Lowering The Barr, Con't

As I said yesterday, the notion that Attorney General William Barr is going to resign is absolute nonsense, and the bogus reports that Barr would even consider stepping down was in response to defuse the hastily-called meeting of the Federal Judges Association.  The plan worked beautifully as the meeting scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed until further notice.

A group of federal judges hastily postponed an emergency meeting that was scheduled to take place Wednesday to discuss concerns about President Donald Trump and the Justice Department's intervention in politically charged cases. 

Megan Cruz, the executive director of the Federal Judges Association, said the meeting was set to occur Wednesday afternoon and the group was considering whether to issue a statement afterwards. But later in the day, Cruz said that the conference call between the 14 judges who serve as officers on the Executive Committee had been postponed. 

Cruz offered no further details and did not respond to questions asking whether the group had been asked to reschedule the meeting. 

The fact that the little known independent group -- originally established in the 1980s to respond to issues concerning judicial compensation -- was having the meeting in the first place drew the attention in Washington on Tuesday and Trump made it the subject of one of his tweets. 

"I hope the Federal Judges Association will discuss the tremendous FISA Court abuse that has taken place with respect to the Mueller Investigation Scam, including the forging of documents and knowingly using the fake and totally discredited Dossier before the Court. Thank you!" the President tweeted. 

Judge Cynthia Rufe, the group's president, told USA Today that there were "plenty of issues we are concerned about." Her comments drew some criticism as judges are barred from commenting on pending controversies. 

The cancellation came after a source told CNN's Kaitlan Collins Tuesday night that Attorney General William Barr had considered resigning over Trump's tweets discussing ongoing controversies and attacking the judge hearing the case. 

Mission accomplished.  The meeting will now most likely never happen, as I said yesterday, Trump has already appointed nearly a quarter of all serving federal judges in the last three years.  Some of those judges are in the FJA, and there's got to be influence among the executive committee there.

The rumors around Barr were enough to stop the meeting.  Barr couldn't have asked for a better outcome.

Meanwhile, all indications are that the Trump regime pardon machine is becoming the new normal.

President Donald Trump is considering issuing additional pardons and commutations and has assembled a team of advisers to recommend and vet candidates for clemency, a White House official confirmed Thursday.

The process is normally handled by the Department of Justice, but the White House has taken the lead, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, heading the effort, and is joined by White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

The Washington Post first reported Wednesday night that Trump had put together this team, which the report said is basically an informal task force of at least a half-dozen allies of the president. According to the report, the group has been meeting since late last year.

This comes as speculation swirls around whether Trump will pardon his longtime ally Roger Stone who is expected to be sentenced by a federal judge on Thursday. Early in the morning, Trump tweeted a video clip from a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News that suggested the president is considering pardoning Stone.

Stone got 40 months, a far cry from the 7-9 years originally recommended.  It's important to note that all of this: the pardons from this week and the ones certainly coming later for Stone, Manafort and Flynn, the Justice Department prosecutors leaving high profile cases, the investigations into those cases by the DoJ, and the coming mass purge of everyone involved in the Mueller probe, all of this is going through Bill Barr.  He could stop this at any point, but he won't.

Trump isn't the problem.  It's the people who continue to enable his worst impulses, like Bill Barr, who are the real villains.

Retribution Execution, Con't

With Trump having a soulless toady as Attorney General, he now needs a soulless toady for Director of National Intelligence to continue his purge of anyone who might be able to inform America of his wrongdoing, and he's found the near-perfect scuzzball for the job.

President Trump was expected to name Richard Grenell, the American ambassador to Germany, to be the acting director of national intelligence, three people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Mr. Grenell, whose outspokenness throughout his career as a political operative and then as ambassador has prompted criticism, is a vocal Trump loyalist who will lead a group of national security agencies often viewed skeptically by the White House.

He would take over from Joseph Maguire, who has served as the acting director of national intelligence since the resignation last summer of Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana. Mr. Grenell, who has pushed to advance gay rights in his current post, would apparently also be the first openly gay cabinet member.

Mr. Grenell did not respond to a request for comment, nor did a White House spokesman. The people familiar with the move cautioned that the president had a history of changing his mind on personnel decisions after they were revealed in the news media.

Under American law, Mr. Maguire had to give up his temporary role before March 12. He could return to his old job as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, but he might choose to step down from government.

Mr. Trump can choose any Senate-confirmed official to replace Mr. Maguire as the acting head of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies.

