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

Three for the Friday Night Mueller News Dump™ file, first up, George Papadopoulos got a light sentence plea deal for his role in the Trump collusion mess for lying to the FBI.

A once low-profile foreign policy campaign adviser whose offhand remark in a London bar in May 2016 helped trigger an FBI counterintelligence investigation into President Trump’s campaign was sentenced to 14 days incarceration Friday by a federal judge in Washington.

George Papadopoulos, 31, pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI about key details of his conversations with a London-based professor who had told him the Russians held dirt, in the form of thousands of emails, on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos tried futilely for months to arrange a meeting between top campaign aides and Russian officials.

In asking the court for leniency, Papadopoulos said he made “a terrible mistake, for which I have paid a terrible price, and am deeply ashamed,” and that he was motivated to lie to the FBI try to “create distance between the issue, myself, and the president.”

In hindsight, he said in court, he recognizes that was wrong and “might have harmed the investigation.”

Papadopoulos’s attorney, Thomas M. Breen, went further, saying “the President of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could,” by calling the investigation fake news and a witch hunt.

It seems like small potatoes, but in reality George was a small potato.  Like it or not, Mueller has bigger fish to deal with, like Paul Manafort.

Paul Manafort’s lawyers have talked to U.S. prosecutors about a possible guilty plea to avert a second criminal trial set to begin in Washington this month, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted of bank and tax fraud last month in a Virginia federal court. He’s accused in Washington of financial crimes including conspiring to launder money, as well as acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Ukraine and obstructing justice.

The negotiations over a potential plea deal have centered on which charges Manafort might admit and the length of the sentence to be recommended by prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the person familiar with the matter said. Manafort, 69, already faces as long as 10 years in prison under advisory sentencing guidelines in the Virginia case.

By pleading guilty, Manafort could avoid the risk of a longer prison term if he’s convicted at a second trial, as well as the threat of forfeiting several properties and financial accounts. He could also save the cost of paying lawyers to defend him at trial. Such white-collar criminal cases can cost defendants millions of dollars.

The talks may break down without a deal, but if they succeed, they could prompt Mueller to request a reduced sentence in both the Washington and Virginia cases. It’s not clear whether Manafort might cooperate in Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to the person. Trump, who said he was “very sad” after Manafort’s conviction, could still pardon him.

This could be Manafort fishing for a pardon now, but it's a dangerous game, ask Michael Cohen, who's going to be in jail for quite some time, about that.  Still, Republicans probably want the Manafort trial to go away ASAP rather than a long drawn out trial smack in the middle of midterm campaigns, and Manafort knows it.

We'll see if the deal happens soon.

And speaking of Cohen, the campaign finance probe is apparently far from over.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether anyone in the Trump Organization violated campaign-finance laws, in a follow-up to their conviction last month of Michael Cohen, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, not previously reported, shows that the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office doesn’t intend to stand down following the guilty plea from Trump’s longtime personal lawyer. Manhattan prosecutors are working on a parallel track to U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is tasked with examining Russian interference in the presidential election and who is referring other matters as they arise to appropriate sections of the Justice Department.

Representatives of the prosecutors in New York declined to comment, while officials for the Trump Organization didn’t immediately respond to several requests for comment.

Among other crimes, Cohen admitted to violating campaign finance laws. He acknowledged that he paid off a woman who claimed to have had an affair with the president, saying he did it at the direction of the candidate himself and that Trump’s company then repaid him. Notably, the president said the next day that Cohen’s acts weren’t a crime. Whether others in Trump’s orbit were complicit -- steering money to benefit his campaign without making proper disclosures or by exceeding federal limits -- is not yet clear. No one else has been charged.

Again, more charges ill be coming from this, and it won't be Mueller running the probe.  Trump can't shut down everything without proving his guilt and causing a massive headache for Republicans going forward.

Stay tuned.  This is all far, far from over.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Earlier this week I talked about Denmark's Danske Bank, facing a massive scandal involving Russian money laundering through its tiny Estonian branch.  It turns out however that the $30 billion in rotten rubles was really more like $150 billion or more, as the scandal has exploded into a full-blown international incident.

