15

Worrisome:

https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-impeachment-house-democrats-e38d068b-77a2-4438-b3b7-79961d779b9b.html

UPDATE:

Trump’s Lawyers Raised Concerns with Mueller’s Office about Testimony They Shouldn’t Know Whether Is Phony or Not

As you know from previous chapters I’ve been going back and forth on the fear that the Dems in the end are going to give Trump a pass on everything and blandly declare ‘Let’s just beat him in 2020.’-I’ve written an entire chapter pushing back against this flawed notion.

After a post by Greg Sargent a few weeks back suggested that the Democrats aren’t going to impeach Trump even if found guilty of High Crimes and Misdemeanors I was on the ledge. But over time I allowed myself to be talked off of it-Nita Lowery assured us that I have my boxing gloves on and so does Nancy! (Chapter B).

I was thrilled by Pelosi’s masterful destruction of the anti Pelosi crusaders-Seth Moulton himself ended up voting for her, Kathleen Rice stuck to her anti Pelosi guns and is now in political Siberia and I have zero sympathy for my fellow Long Islander-as many do not.

I applauded Pelosi’s taking away Trump’s SOTU invite this week-the MSM absurdly seems to want to say that both her and Trump are behaving badly-her in rescinding his invite and he for blowing her cover on her trip to Afghanistan. Well only one potentially put people’s lives at risk but sure both sides need to do better, right Chuck?

As for impeachment, the Democrats have at least talked a good game on investigations-Elijah Cummings has invited Michael Cohen to testify on February 7 and Jackie Speier revealed that the first subpoena from her House Intelligence Committee will be: Donald Jr. 

I found that House Judiciary Committee Democrat, Jamie Raskin, made me feel quite reassured in his interview on Chris Hayes on Friday night-though a subsequent guest on the show got me nervous again in suggesting that Raskin is still showing too much deference to Mueller-the Democrats still think they can outsource their oversight role to Mueller- when PACE Bill Barr’s testimony, we don’t even know if we’ll ever see Mueller’s full report.

Raskin had assured us that Democrats are not ‘fraidy cats about impeachment.’

I want to believe that. But then Barney Frank was on Bill Maher’s Friday night show and all my worst fears were validated yet again. Frank said a bunch of stuff that, to use Bill Barr’s words about Mueller’s investigation, are fatally misconceived. 

He hit all the worst canards: that the Democrats should just ‘beat Trump in 2020’-thereby legitimizing his illegitimate 2016 ‘victory.’ He asked ‘do you want to impeach him or beat him in 2020?’ as if these are two entirely mutually exclusive things. Yet it’s not clear what this assumption is based on.

There are many problems with this assumption-the first being it elevates political expediency over principle, where even if Trump conspired with Russia to rig the election and even if Mueller finds him guilty of crimes, or if he clearly committed what should be seen as High Crimes & Misdemeanors the Democrats should just let him off the hook because 2020.

Footnote: Bob Barr’s criticism of making this decision based primarily on political expediency

As  political historian, Julian Zelizer says, political expediency should not be the yardstick:

It is now time for Congress, the institution that will ultimately determine whether the President has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, to launch its own proceedings. Congress cannot rely on the Department of Justice to handle this job alone. The House can either first turn to relevant committees to conduct hearings of their own before turning the matter over to Judiciary. Or, as occurred under Peter Rodino in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee could conduct an investigation of its own by assembling a first-rate team of lawyers and calling witnesses. The Judiciary Committee can then make a determination as to whether the weight of evidence moves them to vote for articles of impeachment

Political considerations should not dictate what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decides to do. There are moments in American political history when congressional leaders have the obligation to do the right thing regardless of the potential political costs. Given the body of very serious charges that are now facing this President, it would be almost reckless for the House to refrain from investigating.”