Grenell is just about the worst-case scenario of people who would get the job.  It's possible that Trump will replace Grenell in nine months, but by then it'll be a moot point once the election happens.  There's no doubt on two things though: he is a Trump loyalist and that he has zero intelligence experience.

As ambassador to Germany, Grenell has been a loyal and outspoken support of the president, frequently with reporters on his voluble Twitter feed.

He is also the latest Trump loyalist to take on a new role in the aftermath of impeachment. Trump has long been a skeptic and even critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially in response to their shared conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

In 2016, Grenell dismissed Russia's meddling, which resulted in a special counsel investigation and multiple indictments, as nothing new. “Russian or Russian-approved tactics like cyber warfare and campaigns of misinformation have been happening for decades,” he wrote in an op-ed for Fox News.
Grenell has served as a Republican operative, commentator, national security aide and spokesperson for multiple high-profile Republicans, including former 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He served as communications director at the United Nations for eight years under President George W. Bush, making him the longest serving person in that role.

His predecessor, Maguire, was at the forefront of Trump’s impeachment drama and testified before Congress over a whistleblower's complaint about the president’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Democrats criticized Maguire for initially blocking Congress from obtaining the whistleblower’s complaint to the inspector general.

"In light of recent reporting on the whistleblower complaint, I want to make clear that I have upheld my responsibility to follow the law every step of the way,” Maguire said in a statement about his handling of the complaint.

During his testimony, Maguire defended the rights of the whistleblower but painstakingly avoided criticisms of the president.

"I believe that the whistleblower followed the steps every step of the way," Maguire said. “I think the whistleblower did the right thing.”

In his announcement of Grenell’s role, Trump thanked Maguire for his work as director of national intelligence and suggested he might be transferred to a different job.

“I would like to thank Joe Maguire for the wonderful job he has done, and we look forward to working with him closely, perhaps in another capacity within the administration!” Trump tweeted on Wednesday.

If Trump wanted to keep Maguire, he would have nominated him for the role full-time.  He didn't.  He's handing the position over to Grenell for a reason, and that reason is to make sure the entire US intelligence apparatus is working for Donald Trump personally.

Grenell can do a lot of damage in the next nine months, and I expect he will.

StupidiNews!

• A mass shooting in Germany has left at least 8 people dead as German police are looking for suspects who shot people at two different locations in Hanau, neat Frankfurt.
• Chelsea Manning's lawyers are demanding her release from a Virginia prison where she has been serving a contempt of court sentence since March 2019 for refusing to testify.
• Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson will sentence Trump confidant Roger Stone for his conviction on jury tampering and other charges related to the Mueller probe on Thursday.
• The number of Wuhan Coronavirus cases in Japan is growing as two Japanese passengers evacuated from a quarantined cruise ship have now been reported dead from the illness.
• A federal judge has ruled that a 2019 law preventing the sale of Pentagon tech to Chinese networking giant Huawei is constitutional, the company argued the law was a bill of attainder.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

So if this is true, and it's a damn big if considering the subject matter is Julian Assange, then the Trump regime offered him a full pardon in exchange for denouncing the DNC email hack was Russian in origin.

A lawyer for Julian Assange has claimed in court that President Donald Trump offered to pardon Assange if the WikiLeaks founder agreed to help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Assange’s lawyers said on Wednesday that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017, a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published. WikiLeaks posted the stolen DNC emails after they were hacked by Russian operatives.

The claim that Rohrabacher acted as an emissary for the White House came during a pre-extradition hearing in London.

Assange has argued that he should not be extradited to the U.S. because the American case against him is politically motivated. He spent almost seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in Central London claiming that he would be jailed in the U.S. if he wasn’t granted asylum. He was kicked out of the embassy last year.

His lawyers told the court that Trump’s alleged offer to pardon Assange proved that this was no ordinary criminal investigation.

Edward Fitzgerald, who was representing Assange in court, said he had evidence that a quid pro quo was put to Assange by Rohrabacher, who was known as Putin’s favorite congressman.

Fitzgerald said a statement produced by Assange’s personal lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, included a description of “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”

Rohrabacher weighed in on Wednesday afternoon, insisting he never spoke to Trump about Assange prior to his personally-funded “fact finding mission” to London. He said he told Assange that he would “call on” Trump to pardon him if he was able to say who gave him the hacked emails.

“I was not directed by Trump or anyone else connected with him to meet with Julian Assange,” he said in a statement. “At no time did I offer Julian Assange anything from the President because I had not spoken with the President about this issue at all.”