Investigators at Denmark’s largest bank are studying around $150 billion of transactions that flowed through its Estonian outpost between 2007 and 2015 as part of an internal money-laundering probe, according to people familiar with the matter.

Much of that figure, which dwarfs Estonia’s total deposits, came from companies with ties to Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Danske Bank A/S has been criticized by its regulator for lax oversight of illicit money flows. The bank’s investigators haven’t determined if all $150 billion handled by non-Estonian entities should be deemed suspicious. But such a large flow of money suggests that roughly $8 billion of suspected money-laundering transactions previously reported by a Danish newspaper could grow higher.

Shares in the bank traded down more than 7% on Friday after The Wall Street Journal reported on the scope of the investigation.

The $150 billion figure, which has been presented to the bank’s board of directors, is a substantial sum considering Estonia’s entire banking system reports total deposits of €17 billion ($19 billion). Even in the context of Russia, the suspected source of some of the funds, the figure would represent more than a year’s worth of the country’s corporate profits. The flows would have stayed in the branch for only a short time before leaving Estonia, according to a person familiar with the investigation, so wouldn’t fully show up in official statistics.

“Any conclusions should be drawn on the basis of verified facts and not fragmented pieces of information taken out of context,” Danske Bank Chairman Ole Andersen said in a statement. “As we have previously communicated, it is clear that the issues related to the portfolio were bigger than we had previously anticipated.” The bank says the results of its probe are being finalized.

Danske’s Estonian branch is the subject of criminal investigations in Denmark and Estonia, prosecutors in the countries said. The Danish Financial Supervisory Authority reprimanded the bank for weak controls in May and ordered Danske to hold about $800 million more in capital, but didn’t issue a fine.

The problems at Danske highlight the growing concern among authorities about how illicit money flows—especially from Russia—are channeled through European-regulated banks to the West.

Shell companies, including many registered in the U.K., controlled most of the accounts in question, and many of the accounts had links to people in Russia and former Soviet Union countries, people familiar with the matter said. The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority isn’t probing the bank, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I bet that's going to change.  And again, I bet Robert Mueller is taking a long, hard look at that 2007-2015 period too, especially the last three years.

Don't be surprised if some familiar names come up in this investigation.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is now officially pursuing permanent detainment of undocumented minors, so as the country wrestles with Trump's fitness for office and phantom op-eds, America's official policy will soon be kids in cages, all day, every day.

The Trump administration took the first official step Thursday toward withdrawing from a court agreement limiting the government’s ability to hold minors in immigration jails, a move that could lead to the rapid expansion of detention facilities and more time in custody for children.

The changes proposed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services would attempt to terminate the Flores Settlement Agreement, the federal consent decree that has shaped detention standards for underage migrants since 1997.

The maneuver is almost certain to land the administration back in court, while raising the odds that the government eventually could petition the Supreme Court to grant the expanded detention authority lower courts have denied.

U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee, who oversees the Flores agreement, has rejected the government’s requests to extend the amount of time migrant children can be held in immigration jails beyond the limit of 20 days. The administration’s new proposal does not set limits on the amount of time children could be held in detention. Rather, it seeks the authority to hold migrant children and their parents until their cases have been adjudicated, a process that could take months.

DHS officials said the change would not undermine the protections mandated by the court agreement, but would instead fully implement them as a set of formal policies to ensure migrant children are treated “with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors,” according to a statement.

“Today, legal loopholes significantly hinder the Department’s ability to appropriately detain and promptly remove family units that have no legal basis to remain in the country,” DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement. “This rule addresses one of the primary pull factors for illegal immigration and allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress.”

Because permanent detainment of children as immigration criminals is "in their best interest".

Jesus.

There is cartoonishly evil, and there is locking up kids for the crime of existing in America.  Will the rest of the world continue to overlook our obvious human rights crimes, or will somebody finally stand up to America and take action?

StupidiNews!