Yet Frank is making this reckless argument-that you don’t impeach Trump out of political expediency. This is an outrageous and appalling idea on the moral merits-no one is above the law, unless we think holding him accountable will damage us in the Rust Belt. It’s also not at all self-evident on the politics-why is it presumed that impeaching Trump would be a clear political loser for the Democrats?

It’s pretty clear where this idea comes from: Bill Clinton. Too many of the old line antediluvian’ Democrats learned the wrong lessons from Bill Clinton.

“In no small part, this trepidation is due to the fact that the last effort to remove an American president from office ended in political fiasco. When the House impeached Bill Clinton, in 1998, his popularity soared; in the Senate, even some Republicans voted against convicting him of the charges.

“Pelosi and her antediluvian leadership team served in Congress during those fights two decades ago, and they seem determined not to repeat their rivals’ mistakes. Polling has shown significant support for impeachment over the course of Trump’s tenure, but the most favorable polls still indicate that it lacks majority support.”

Though even those polls show it at about 40%-considerably more support than ever wanted to impeach Clinton.

“To move against Trump now, Democrats seem to believe, would only strengthen the president’s hand. Better to wait for public opinion to turn decisively against him and then use impeachment to ratify that view. This is the received wisdom on impeachment, the overlearned lesson of the Clinton years: House Republicans got out ahead of public opinion, and turned a president beset by scandal into a sympathetic figure.”

To be sure even the basic premise is flawed as Clinton was considerably more popular than Trump.

Vox has more on the overlearned lesson of Bill Clinton:

“In justifying their skepticism of impeachment, many Democrats tend to cite their memories of the GOP push to impeach President Bill Clinton.”

“Leaving aside the question of the merits there, there’s been an enduring perception in Washington that the effort was a dreadful political loser for Republicans.”

“But there’s the rub: what is the evidence it was such a loser for Republicans?The evidence for this is basically that Clinton’s popularity remained high throughout, and that in the 1998 midterm elections, Republicans lost four House seats. (That midterm result might not seem so bad, but in historical context, it’s quite shocking for the party that holds the presidency to gain seats in Congress.)”

Yes-in 1998 it looked like a clear political loser for the GOP. Yet, despite losing the 4 House seats, and despite the fact that Clinton’s approval was in the 60s, they impeached him in the lame duck. 

When Greg Sargent talks about the hardball gap between the parties nowhere is it more stark than on impeachment. And, alas, it’s not clear in the long term the GOP did pay any such huge price-though it’s clear that the majority of Americans believed they’d overreached wildly.

They ‘won’ the 2000 election-I use scare quotes because of the Brooks Brother’s riots and the GOP Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore fiasco.

“Still, there are some indications that even a failed impeachment effort might not be as obviously politically toxic as the conventional wisdom thinks — and that Trump’s situation could be quite different from Clinton’s.”

“Looking at FiveThirtyEight’s historical presidential approval data, Clinton’s approval rating was quite high at the beginning of the year the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke (1998). Over the course of the year, it dropped, but not by very much. Then it rose again toward the end of the year (as the House voted to impeach).”

“But though there was some movement in this period, the commonality is that Clinton was far more popular throughout those years than Trump has been. Trump’s approval rating has hovered in the low 40s, whereas all through 1998, Clinton’s approval was at 60 percent or more.”

Again, there’s the irony-impeaching Clinton was always very unpopular and yet the GOP did it anyway, while polls show a plurality, close to a majority already want Trump impeached and the Dems are talking blandly of losing Obama-Trump voters.

And again, I wish I could tell a story of how it backfired on the GOP and maybe in the short term it did-1998 losing the House seats, Newt Gingrich and then Bob Livingston going up in smoke-certainly the GOP’s impeachment obsession was disastrous personally for Newt Gingrich.  But, again, they took back all three Houses of government in 2000 and until 2018 had controlled the House 14 of 18 years. That’s a political disaster?