Rohrabacher said he spoke briefly with then chief of staff John Kelly after the trip to let him know that Assange would provide information about the hacked DNC emails in exchange for a pardon. “No one followed up with me including Gen. Kelly and that was the last discussion I had on this subject with anyone representing Trump or in his Administration,” he said.

50% of me says this is absolutely Russian disinformation.  50% of me says this is all true and Assange has been sitting on this for years waiting for the right moment to shove the knife into Trump.  I don't know which, and America needs to know pretty much right away as to whether or not it's true.

Because if it is true, it's time to impeach this orange asshole again for pardon quid pro quo.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

White supremacist terrorist groups are popping up like weeds in the Trump era, riding through major US cities like Washington DC with masks and armed to the teeth in vulgar displays of power, groups like III Percent, Oath Keepers, and Molon Labe are growing in number and new groups are openly recruiting on the internet.  The latest such movement is "boogaloo", a funny meme name for a armed militia gathering members on Facebook and social media, with the very real goal of a second Civil War.

An anti-government movement that advocates for a violent uprising targeting liberal political opponents and law enforcement has moved from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream in recent months and surged on social media, according to a group of researchers that tracks hate groups.

The movement, which says it wants a second Civil War organized around the term “boogaloo,” now includes groups on mainstream internet platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit as well as fringe websites including 4chan, according to a report released Tuesday night by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), an independent nonprofit of scientists and engineers that tracks and reports on misinformation and hate speech across social media.
While calls for organized and targeted violence in the form of a new Civil War have previously circulated among some hate groups, the emergence of the term “boogaloo” appeared to be a new and discrete movement. NCRI researchers analyzed more than 100 million social media posts and comments and found that through the use of memes — inside jokes commonly in the form of images — extremists have pushed anti-government and anti-law enforcement messages across social media platforms. They have also organized online communities with tens of thousands of members, some of whom have assembled at real-world events.

The report “represents a breakthrough case study in the capacity to identify cyber swarms and viral insurgencies in nearly real time as they are developing in plain sight,” John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general and current director of the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience at Rutgers University, wrote in the report’s forward.

The report comes as U.S. law enforcement officials and researchers at various levels have issued warnings about the growing threat posed by domestic extremists motivated by fringe ideologies and conspiracy theories. Joel Finkelstein, NCRI’s director and a research scholar at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, said the report had been sent to members of Congress and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice, among others.

Paul Goldenberg, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, said the report was “a wake-up call.”

“When you have people talking about and planning sedition and violence against minorities, police, and public officials, we need to take their words seriously,” said Goldenberg, who is also CEO of the security consulting company Cardinal Point Strategies.
Goldenberg said the report had “gone viral” within law enforcement and intelligence communities since its limited release last week. People are reading it and distributing it “far and wide,” he said.

The current boogaloo movement was first noticed by extremism researchers in 2019, when fringe groups from gun rights and militia movements to white supremacists began referring to an impending civil war using the term boogaloo, a joking reference to “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a 1984 sequel movie about breakdancing.

The term is used to describe an uprising against a seemingly tyrannical or left-wing government, often in response to a perceived threat of wide-spread gun confiscation. For many, the term boogaloo — silly on its face — is used jokingly, or ironically, but for others, the boogaloo memes are shared alongside violent text and images, seemingly to inflame an eventual confrontation.

In the last three months, boogaloo-related conversation has grown rapidly, according to the researchers, who found that use of the term has increased nearly 50 percent on platforms like Reddit and Twitter over the last few months. Increased exposure, the researchers warn, carries the danger of indoctrination.

It's real, it's dangerous, and in the Trump era it's the latest domestic terrorism virus spreading openly across the country.  Again, these are people that want to start openly killing folks.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

I have to say, here's some more expert trolling from the Trump regime and Attorney General Bill Barr.

Attorney General William P. Barr has told people close to President Trump — both inside and outside the White House — that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said, foreshadowing a possible confrontation between the president and his attorney general over the independence of the Justice Department.

So far, Trump has defied Barr’s requests, both public and private, to keep quiet on matters of federal law enforcement. It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether Barr had made his posture known directly to Trump. The administration officials said Barr seemed to be sharing his position with advisers in hopes the president would get the message that he should stop weighing in publicly on the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigations.

“He has his limits,” said one person familiar with Barr’s thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others, to discuss internal deliberations.