• India's highest court has unanimously overturned a 150-year-old colonial era ban on gay sex, allowing LGBT Indians the first steps towards equality.
• China is warning the UK that post-Brexit free trade talks could be in jeopardy after a British warship sailed by Chinese-claimed islands last week.
• Mexican officials say at least 166 bodies have been discovered in several mass graves in the state of Veracruz, authorities believe the graves are connected to drug trafficking violence.
• US businesses are scrambling to avoid $200 billion in new Trump Chinese tariffs that could go into effect as soon as today, the public comment period ended Thursday with no Beijing trade deal.
• After congressional testimony this week on the company's role in spreading fake news, Twitter has handed down a permanent ban on Alex Jones and his Infowars site.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

Republicans have been doing everything possible to hide the judicial record of Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, from scrutiny.  They've sat on literally one million such documents, and only released about 45,000 of them the night before the Senate Judiciary hearings got underway on Tuesday.  

When Democrats objected to such nonsense, chair Sen. Chuck Grassley assured the Democrats that his office had reviewed every document, and that it was Democrats who were not doing due diligence.

Cory Booker then went off, daring Grassley to cesure him by releasing these documents himself.

Still, that meant hundreds of thousands of documents were being blocked under executive privilege from Kavanaugh's time working as White House counsel for George W. Bush. and it was only a matter of time before the nastier documents on Kavanaugh's judicial views leaked to the press.

As a White House lawyer in the Bush administration, Judge Brett Kavanaugh challenged the accuracy of deeming the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to be “settled law of the land,” according to a secret email obtained by The New York Times.

The email, written in March 2003, is one of thousands of documents that a lawyer for President George W. Bush turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Supreme Court nominee but deemed “committee confidential,” meaning it could not be made public or discussed by Democrats in questioning him in hearings this week. It was among several an unknown person provided to The New York Times late Wednesday.

Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to submit under their names. It stated that “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.”

Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

[Read the e-mail.]

He was presumably referring to then-Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, conservatives who had dissented in a 1992 case that reaffirmed Roe, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The court now has four conservative justices who may be willing to overturn Roe — Justices Thomas and John C. Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — and if he is confirmed, Judge Kavanaugh could provide the decisive fifth vote.

Still, his email stops short of saying whether he personally believed that the abortion rights precedent should be considered a settled legal issue.

This alone should have disqualified Kavanaugh, clearly he's going to overturn Roe and allow states to decide whether or not abortion is legal.

What Democrats are going to do to stop him, I don't know, but the charade is clearly over.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Just A Few Miles Away

America's mass shooting epidemic came to Cincinnati this morning, with four people killed, including the gunman, when a man opened fire in the lobby of the Fifth Third Center building downtown on Fountain Square.

Gunshots and chaos erupted in the heart of Cincinnati's downtown Thursday morning when a man opened fire in the lobby of Fifth Third Center, killing three people and wounding two others.

Dozens of police officers rushed to the scene and exchanged gunfire with the suspect as a crowd of people who had been on their way to work scattered across Fountain Square to safety.

Police said the gunman, who has not been identified, is dead.

The four fatalities, including the gunman, make this one of the deadliest mass shootings in Greater Cincinnati in years.

"There was definitely a lot of blood," said Zach Fritzhand, who saw police taking victims out of the building.

When the shots first rang out at 9:10 a.m., people ran or took over where they stood. Many were getting their morning coffee or a donut before work when they heard gunshots and screams.

Michael Richardson was smoking in front of the building when he saw a man open fire in the lobby.

"A bunch of cops were coming in with guns," he said. "I saw a lady down. A Cincinnati police officer dragged her out of the bank. She was talking. She was bleeding. Her shirt was red."

Leonard Cain said he saw a woman wearing headphones get shot as she entered the building. He said she dropped to the ground, and everyone else started running.

City Councilman Wendell Young said during Thursday's City Council session he was told the shooter had more than 500 rounds of ammunition.

If that's true, Young said, the body count would have been much higher “if not for the brave intervention of our first responders.”

Mayor John Cranley also praised the quick response from police and said he regretted Cincinnati had joined the growing list of American cities that have experienced mass shootings in the past year.

"There's something deeply sick at work here and we as a country need to work on it," Cranley said.

So now the area where I live now has to deal with America's most deadly disease, questions will be asked, and maybe Mayor Cranley and the City Council will try to take action, but Ohio statehouse Republicans have made it clear that home rule gun safety measures will not be tolerated.  A federal judge blocked the city's bump stock ban six weeks ago after a similar ban in Columbus was struck down, and Cincinnati was sued.