And it gets even worse than that as while they were never able to destroy Clinton’s Presidency or his popularity they were successful in destroying the Clinton brand-fate was cruel enough to punish his wife’s political career more than his own. By 2016 all the years of flinging poop at the Clintons paid off. Americans by then simply presumed that while no one could quite explain what terrible crimes Hillary Clinton had committed she must have done something really bad. 

To this day Trump and his Deplorable supporters are still doing lock her up chants-even the day after a MAGA supporter sent Clinton a pipe bomb-along with the rest of the national Dem leadership. But hey, let’s just beat him in 2020, that’s the ticket. 

You can argue that long term it still did benefit them politically-it was the cudgel that would make Clinton unelectable for the Presidency.

“Additionally, the Clinton impeachment effort wrapped up in February 1999. By the time the 2000 election rolled around, it was far in the past, and other issues dominated the public conversation. And a Republican, George W. Bush, became the next president. Impeaching Trump may not be a political gold mine, but the evidence that it would tank Democratic prospects in 2020 seems thin.”

But the bigger misconception is the absurdity of a Clinton-Trump analogy when clearly Trump is not Clinton, he’s Richard Nixon and the Dems should be focusing on Watergate not Whitewater-Lewinsky.

The Watergate Democrats benefitted greatly from Nixon’s resignation. Let’s be clear, Nixon would have been impeached and convicted which is why he resigned. So when it’s said no POTUS has ever been successfully removed from office that’s false-as Nixon only resigned to avoid removal it may be literally true but is false in substance.

They then won the Presidency in 1976, largely because of Gerald Ford’s self serving pardon of Nixon.

And what is the lesson these ‘antediluvian Dems’ learned from Bill Clinton? Essentially that you should never impeach any President for any reason? So did the Framers make a mistake in giving Congress this power? This idea commits the logical fallacy that because Bill Clinton’s impeachment was a politically motivated hit job that all impeachments are politically motivated hit jobs.

As noted in Chapter C, Alan Dershowitz harbors this same fallacy: that consistency requires that if you call for innocent defendants to be acquitted you have to do the same for guilty ones.

Indeed, what Dershowitz, Barney Frank, and other Democratic Fraidy Cats need to tell us is why the Framers gave Congress impeachment powers at all if you should never use them? I mean if the impeachment power can’t be used against ‘President Trump’ then you’ve effectively ruled out ever using it.

Yuri Applebaum on this strange idea that the Framers gave Congress a power too potent to ever use.

“The electorate passes judgment on its presidents and their shortcomings every four years. But the Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment. Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe.”

“But the United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.That is precisely backwards. It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits—to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system—accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.”

Again, if you don’t think it should be employed against Illegitimate President Trump you don’t believe it should ever be employed. Frank was in top form on Maher, offering up multiple such canards from the never ever never impeach crowd. He argued that unless you can be assured in advance that Mitch McConnell’s GOP Senate will convict you shouldn’t even consider impeachment. On the face of it, this is just stunningly perverse. What it effectively amounts to is because the GOP is so virulently partisan, and puts the health of their party over that of the country Democrats should follow them and also give Trump a pass.

The notion that Mitch McConnell, who was willing to tank the economy in 2009-2010 as he perceived a GOP benefit in it, to hold the debt ceiling hostage in 2011-saying afterwards that it was a hostage worth taking-who refused to even allow Merrick Garland a hearing in 2016-who refused to make a bipartisan statement about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election late in the campaign, who now refuses to even open the government, to even bring up for a vote the same bill his GOP Senate passed three weeks ago, so as not to embarrass ‘President Trump’-the notion that Frank wants McConnell to be the final arbiter with veto power on impeachment is so perversely obscene as to take one’s breath away-as it greatly rewards McConnell’s unpatriotic partisanship.