Late last week, Barr publicly warned the president in a remarkable interview with ABC News that his tweets about Justice Department cases “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Trump, White House officials said, is not entirely receptive to calls to change his behavior, and he has told those around him he is not going to stop tweeting about the Justice Department. They said Trump considers highlighting what he sees as misconduct at the FBI and Justice Department as a good political message.

This is the equivalent of GOP Sen. Susan Collins and her perpetual "concern" over Donald Trump.  Barr isn't going anywhere, but this will defuse the criticism this week from both former Justice Department employees and from the Federal Judges Association.

Trump is playing along as well.

Trump was quick to agree when asked by a reporter Tuesday about whether his tweets make it difficult for Barr to do his job in a way that appears impartial.

“I do make his job harder, yes, I do agree with that. I think that’s true,” Trump said. “He’s a very straight shooter. We have a great attorney general and he’s working very hard. He’s working against a lot of people that don’t want to see good things happen, in my opinion. That’s my opinion, not his opinion. You’ll have to ask what his opinion is.”

Trump then added that social media has been “very important” to him because “it gives me a voice” that he doesn’t get in the media.

When asked if he makes it hard for Barr to do his job with integrity, Trump said “oh yeah” given how Barr is “a man with incredible integrity.”

“Just so you understand, I chose not to be involved,” Trump said. “I’m allowed to be totally involved. I’m actually, I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country. But I’ve chosen not to be involved. But he is a man of great integrity. But I could be involved if I wanted to be.”

This is grade A quality horse manure, all of it.  Crocodile tears of fake contrition are going to wash away the criticism.  It would be funny if I wasn't absolutely sure that Trump was lying, as he always does lie, and the country wasn't at stake.

And again, even if Barr magically did resign, he'd only be replaced by somebody even more awful.

StupidiNews!

• A new UNICEF report on the healthiest countries to raise children finds the US ranks 39th out of 180, and 173rd out of 180 in sustainability of carbon emissions.
• Even though the Wuhan coronavirus has surpassed 2,000 deaths, World Health Organization doctors are calling for calm as the virus itself is less deadly than SARS 20 years ago.
• Utah's measure to decriminalize polygamy among consenting adults has passed the state's Senate in a unanimous vote, but the bill faces stiffer odds in the Utah state House.
• Michael Bloomberg's campaign says if elected president, he will sell his Bloomberg news company so as to not profit off of it "like Trump does now".
• A US-based natural gas facility was shut down for more than two days after being crippled by ransomware, according to the DHS and Department of Energy.

Last Call For Pardon The Corruption

Donald Trump expertly trolling America today with a series of pardons and commutations for some of the country's most infamous white collar criminals and political crooks, and of course they just happen to be white guys.

President Donald Trump announced a host of pardons and commutations on Tuesday, ranging from Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor jailed on corruption charges, to Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner.

"Yes, we have commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich. He served eight years in jail, a long time," Trump told reporters before boarding Air Force One en route to Los Angeles.

The commutation was one of a flurry of legal actions Trump took Tuesday, including pardons for Kerik, financier Michael Milken and former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo, Jr. And they came days before the scheduled sentencing of Roger Stone in federal court in D.C., amid widespread speculation about whether the president will pardon his former longtime aide.

Stone was at the center of last week's drama inside the Justice Department, with four career prosecutors quitting his case after Attorney General William Barr overruled their sentencing recommendation.

Stone's looming fate has drawn Trump's condemnation in recent weeks, with the president calling it a "miscarriage of justice!" on Twitter and excoriating the prosecutors and judge for their handling of the case. On Tuesday, he appeared to echo a Fox News contributor’s call for a new trial.

Trump's clemency moves furthered a pattern in which those seeking pardons have aggressively lobbied the president's allies and associates, jumping ahead of the formal process by which the White House usually reviews pardon requests. And Tuesday's announcement by the White House offered a few tantalizing hints as to who might be the next on the president's list.

Now Trump also pardoned or commuted the sentences of some less infamous people who have been pressing for one in the media through criminal justice reform:

Ariel Friedler hacked into his competitors’ computers. Paul Pogue filed false income tax statements. David Safavian is a Republican lawyer who was convicted of perjury in connection with the Abramoff corruption scandal. Angela Stanton “spent time in Georgia prisons for things like felony embezzlement, theft and fraud” but since her release in 2005 has become a best-selling author and the creator of Reclaim It Albany.

Tynice Nicole Hall was convicted of conspiracy and drug offenses involving powder and crack cocaine because her boyfriend sold drugs out of her house. Crystal Munoz was convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 1000 kilograms of marijuana. Judith Negron received a 35-year sentence as part of a Medicare fraud racket.