Can't wait until metal detectors start appearing in all downtown buildings and City Hall, because that's coming before the end of the year, but it won't help.

Sigh.

The Greatest Coward In Modern Political History

The self-serving "anonymous" Trump regime official who penned this NY Times op-ed trying to be the hero and keep enabling Trump to do what Republicans want is my definition of the very problem in modern American politics today.

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The Times is tight-lipped about the true identity of the author, but the smart money is on Vice Dictator Mike Pence (who would have the most to gain from the existence of such a piece under both Occam's Razor and cui bono plus the clout to get the NYT to agree to run it), Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats (who is smart enough to make the piece sound like Pence wrote it but is a total desk weenie coward with Senate connections and is from Indiana, close enough to Pence to serve as his proxy), or Attorney General Jeff Sessions (who has the least to lose by writing such a piece as he's on his way out, and is crafty enough to crib Pence's speech notes, and who also has Senate connections).

Long shot: Jim Mattis, who is also on the way out.

Whoever the author is, they're a complete and utter coward, however. LA Times columnist Jessica Roy sums it up very well.

The truth is, Republicans don't want Trump out of office. They're clearly pleased with this “two-track” arrangement. They're advancing the right-wing economic agenda that President Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz would have been championing while preserving their popularity with Trump's base.

If you're reading this, senior White House official, know this: You are not resisting Donald Trump. You are enabling him for your own benefit. That doesn't make you an unsung hero. It makes you a coward.

It's this that makes me believe it's one of these three people.  Trump had an afternoon-long Twitter screaming fit, demanding the NY Times reveal the author's identity for "national security" but I'm willing to bet I'm right on this.

Still, Trump has his "fake news witch hunt conspiracy" to rally the base, and the author can come forward when the time is right to be the hero and claim Trump's head (which is why I think it's Pence, if I had to hang my hat on one of the three).  If they play it right, they have a lot to gain, but remember, whoever they are, they're a manipulative coward. Adam Serwer in the Atlantic this morning:

The biggest open secret in Washington is that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. His staff knows it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows it. House Speaker Paul Ryan knows it. Everyone who works for the president, including his attorneys, knows it. But they all want something, whether it’s upper-income tax cuts, starving the social safety net, or solidifying a right-wing federal judiciary. The Constitution provides for the removal of a president who is dangerously unfit, but those who have the power to remove him will not do so not out of respect for democracy, but because Trump is a means to get what they want. The officials who enable the Trump administration to maintain some veneer of normalcy, rather than resigning and loudly proclaiming that the president is unfit, are not “resisters.” They are enablers.

The anonymous Times op-ed writer is no different. While claiming that they and other officials are “thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses,” the op-ed provides few examples of this, and the author must know that the mere existence of their piece will only inflame those impulses. Already Trump has declared that “the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!” If the president ever decides to issue unconstitutional orders to the Justice Department or the Pentagon, he and his supporters will point to this op-ed and claim that drastic action was necessary to “protect democracy.”

As I have said time and time again, Trump is the symptom, the real problem has been the "gutless" Republican cowards enabling him, and whoever wrote that NYT op-ed is my Exhibits A through ZZ supporting that theory.

Bottom line:

The op-ed is an attempt to take out an insurance policy for the GOP and conservatism if and when things get much much worse. It's a very public hedge meant to preserve the reputation of the GOP's entire political and governing class.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 5, 2018

This is one of Trump's chief enablers covering the ass of the Republican party.  It's part of a larger plan going forward.  Part of that plan is for the writer to reveal themselves, and very soon. Count on that.

But for right now, they're buying time so that Brett Kavanaugh can be confirmed to the Supreme Court at record speed.  Once that's done, all bets are off.

StupidiNews!

• As the remnants of Tropical Storm Gordon dump rain on the Ohio Valley, Hurricane Florence has reached Category 4 strength and could threaten the East Coast  next week.
• One person is confirmed dead and 32 missing after a magnitude 6.7 quake near the Japanese island of Hokkaido knocked out power to millions and triggered landslides slowing rescue and recovery.
• North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is now saying he wants to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula "during Trump's first term" according to South Korean officials.
• Hong Kong has surpassed New York City as the home to the most individuals worth $30 million or more as Chinese millionaires are on the rise and returning from overseas.
• Amazon has joined Apple as the first two US companies to reach the $1 trillion mark as the retail shipping giant continues to grow and expand.

