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

The jig on the Barr coverup of the Mueller Report is so far up it's heading for a neighboring galaxy.

Not all of Robert S. Mueller III’s findings will be news to President Trump when they are released Thursday morning.

Justice Department officials have had numerous conversations with White House lawyers about the conclusions made by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The talks have aided the president’s legal team as it prepares a rebuttal to the report and strategizes for the coming public war over its findings.

A sense of paranoia is taking hold among some of Mr. Trump’s aides, some of whom fear his backlash more than the findings themselves, the people said. The report might make clear which of Mr. Trump’s current and former advisers spoke to the special counsel, how much they said and how much damage they did to the president — providing a kind of road map for retaliation.

The discussions between Justice Department officials and White House lawyers have also added to questions about the propriety of the decisions by Attorney General William P. Barr since he received Mr. Mueller’s findings late last month.

Mr. Barr and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, determined that Mr. Trump did not illegally obstruct justice and said the special counsel found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference. Mr. Barr told lawmakers that officials were “spying” on the Trump campaign, raised ominous historical parallels with the illegal surveillance of Vietnam War protesters and pointedly declined to rebut charges that Mr. Mueller’s investigators were engaged in a “witch hunt.”

Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department declined to comment. Mr. Barr, who plans to hold a news conference at 9:30 a.m. Thursday to discuss the special counsel’s report, refused to answer questions from lawmakers last week about whether the department had given the White House a preview of Mr. Mueller’s findings.

I mean, at this point Barr is literally helping Trump's lawyers prepare a rebuttal to information before that information is made public, and at this point anything that is public should be considered highly suspect.  This is the equivalent of the White House writing its own report on the investigation into itself.  It stinks to hell and back.

And none of Mueller's team will be at the press conference tomorrow morning, let alone Mueller himself.  This is a screw job of epic proportions.

Once Trump and Barr bury this, it's done.  If we don't raise hell here and now, we are done.

It's About Suppression, Con't

The latest feigned outrage by House Republicans where they tell Elijah Cummings, a black Democrat, to know his place, is over Democrats investigating GOP efforts to suppress millions of votes in red states. This of course is something Republicans have to have in order to survive as a party and to keep red states red, so they're pretty upset over this.

House Democrats overstepped their authority by asking state officials for information as part of an inquiry into allegations of voter suppression, top Republicans on the U.S. House’s investigatory committee said Monday.

The Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee voiced their objections Monday in a letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee chairman, and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who chairs a subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties. The two Democrats sent letters to officials in Georgia, Texas and Kansas earlier this year asking for documents related to controversial election decisions in 2018.

“We have serious concerns that your letters appear to be an attempt to insert the Committee into particular state election proceedings, for which we do not see a legitimate legislative purpose,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member on the committee, wrote in a letter signed by three other Republicans. “By seeking voluminous records relating to election administration of sovereign states, your investigation offends state-federal comity. In fact, the respective states are already working to resolve any issues with their election administration.”

The U.S. Constitution gives states the authority to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections but also gives Congress the authority to make its own regulations or “alter” state election laws.

The Republicans also wrote directly to the officials in the three states the committee is focused on and suggested the inquiry was not legitimate. One of the state officials, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), told the committee last week he was rebuffing the request for information. GOP Reps. Chip Roy (Texas), Jody Hice (Ga.) and Michael Cloud (Texas) also signed Jordan’s letter.

Raskin pushed back on the letter in a statement Monday evening, saying the committee had broad investigative power.

“The U.S. Congress has the power and obligation to enforce the voting rights of the people as spelled out in the 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, and 24th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, a power we have exercised repeatedly in statutes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Americans with Disabilities Act to shut down state action hostile to democratic participation,” he said in a statement.

Cummings replied in a statement Monday night, “It’s disappointing that Rep. Jordan is so opposed to oversight at so many levels. With a Democratic President, there was no allegation too small to investigate, but now that Donald Trump is in the White House, there is apparently no scandal too big to ignore. Democrats will do everything in our power to investigate reports of voter suppression, and we expect full compliance with the Committee’s requests.”

Kansas, Georgia, and Texas especially are ignoring the requests.  They figure they can tie them up in court until after Republicans win back the House in 2020 and make that permanent in 2022 after the Trump census and redistricting.  It's not a bad plan for them to have and it's very possible that things will work out this way.