Hey, but he got all these names from FOX News State TV anyway.

Unsurprisingly, a key influence that led to Trump’s decision, particularly as it related to Blagojevich, was Fox News. The same could partly be said of the decision on Kerik, a frequent Fox News guest whose pardon was backed by several of the network’s stars; Milken, whose pardon was supported by Fox Business Network host and Trump loyalist Maria Bartiromo; and Angela Stanton, an occasional pro-Trump TV pundit whose pardon was pushed by frequent Fox News guest and evangelical leader Alveda King.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Trump made the Fox News connection abundantly clear, telling reporters that he decided to commute the rest of Blagojevich’s sentence because he’d seen the ex-governor’s wife Patti Blagojevich pleading her husband’s case on Fox.

“I watched his wife on television,” Trump declared, adding that he didn’t know the ex-governor “very well” despite Blagojevich’s appearances on The Celebrity Apprentice years ago.

In mid-2018, the president repeatedly asked close advisers to explore a Blagojevich pardon and, while doing so, emphatically referenced clips he’d seen on Fox, including a segment on informal Trump adviser Jeanine Pirro’s weekend show, according to two sources who independently discussed the matter with the president at the time.

According to liberal media-watchdog Media Matters for America, Patti Blagojevich took to Fox programming in April 2018 to push for her husband’s sentence to be reduced, making at least seven appearances on some of Trump’s favorite primetime shows such as Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle.

The hosts, meanwhile, didn’t even bother with subtlety during the interviews. For instance, Tucker Carlson asked Mrs. Blagojevich what she would say “if you could speak to the president.”

Of course, money talks too.

For those who didn’t receive the Fox News treatment, it appears that in at least one case, cold hard cash did the talking. Paul Pogue, a construction company owner who pleaded guilty to underpaying his taxes by $473,000 and received three years probation, was issued a full pardon and clemency by the president.

According to FEC filings, Pogue’s family has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct contributions and in-kind air travel to the Trump Victory Committee. Beginning in August 2019, Ben Pogue—CEO of Pogue Construction and son of Paul Pogue—and his wife Ashleigh made over $200,000 in contributions to the campaign.
In August alone, Ben Pogue donated $85,000 to Trump Victory while Ashleigh Pogue contributed $50,000 that month. The following month, Ben Pogue made an in-kind air travel contribution of $75,404.40. The couple also made several large donations to the Republican National Committee and each donated $5,600 to Donald Trump for President Inc.

On the day of their first donation to the Trump campaign, Ashleigh posted an Instagram photo of her and her husband posing with Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at the Hamptons.

But the real message is a clear as a Nordic spring lake: pardons for those who Mueller put behind bars are now coming, and for everyone else, justice is for sale if the price is right.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime continue to purge everyone involved in the House Democratic impeachment investigation.  Some are leaving out of concern for the Justice Department under Bill Barr, most are being forced out. I'm not sure which category he latest departure falls into just yet, but the lawyer who handled the Ukraine whistleblower complaint against Trump is now leaving the DNI's office.

The top lawyer for the intelligence community, whose decision to block a whistleblower's complaint about President Donald Trump and Ukraine from reaching Congress helped jumpstart the impeachment inquiry, is resigning from his post, officials confirmed.

Jason Klitenic, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will depart early next month, according to an agency spokeswoman. His exit comes as the acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, nears a March 11 deadline to depart as well. Federal law prevents Maguire from serving in an acting capacity beyond that date, meaning a new director must be nominated and confirmed by then, or Trump must pick a new acting official.
No official reason for Klitenic's departure has been provided. But he became the subject of scrutiny in September when he consulted with the Justice Department and determined that a whistleblower complaint deemed "urgent" by an internal watchdog would not be provided to Congress. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) demanded access to the complaint after learning it had been blocked — and that it likely pertained to Trump or his senior advisers — and the furor that ensued led to a cascade of support for impeachment in the House.

The Trump administration's initial refusal to provide the complaint, as well as a string of media reports suggesting the complaint described wrongdoing by Trump in his posture toward Ukraine, ultimately led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to open an impeachment inquiry in late September. Within days of her decision, Maguire testified to Congress and the whistleblower complaint was released publicly. Trump also decided to release the readout of a July 25 call with Ukraine's president that became a central piece of evidence in the impeachment inquiry.