Last Call For The Anti-Social Network, Con't

Facebook and Twitter execs faced tough questions on Capitol Hill today over failure to stop Russian propaganda operations and white supremacist users (Google didn't even bother to show up apparently) and it did not go well for any of them, especially when Alex Jones showed up as a guest.

The Senate Intelligence committee's hearing on election interference on social media Wednesday swiftly turned into unconventional political theater, complete with a conspicuously empty chair set aside to highlight Google's absence and a notable cameo from InfoWars host Alex Jones.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg fielded questions for nearly three hours on their companies' efforts to combat online disinformation and foreign influence operations ahead of the midterm elections. Lawmakers also pressed the executives on an array of issues including data privacy, hate speech and doing business China.

But it was Jones, who claims he's being silenced by the tech giants, who grabbed attention outside the hearing room, where a scrum of reporters huddled around him as he pontificated on the wrongs he said the industry has done him. The far-right provocateur, known for spreading baseless conspiracy theories, at times took a seat in the front row of the hearing room as Dorsey and Sandberg testified.

No wonder then that new numbers from Pew Research finds Americans are dumping Facebook like toxic waste (along with Trump having the same effect on Twitter) and that the primary social media networks of this decade may not even make it into the next.

Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year.

The findings come from a survey of U.S. adults conducted May 29-June 11, following revelations that the former consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had collected data on tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

Facebook has separately faced scrutiny from conservative lawmakers and pundits over allegations that it suppresses conservative voices. The Center found that the vast majority of Republicans think that social platforms in general censor political speech they find objectionable. Despite these concerns, the poll found that nearly identical shares of Democrats and Republicans (including political independents who lean toward either party) use Facebook. Republicans are no more likely than Democrats to have taken a break from Facebook or deleted the app from their phone in the past year.

There are, however, age differences in the share of Facebook users who have recently taken some of these actions. Most notably, 44% of younger users (those ages 18 to 29) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past year, nearly four times the share of users ages 65 and older (12%) who have done so. Similarly, older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months: Only a third of Facebook users 65 and older have done this, compared with 64% of younger users. In earlier research, Pew Research Center has found that a larger share of younger than older adults use Facebook. Still, similar shares of older and younger users have taken a break from Facebook for a period of several weeks or more. 

It's Millennials who are abandoning Facebook, and without them, the network is done. Generation Z won't even have Facebook around to get into at this rate.  Google is in the best position of the three, but that's not saying much.

Couldn't happen to a nicer group of privacy-abusing assholes.

The End Of The Session(s), Con't

Last week I talked about Donald Trump all but firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, with both Sens. Lindsay Graham and Chuck Grassley giving Trump tacit permissions to fire him after the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was wrapped up. But it seems Trump's true cabinet -- FOX News hosts and right-wing pundit sites -- want Sessions's head on a pike now, and are telling Trump that he needs to make his move as soon as possible.

“It’s clear Jeff Sessions is more concerned with his career than the good of America. That said, it’s high time President Trump fires his ineffective Attorney General,” Eric Bolling, a close Trump friend and a former Fox News personality, told The Daily Beast on Monday. “I would NOT, however, fire [special counsel Robert] Mueller. For no other reason than political optics.”

He was hardly the only one calling for Sessions’ head for his alleged failure to protect Trump due to the attorney general’s recusal from the Russia probe. According to several people who speak regularly to Trump, the president still keeps polling his inner circle and allies for their take on what he should do about Sessions, all the while highlighting what he views as Sessions’ weaknesses, failings, and annoying qualities.

And nowhere is Trump’s fury on this better reflected and projected than on his preferred conservative media behemoth.

For her Labor Day weekend episode of Justice With Judge Jeanine, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro dedicated her opening monologue to personally and professionally trashing Trump’s attorney general as a witless “shill” and as a pathetic enabler of supposed “corruption by the Democrats.”

Her overarching message to Sessions was: Nobody likes you, nerd.