The reality is without gaining control of the White House and Senate, Democrats will never be able to fix the Voting Rights Act, and demographics favor Republicans with a near-permanent Senate majority as smaller states get older and whiter as Millennials and Gen Z move out to blue states. 

That's a fight Democrats are going to have to find a way to win down the road, but more immediately, we have to keep the House and win back the White House next year.

Immigration Nation, Con't

The Trump regime plan is to spark an actual immigration emergency in America by breaking the system the processes undocumented immigrants so badly that the regime believes it will have the necessary public outcry to use draconian, fascist measures to "solve" the immigration "problem" once and for all.

Attorney General Bill Barr is doing his part to make the immigration system as busted as he can, ruling Tuesday that the Justice Department will not interfere in ICE slow-walking asylum cases and that the DoJ will effectively deny bail to any and all asylum seekers starting in 90 days.

The Trump administration on Tuesday took another significant step to discourage migrants from seeking asylum, issuing an order that could keep thousands of them in jail indefinitely while they wait for a resolution of their asylum requests.

In an effort to deliver on President Trump’s promise to end “catch and release” at the border, Attorney General William P. Barr’s order directed immigration judges to no longer allow some migrants who have sought asylum to post bail.

The order will not go into effect for 90 days, and is all but certain to be challenged in federal court. But immigrant rights lawyers said it could undermine the basic rights of people seeking safety in the United States.

“They want to send a message that you will get detained,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a deputy director of the Immigrants Rights’ Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s really obscene. We are talking about people who are fleeing for their lives, seeking safety. And our response is just lock them up.”

For more than a decade, migrants who are deemed to have a “credible fear” of persecution in their home countries have been allowed to request a bond hearing so they can be released on bail while they wait for their asylum cases to be heard, sometimes months or years later.

A federal judge in Washington State this month affirmed the rights of individuals with a bona fide claim for asylum, saying they must be given the opportunity to seek bail within seven days of a request.

But Mr. Barr’s order came in a case involving an Indian man who crossed into the United States from Mexico and claimed asylum. Mr. Barr, exercising his authority as the top official overseeing the immigration courts, said that migrants in similar cases do not have the right to bail.

Such an immigrant, “after establishing a credible fear of persecution or torture, is ineligible for release on bond,” Mr. Barr wrote in his order, which overrules a previous Board of Immigration Appeals case from 2005.

A migrant seeking asylum could still ask the Department of Homeland Security to be released under a grant of parole, but that is entirely at the discretion of the department, which under Mr. Trump has sharply cut back on such releases.

Mr. Barr’s decision does not affect migrants applying for asylum at one of the two dozen ports of entry along the border with Mexico. It affects people who are apprehended after they cross into the United States illegally in the often vast, rural stretches of the border.

Mr. Barr’s order is the latest effort by the Trump administration to reduce the number of immigrants who are able to seek protection from violence, poverty and gangs by asking for legal status in the United States.

Of course the indefinite detainment policy is designed not to discourage undocumented folks from crossing into the US, it's designed to overload the system to the point where Trump will use "emergency powers" to resolve the situation, and those measures will be absolutely brutal.

Everything the Trump regime has done on the immigration front since the Mueller report was completed has been designed to deliberately shatter the immigration processing machinery in this country and to create absolute chaos on the boder and in ICE facilities.  The solution will be extraordinary use of force against these asylum-seekers and the beginning of a mass detainment and deportation pipeline that will terrorize tens of millions.

And eventually this pipeline will be used against Trump's political foes as well who are already US citizens.

Count on that.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump has issued his second veto of his term, striking down the Yemen War Powers Resolution and stating the US has no military personnel "in or affecting Yemen".
• Disgraced former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has landed on his feet after resigning in scandal, Zinke is now working for a Nevada gold mining company pursuing contracts on federal land.
• French President Emmanuel Macron is vowing that Notre Dame cathedral in Paris will be rebuilt after Monday's devastating fire and that the work will be completed within five years.
• The proposed T-Mobile/Sprint cellular carrier merger is running into steep opposition from the Trump Justice Department, the merger would create the world's second-largest mobile company.
• Five mothers are suing New York City's mandatory vaccination order as the Big Apple is suffering a seven-month outbreak, falsely claiming the vaccine is more of a public health risk than the disease.