Schiff first asked the DNI for the whistleblower complaint after the agency's inspected general characterized it as an "urgent" and credible matter. Typically federal laws trigger a requirement that such complaints are forwarded to Congress. But in a Sept. 13 letter, Klitenic replied that rather than honor the inspector general's assessment, DNI consulted with the Justice Department, which overruled the inspector general and determined the complaint did not meet the threshold required to share it with lawmakers.

"Based on those consultations, we determined that the allegations did not fall within the statutory definition of an 'urgent concern' and that the statute did not require the complaint to be transmitted to the intelligence committees," Klitenic wrote on Sept. 13.

He also argued that the whistleblower had no legal right to approach Congress directly with his concerns. "We believe that it is important to apply the statute as it was written, because reading it to give a complainant a unilateral right to forward a complaint to the congressional intelligence committees would raise serious constitutional questions," Klitenic argued.

Klitenic's letter also hinted at Trump's role in the complaint, noting that it involved "confidential and potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community." Schiff said at the time that such a description could only apply to Trump or his top aides.

So is Klitenic leaving because he failed to kill the whistleblower complaint that led to the impeachment of Trump, or is he leaving because he sees who Trump truly is?

Maybe both.  We don't know.

That should scare everyone.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

The nation's largest voluntary group of federal judges has called an emergency meeting for today on how to handle Attorney General Bill Barr stepping in last week to take control of federal cases involving Donald Trump.

A national association of federal judges has called an emergency meeting Tuesday to address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases, the group’s president said Monday. 

Philadelphia U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who heads the independent Federal Judges Association, said the group “could not wait” until its spring conference to weigh in on a deepening crisis that has enveloped the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr. 

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” Rufe told USA TODAY. “We’ll talk all of this through.” 

Rufe, nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, said the group of more than 1,000 federal jurists called for the meeting last week after Trump criticized prosecutors' initial sentencing recommendation for his friend Roger Stone and the Department of Justice overruled them. 

Trump also took a swipe at the federal judge who is set to preside at Stone’s sentencing hearing Thursday. 

"Is this the judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something not even mobster Al Capone had to endure?” Trump tweeted last week, referring to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson. “How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!" 

Jackson jailed Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, prior to his convictions in two separate financial fraud cases after he sought to tamper with potential witnesses.

Rufe said the judges' association is “not inclined to get involved with an ongoing case,” but she voiced strong support for Jackson. 

“I am not concerned with how a particular judge will rule,” Rufe said, praising Jackson's reputation. “We are supportive of any federal judge who does what is required.” 

The unusual concern voiced by the judges’ group comes in the wake of an equally unusual protest. More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials called on Barr to resign Sunday, claiming his handling of the Stone case "openly and repeatedly flouted" the principle of equal justice.

If the FJA decides to call for Barr's resignation, things could potentially get ugly, but I don't think they will.  Remember, Mitch McConnell's assembly line of scores of judicial confirmations mean Trump has appointed nearly a quarter of all currently-serving federal judges in just 3 years, and that has to include a healthy percentage of the FJA's membership.

Frankly, I don't expect a single Trump-appointed judge to raise a finger, either so best-case scenario out of this is a mealy-mouthed position of "deep concern" (heaven forfend!) voiced in a heavily watered down statement that Barr will wipe Trump's ass with before chucking it in a gold-plated toilet.

I'd like to think this would lead to Barr's imminent resignation, but even if that somehow miraculously happens, McConnell will make sure Trump has an even worse AG confirmed within weeks, and the new AG won't be shy about locking Democrats up, either.

Most likey, Barr will respond defiantly and nothing will happen.

StupidiNews!

• Denny Hamlin took his third Daytona 500 win Monday as the NASCAR race was rained out on Sunday, driver and 2008 Daytona winner Ryan Newman was hospitalized after a final lap crash.
• A new study finds that while overall the number of US atheists is on the rise, Generation Z isn't any more or less religious than their Millennial counterparts.
• The Trump regime's war on Chinese tech giant Huawei continues as Washington is considering new trade barriers that would cut the networking company off from Taiwan's largest chipmaker, TSMC.
• Former National Security adviser John Bolton is warning that the Trump regime may censor or block his forthcoming book completely over "national security concerns".
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says he'll donate $10 billion to help stop climate change, Bezos has already pledged that his company will be net emissions-free by 2030.

Last Call For Elephant Wrenches In The Works

Republican dark money is trying to wreck NC Democrats and their chances of beating GOP Sen. Thom Tillis in November by backing a long-shot Dem in order to hurt primary frontrunner Cal Cunningham.