“What don’t you get? Have you no self-esteem, self-regard, self-respect? Where is your dignity? Why would you stay in a job where you’re not wanted?… And why do you continue to stay?” Pirro said in her lengthy “Opening Statement” on the program. “You’re so clueless you don’t even know you’re being used. You don’t even know you’re nothing but a shill. In fact, the only constituency that wants you is the ‘Deep State’… Are you proud of yourself?”

“Are you kidding? All of America knows the DOJ continues to be to be influenced by politics," she added. "You need to do one of two things: Resign immediately, because you are not wanted. Or put on your big boy pants and be a real attorney general.”

Pirro is a longtime friend and ally of Trump’s, and she had even been interviewedduring the Trump presidential transition for the job of deputy attorney general. The president watches her weekend show routinely, and Pirro stands in the same Trumpworld echelon as someone like Sean Hannity, another Fox star who doubles as a confidant and top outside adviser to Trump.

This seems to me to be a coordinated move in order to get Sessions to resign, by application of a hint fired out of railgun.  The plan of course is to neuter the Mueller probe, and make sure its conclusions never reach the light of day.  Rudy Giuliani gave away that game on Monday.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said that the administration may claim executive privilege to block Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein from releasing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report when the investigation is finished, according to a New Yorker report.

Giuliani claims that President Donald Trump’s original legal team—which has undergone many mutations since—cut a deal with Mueller that that the White House can object to public dissemination of information from the probe on the grounds of executive privilege.

When asked if the White House is likely to invoke this clause, Giuliani was frank: “I’m sure we will.”

And with Kavanaugh as the fifth vote on SCOTUS even if the Democrats with back the House, Trump then buries the report permanently, the GOP in Congress does nothing, and the investigation vanishes.

Greg Sargent says this is all part of the plan to bury the Mueller report.

Could this work? On Tuesday, I spoke to Andrew Kent, a professor at Fordham University School of Law. The short answer is: Probably not, but there are scenarios under which it could have some success, and a lot may turn on whether Democrats win back one or both chambers of Congress.

Under the special counsel regulations, Mueller is supposed to provide a “confidential” report explaining his conclusions to the attorney general — or, in this case, to Rosenstein, since Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. Rosenstein, not Mueller, is then supposed to provide the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate judiciary committees with an “explanation” for the Justice Department’s decision to conclude the investigation.

This explanation can be released publicly if the Justice Department official overseeing the probe decides it would be “in the public interest.” In this scenario, Rosenstein would have a great deal of discretion to decide how much to put in that report — he could keep it very brief, or supply a lot of detail.

Kent tells me the White House could try to override the regulations and stop the report’s release to Congress — or at least part of it — by claiming executive privilege covers certain information in it. Kent says most of the information in the report probably would not plausibly be covered by any such claim, but that Trump might try to assert that much of it is, anyway.

And should Rosenstein object, he's fired or replaced, and the new overseer of the Mueller probe refuses to release the report at all.  The only way it happens is if Congress subpoenas the report, which will never happen unless the Dems can take back the House or Senate in November.

It's possible then, very possible in fact, that Trump may not actually fire Robert Mueller, but simply erase the report.  Either way, Jeff Sessions will not be Attorney General in 2019, that's a 100% certainty at this point.

He may not be Attorney General by the end of the month.

Stay tuned.

Battering Rahm, Or Replacing An Emanuel Transmission

There will be no third term for Chicago's Democratic Mayor and former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, as his utter failure in the police killing of Laquan McDonald four years ago has now grown into a millstone large enough to drown him in the Chicago River. Vox's German Lopez:

The primary cause: Emanuel and his office played key roles in delaying the release of video of the 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black 17-year-old.

The footage, which was released more than a year after the shooting, revealed that police had lied about what happened. Instead of lunging at police, as officers said, the teenager appeared to stumble around and move away from the officers when he was shot. The video, autopsy, and other forensic evidence also indicated that the officer who shot McDonald did so for as long as 15 seconds straight, with most of the shots seemingly fired after McDonald fell to the ground.

