sunday offering what he called the “principal conclusions” of the report — including that Mr. Mueller had not found evidence that the Trump campaign took part in a conspiracy to undermine the election. But he had notably declined to publicly disclose its length.

The total of 300-plus pages suggests that Mr. Mueller went well beyond the kind of bare-bones summary required by the Justice Department regulation governing his appointment and detailed his conclusions at length. And it raises questions about what Mr. Barr might have left out of the four dense pages he sent Congress.

Democrats, who like all other lawmakers have not seen the report, have all but accused Mr. Barr of covering up damaging information it contains. They have specifically focused on an apparent difference between the views of Mr. Barr and Mr. Mueller on whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. Democrats have demanded that the attorney general make the full report and evidence public.


The American officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss details of the report, titled “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.”

The Justice Department has continued to decline to publicly give an official page number, though a senior Justice Department official told reporters on the day it was received that the report was “comprehensive.”

Getting the idiots at the Times and other media outlets to finally admit that the Barr Letter is not the Mueller report is something that took almost a week, while Trump is busy doing victory laps and his party is calling for the resignation and/or blacklisting of as many Democrats as possible over the "vindication" of Trump by "the Mueller report".

Maybe House Democrats can make this happen, but it's going to take the American people demanding this daily for it to actually occur.  Republicans know they can block this as long as they want, because Americans won't tear themselves away from Netflix or cat videos long enough to stay home from work and fill the streets.

Everyone believes somebody else will take care of it.

That's not how this works.

Jussie-fied By The Circumstances, Con't

Donald Trump continues to go after political enemies, which is everyone who didn't vote for Trump, announcing today on Twitter that he's ordered the FBI and Justice Department  to look into federal charges against actor Jussie Smollett over an allegedly hate crime hoax case in Chicago that was completely dropped by Cook County prosecutors.

President Donald Trump again leaned into a controversial issue that has ignited his base -- the case of "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett -- when he announced Thursday that the Department of Justice would review Smollett's case after conservatives decried a prosecutor's decision Tuesday to unexpectedly drop all charges against the actor, who was accused of staging a hate crime against himself in Chicago. 
"FBI & DOJ to review the outrageous Jussie Smollett case in Chicago," Trump wrote on Twitter Thursday morning. "It is an embarrassment to our Nation!" 
The Department of Justice and the FBI declined to comment when asked about the President's tweet. 
Smollett went to police in January claiming he had been attacked by two men who tied a noose around his neck, poured bleach on him, used racial and homophobic slurs, and shouted, "This is MAGA country," a reference to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan. 
Initially reacting to Smollett's claims, Trump denounced the alleged attack, as others did, telling reporters in January, "I think that's horrible. It doesn't get worse as far as I'm concerned." 
But after Chicago police investigated, they alleged that Smollett had hired two men to stage the attack, though those charges were dropped by a prosecutor Tuesday. 
On the day Smollett was arrested, Trump tweeted, "What about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments?" 
Trump's comments on Smollett's case comes ahead of a 2020 re-election battle as he tries to capitalize on another issue to animate his base. 

He's fanning hate and stoking outrage in order to keep the monsters in his base fed, lest they turn on him, but we should all be worried about a commander-in-chief who orders FBI investigations of American citizens over twitter.

The Reason For Treason Season

As I said Tuesday, the practical upshot of the Barr snow job on the Mueller report is that Trump feels 100% emboldened to go after people he sees as his political enemies openly now, and he doesn't believe anyone can or will bother to stop him.  Now he's upped the ante considerably by publicly accusing two FBI agents involved in the Mueller probe, Peter Strzok and Linda Page, of treason.

President Donald Trump said former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page committed treason when they took steps to investigate his possible ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.

“They wanted an insurance policy against me,” Trump said Wednesday in an interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, the president’s first since Attorney General William Barr announced on Sunday that Robert Mueller had found no coordination between his campaign and the Russian government. “And what we were playing out until just recently was the insurance policy. They wanted to do a subversion. It was treason. It was really treason.”

“If the Republican party had done this to the Democrats, if we had done this to President Obama you’d have a hundred people in jail right now, it’d be treason,” he added.
Trump has long suggested that Mueller’s investigation was politically motivated and since it concluded he has called called for an inquiry into its origins. And on Monday, Trump said “people out there” had done “treasonous things against our country” and called for an investigation into their actions, without specifying what he meant.

“We can never allow these treasonous acts happen to another president,” Trump said.

I know more than a few of you think it's talk and bluster.  So far it has been.  But that rhetoric is dangerous, and unlike all of the bumbling conservative ghouls out there howling for blood, Trump actually could, at any time, order the Justice Department to prosecute Strzok and Page.

And maybe a lot more.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested the investigation was the result of some sort of targeted operation. “It went very high up, and it started fairly low, but with instructions from the high up,” he said. Asked if he was accusing senior members of President Barack Obama’s White House staff, Trump said he did not “want to say that, but I think you know the answer."

Maybe the American people will finally cut Trump off at the knees if he tries it.

But we also elected this idiot.

StupidiNews!