Democrats are growing alarmed about Republican attempts to prop up an insurgent liberal candidate in North Carolina — fearful that GOP meddling will undercut the party’s prospects in a key Senate contest.

What seems like a generic campaign ad pitching Erica Smith, a North Carolina state senator, as “the only proven progressive” in the state’s high-profile Senate race is actually part of a multimillion dollar investment from a mysterious super PAC — the innocuously named "Faith and Power PAC" — with apparent ties to Republicans.
The ad campaign, which began last week ahead of the March 3 primary, immediately disrupted the bid from frontrunner and Democratic leadership favorite Cal Cunningham to emerge from his primary and face incumbent GOP Sen. Thom Tillis in November.

The North Carolina race is critical: Without beating Tillis, Democrats' path back to the Senate majority is nearly impossible. Cunningham, a former state lawmaker and military veteran, lost a Senate primary in 2010, and Democrats are eager to avoid the same result this year. But things are getting messy — and expensive.

Smith, whose low-budget campaign has otherwise posed little threat to Cunningham, has denounced the intervention. But the episode threatens Democrats’ hopes of getting the better-funded, more moderate Cunningham through the primary unscathed.

“It’s so brazen and obvious. … They recognize that Cunningham is a strong candidate, and they’re worried about holding onto that seat,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “When Republicans are weighing in for somebody, they’ve made the judgment that they’re worried about Cal, and they’re not worried about her.”

Privately, Senate Democrats have been discussing the matter internally, with one fretting that Smith is “unelectable” in a general election and will be painted as a Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) acolyte. Few in the party want to criticize Smith publicly since no matter who emerges as Democrats’ nominee, North Carolina is a must-win to take back the Senate.

But the GOP infusion of money is increasing worries about disarray.

“You want your strongest candidate. And if she’s not the strongest candidate, yes, it makes it much tougher,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who supports Cunningham. “There’s just too much money in politics, and they spend it on trying to get the weakest candidate to run against” Tillis.

Sorry folks, NC is nearly as conservative as Kentucky.  I grew up there and lived in the state for 25 years.  I'd love to see Erica Smith beat Tillis and be the first black woman in the US Senate from my home state, just to see everyone's head explode.

But it's not going to happen.  Smith herself is the first to point out this is Republican douchebaggery.  This is still the state where Jesse Helms beat Harvey Gantt with one of the most racist campaign ads in history and not much has changed in 30 years since.

Cunningham is the best shot we have, and we have to beat Tillis to get the Senate away from Mitch McConnell, period.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Armed white supremacist terrorists showing up at state capitols is a tactic that apparently works well, because Virginia lawmakers are now balking at new firearms legislation.

A Virginia Senate committee killed a bill on Monday that would have banned the sale of assault-style weapons and possession of high-capacity magazines, handing gun rights activists a rare win in a Capitol that Democrats won last year on the promise of sweeping gun control.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) backed the legislation, part of a package of eight gun-control measures he advanced after a shooter killed 12 people at a Virginia Beach municipal building on May 31. Republicans’ refusal to act on those bills last summer, in a special session that they gaveled out in 90 minutes, became a rallying cry for Democrats in November elections. They flipped the state House and Senate blue for the first time in a generation.

The House has passed all eight of Northam's bills. But four Democrats — Sens. R. Creigh Deeds (Bath), John S. Edwards (Roanoke), Chap Petersen (Fairfax) and Scott A. Surovell (Fairfax) — sided with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the assault weapons bill for the year. On a 10-to-5 vote, the committee sent the measure to the state's Crime Commission for study.

“Bunch of wimps,” Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) said from the dais, referring to the four.

Philip Van Cleave, the Virginia Citizens Defense League president who organized a huge gun rights rally in Richmond last month and encouraged “Second Amendment sanctuary” declarations across the state, celebrated on Twitter.

"VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Van Cleave tweeted. "Everybody's hard work, Lobby Day, and sanctuary movement paid off!"
Northam was "disappointed" with the vote but "fully expects the Crime Commission to give this measure the detailed review that Senators called for. We will be back next year," spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky said in an email.

House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) — who had challenged the Senate to pass all eight bills in a speech over the weekend — reacted more sharply.

"The Democratic platform last fall was very clear," she said in a statement. "Limiting access to weapons of war used in mass murder was a key part of that platform. The House of Delegates delivered on our promise to take action to keep those weapons off our streets. To call today's vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee a disappointment would be an understatement."