The release of the video led to heavy protests — as the shooting became part of the broader Black Lives Matter movement, which protests racial disparities in policing and particularly police use of force. Much of the criticism fell on Emanuel and other city officials, who in court resisted calls to release the video earlier, citing an ongoing investigation. A judge forced the release of the video despite the mayor’s resistance.

The video led to an investigation of the Chicago Police Department by the US Department of Justice, then led by President Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The subsequent report found that Chicago police often treat people in minority communities “as animals or subhuman,” resulting in widespread racial discrimination and excessive use of force. The report was a huge political blow for Emanuel (who was White House chief of staff under Obama): As mayor he oversees the city’s police force.

The officer who shot McDonald, Jason Van Dyke, is now on trial over the shooting, facing first-degree murder charges.

It says something that Rahm bailed on his $10 million campaign war chest before the verdict in McDonald shooting (he was done either way, frankly) but the guy has been a complete failure across the board as Mayor.

Emanuel tried to recover in the aftermath of the video’s release and Justice Department report — naming a new police superintendent and carrying out some policing reforms, including the adoption of body cameras and new training. “Nothing less than complete and total reform of the system and the culture that it breeds will meet the standard we have set for ourselves as a city,” he told the City Council, according to the New York Times.

But the efforts were widely seen as too little, too late. As the Times noted, “Mr. Emanuel’s seven and a half years as Chicago mayor can be separated into periods: pre-Laquan and post-Laquan” — with the post-Laquan period marking a downturn for Emanuel as critics demanded his resignation for what they saw as a cover-up in the McDonald police shooting.

There were other problems as well. Gun violence was a big one — leading to big protests across Chicago last month, in which demonstrators demanded that Emanuel resign and other efforts be taken up to clean up the streets and provide new economic and education opportunities in the city’s worst-off neighborhoods. The Tribune also reported that Emanuel “had drawn the ire of some voters for record property taxes he instituted to shore up the city’s woefully underfunded police employee pensions and for closing 50 schools in 2013.”

I'm not sorry to see him go in the least.  There are Democrats who are unremittingly awful human beings who need to be driven out of politics for good, and Rahm Emanuel is one of them.

Door, ass, way out.

StupidiNews!

• Ten-term Dem incumbent Rep. Mike Capuano lost in a massive, historic primary upset to Ayanna Pressley last night, 58-41% as she would become the state's first black female Congresswoman.
• For the first time, Japanese officials are acknowledging that a Tokyo Electric Power worker died after being exposed to radiation by the 2011 tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
• UK officials have named two Russian suspects in the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia by military-grade nerve agent.
• Donald Trump will meet with Republican leaders in Congress to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month, Trump has threatened a "good shutdown" to get border wall funding.
• A company that makes lidar laser sensors for driverless cars has figured out how to turn them into cameras as well, a move that could put the startup on the map in the driverless car tech race.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Some good news as the Manafort/Cohen mess is now clearly benefiting the Democrats in the polls as we head into the last 60 days of the 2018 campaign, with a new WaPo/ABC News poll finding Dems with a whopping 14-point generic ballot lead, their biggest lead in this poll since 2006.

Two months ahead of the midterm elections, Democrats hold a clear advantage over Republicans in congressional vote support, with antipathy toward President Trump fueling Democratic enthusiasm, even among those in the party who stayed home four years ago, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.

The survey also points to broad unrest and frustration with the political system generally. More than 6 in 10 Americans say Trump and the Republican Party are out of touch with most people in the country. While Democrats fare better, a narrower 51 percent majority also judged them out of touch.

Registered voters say they favor the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate in their district by 52 percent to 38 percent. That is a marked increase from the four-point edge in an April Post-ABC poll but similar to the 12-point advantage Democrats enjoyed in January.

The models I've seen put the Dems at a 70-75% chance of winning the House, but that was where Clinton was in September of 2016, too.  Take nothing for granted.

The poll says that 75% of registered voters are certain to vote, and we know for a fact that in a midterm year, that percentage will be closer to 40%, with 50% being near-record turnout that would get the Dems a blue tsunami.  That could happen, frankly.

But I'm not holding my breath.  Still, get out there, knock on doors, phone bank, meet people where you live and get them to vote.  I know there's not a lot of hope for me to get rid of Thomas Massie anytime soon, but next door in OH-1, sending GOP Rep. Steve Chabot back to the bench is absolutely doable with Democrat Aftab Pureval.