It's not all bad news though.  Of the other seven gun safety bills that passed Virginia's general assembly, five passed in the state Senate, including universal background checks, a "red flag" law, allowing the government to ban weapons in public buildings and events, limiting handgun purchases to one per month (something that actually was in effect until Republicans overturned it in 2012), and a law to strengthen prohibiting firearms access to a person under a protective order.

In addition to the assault weapon and magazine ban, a measure requiring a gun owner to report a missing firearm to police within 24 hours and a felony measure that would raise the age of "child access prevention" when leaving a gun unattended with a minor being able to access it from 14 to 18 both failed.  Those three bills were easily the most controversial, and they all were blocked by state Senate Democrats who wimped out.

And if the name Creigh Deeds sounds familiar, he's the Democratic candidate for Governor who lost to Bob McDonnell in 2009 in a landslide, who went on to become a precursor to Trump corruption.

 

The Dems' Big Gamble On Nevada

I'm not sure how bad things are actually going to be on Saturday in Nevada for the Democratic caucuses, but all the information points towards an Iowa-level disaster. Again.

Anxiety is rising over the possibility of another tech-induced meltdown at the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday.

In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.
Some volunteers who will help run caucuses at precinct locations said they have not been trained on iPads that the party purchased to enter and transmit vote counts. Party officials scrambled to streamline their vote reporting system — settling on Google forms accessible through a saved link on the iPads — after scrapping a pair of apps they’d been planning to use until a similar app caused the fiasco in Iowa two weeks ago.

The volunteers also said the party has not provided sufficient training on how to use the Google form that will compile vote totals, a complicated process in a caucus.

The concerns, which were described on condition of anonymity because the volunteers are not authorized to speak to reporters, come at a perilous moment for the Democratic Party. As the third state on the primary calendar and the first with a significant minority population, Nevada holds huge importance in the nomination contest. The debacle in Iowa cost one state party chairman his job and threatened the standing of the national party chairman, while casting doubts about whether the results from party-run caucuses can be trusted.

Nevada Democratic officials insist they have everything under control. But a repeat of Iowa — or any kind of breakdown — would be disastrous.

One volunteer who has worked on past caucuses in Nevada said the Google form that will be used to input vote totals wasn’t even mentioned during a training session for precinct chairs late last week.

“We weren’t told at all about it,” the person said.

The iPads weren’t discussed until more than halfway through the presentation, the volunteer said, when someone asked how early vote totals would be added to the totals compiled live at each precinct. The person leading the training said not to worry because the iPads would do the math for them.
“There were old ladies looking at me like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have iPads,’” the volunteer told POLITICO.

After sitting through the two-hour training session, the person predicted the caucus would be a “complete disaster.”

Another volunteer, who will be in a senior position at a caucus site, said that as of Feb. 11 the party had failed to provide updated training sessions for caucus day to many people who’d been preparing to use the now-scrapped apps. Recently, the volunteer did take a refresher course for early voting, but it “diverged significantly” from the initial training. “We were practically starting from scratch,” the volunteer said.

The volunteer received no hands-on training with the iPads before handling one physically for the first time at an early-voting site on Saturday. As a result, the first two hours of early voting were “disastrous,” the person said, as volunteers struggled to get iPads to function properly and connect to the Internet.

Moreover, “There are [Democratic voters] that don't even know that early voting is happening,” the volunteer said, blaming the party for failing to spread the word adequately. Early voting in Nevada started on Saturday and will continue through the end of the day Tuesday.

The combination of states being starved of election funds by the Trump regime and in turn the states choosing to go cheap with technology replacing rigorous paper ballot matching, plus technophobia from older voters and volunteers doesn't bode well.

Caucuses are bad anyway.  Nevada needs to be forced to ditch theirs too, and if it does go belly-up as I think it will, it'll be the best evidence yet that caucuses need to be abandoned.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• The death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus is now over 1,800 with some 71,000 cases globally as American passengers on a quarantined Japanese cruise ship are being flown home.
• Israel bombed Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip over the weekend as Israeli forces have canceled easing of the blockade on Palestinian neighborhoods after rocket fire from Gaza.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is canceling a trip to Barbados as anti-pipeline disruptions by First Nations activists have now shut down Canada's largest railroad across the eastern provinces.
• French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is warning the UK that post-Brexit trade talks with the EU will be "brutal" and that the two sides would likely "rip each other apart".
• The US government says it will take all available steps to combat North Korean malware as a massive hacking operation by Pyongyang against US companies was exposed last week.