Where you live, help people vote blue.

Trump Cards, Con't

Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward's book on the Trump regime will be out next week, and the excerpts of it are heart-stopping.  Donald Trump is so singularly unfit for office that replacing the congressional supporters has to be our top priority in 2018 and if that's not enough, replacing Trump in 2020.

A near-constant subject of withering presidential attacks was Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump told Porter that Sessions was a “traitor” for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, Woodward writes. Mocking Sessions’s accent, Trump added, “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

At a dinner with Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, Trump lashed out at a vocal critic, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He falsely suggested that the former Navy pilot had been a coward for taking early release from a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam because of his father’s military rank and leaving others behind.

Mattis swiftly corrected his boss: “No, Mr. President, I think you’ve got it reversed.” The defense secretary explained that McCain, who died Aug. 25, had in fact turned down early release and was brutally tortured during his five years at the Hanoi Hilton.

“Oh, okay,” Trump replied, according to Woodward’s account.

With Trump’s rage and defiance impossible to contain, Cabinet members and other senior officials learned to act discreetly. Woodward describes an alliance among Trump’s traditionalists — including Mattis and Gary Cohn, the president’s former top economic adviser — to stymie what they considered dangerous acts.

“It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually,” Porter is quoted as saying. “Other times, we would fall over the edge, and an action would be taken.”

After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

I mean, Trump wanted to assassinate Bashar Al-Assad.  Mattis didn't do it.

One of them needs to resign before the week is out, and both of them should.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

I've previously talked about the three aspects of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russian probe into the Trump regime: the Trump campaign working with benefit of Russian help, Trump's long history of money laundering, and the obstruction of justice to cover both up.  Today we're talking about the second aspect, specifically Russia's money laundering ties to international banks.

I've previously mentioned Cyprus as a long-time haven for Russian money laundering operations and the sordid history of Trump's Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, who was the former Vice Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus.  But now we've discovered another major Russian money laundering outlet, this time through Denmark by way of Estonia.

An independent investigation into the money-laundering scandal at Danske Bank found that as much as $30bn of Russian and ex-Soviet money flowed through its Estonian branch in a single year.

The findings, contained in a draft report commissioned by Denmark’s largest bank and seen by the Financial Times, raises questions for Danske’s leadership about who knew, and when, about the sheer volume of foreign money passing through its small Estonian branch.

The report by Promontory Financial, the consultancy, found that up to $30bn was parked in Danske’s Estonian branch by non-residents in 2013, the peak year of a scandal that lasted from 2007 until 2015.

“NRP [non-resident portfolio] transaction volume peaked in 2013 with the number of transactions approaching 80,000 that year, and the transaction volume approaching $30bn,” the independent findings, seen by the Financial Times, stated.

One person close to the investigation said: “It’s a truly breathtaking amount for such a small branch. You can’t have that amount flowing through without it raising questions.”

And Danske Bank has been totally flat-footed by this.  They're on the hook for billions in fines, and they don't have the money to pay for it.

Danske Bank A/S says it hasn’t put any money aside to cover potential fines, or other losses, linked to its alleged role in the laundering of billions of dollars over several years.

“We can never tell for sure, obviously, but what we can tell is that we’ve made the assessment and that we’ve concluded there is no basis for making any provisions,” Morten Mosegaard, interim chief financial officer and chief of staff at Denmark’s biggest bank, said in an interview.

The Copenhagen-based lender is the target of criminal investigations for laundering in Denmark and Estonia amid allegations that more than $9 billion in illicit funds from Russia, Azerbaijan and Moldova flowed through its office in Tallinn. Danske has earmarked about 1.5 billion kroner, or $230 million, as what it’s calling a donation to society in an effort to address public indignation.

“We have been pretty precise in letting the market know that this is the full scope of gross income [from the Estonian unit] and then we’re making the assessment at this point in time,” Mosegaard said. “We can’t comment on that until we get to the point where we can make a general disclosure.”

You'd better believe that Robert Mueller's team and the NY Attorney General's office are taking a long, hard look at Danske Bank and its Russian clients.

And possibly some American clients as well.

Stay tuned.