If the Democrats themselves refuse to consider impeachment now it will codify this state of affairs in American politics: only Democratic Presidents can be impeached-even over trivial things like Lewinsky or Emailgate but as GOPers will defend GOP ‘Presidents’ or any GOPer of any charge-wether it’s pedophilia a la Roy Moore or a traitor like Donald Trump. It will mean that GOP Presidents-and most of the recent GOP Presidents have been ‘Presidents’ are above the law and can’t be impeached for any reason. That’s what ‘ok he committed impeachable offenses but let’s not impeach him just wait beat him in 2020’ actually means-even Democrats agree that GOP Presidents can’t be impeached.

Another zombie idea we keep hearing.  is ‘you only impeach if you know for certain you can convict’

“But Democrats would also be wise to trust House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who wants to defer talk of impeachment until such investigations progress. Without support from “a good fraction of the opposition” party, Nadler said, an impeachment drive would “tear the country apart.”

Really? The GOP impeached Clinton who had approval in the 60s and 70s-the week they impeached I believe he had an 81% approval rating-per gallup. Yet despite this, was the country actually ‘torn apart?’ Now with close to a majority already wanting Trump impeached it can’t be considered because it will ‘tear the country apart?’

With all due respect the country is already torn apart. Nadler like so many Democrats seems to value the feelings of Republican voters over his own-we already believe the system is rigged but we’re supposed to just what-swallow it? Like we swallowed Bush v. Gore?

The Democratic leadership often seems to fear and value the feelings of Trump’s base over that of their own.

When does it end, when is there every going to be accountability? The GOP was willing to ignore the feelings of as much as 81% of the public but the Dems can’t do anything contrary to the wishes of 40%?

“And there is another reason to hold off on impeachment as well: Given the constitutional requirement for a supermajority of Senators to convict, any effort to remove Trump from the White House today would—inevitably and catastrophically—fail. Barring a highly improbable flip-flop by some 20 Senate Republicans, impeachment is simply not going to happen. Rather than indulge the hopes of their most fervently anti-Trump constituents, Democrats might be wiser to press on with investigations while leveling with voters that the best shot at ending Trump’s presidency anytime soon will come at the ballot box in 2020.”

Yuri Applebaum did a great job of dismantling this canard that you don’t impeach unless you know for certain you can convict:

“After the house impeaches a president, the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove him from office. Opponents of impeachment point out that, despite the greater severity of the prospective charges against Trump, there is little reason to believe the Senate is more likely to remove him than it was to remove Clinton. Indeed, the Senate’s Republican majority has shown little will to break with the president—though that may change. The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.”

This is a crucial point that opponents of impeachment fail to grasp: public opinion isn’t static and the simple fact of opening an impeachment inquiry will move public opinion.

But Applebaum gets to the more fundamental benefit:

“But this sort of vote-counting, in any case, misunderstands the point of impeachment. The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office. The country will benefit greatly regardless of how the Senate ultimately votes.”

Contrast this with the idea that if the House impeaches but the Senate doesn’t convict that’s somehow ‘catastrophic.’ To the contrary, there is great benefit in doing it however the Senate votes. 

“Even if the impeachment of Donald Trump fails to produce a conviction in the Senate, it can safeguard the constitutional order from a president who seeks to undermine it. The protections of the process alone are formidable. They come in five distinct forms.”

Again, while I think the most compelling reason to impeach Trump is he won his office illegitimately, the maladministration argument gets more compelling by the day-the longer this callous, partisan, politically motivated shutdown goes on it gets more compelling, every day another government worker doesn’t get her check or a taxpayer doesn’t receive his refund the case for impeachment grows stronger.

Applebaum makes the crucial point that impeachment is a process not a destination with great value for the country under threat from Trump’s authoritarian menace. It’s been badly misconstrued by the Barney Franks of the world as only having value if it results in Trump’s being bumped from office. But, again, even if it fails to lead to conviction-and we don’t know that as the impeachment inquiry itself would move public opinion by dominating the news cycle and via discovery will move public opinion-there’s great benefit in doing it.

Many elected Dems-at least the old guard; clearly some of the freshman like Rashida Tlaib or Joe Neguse don’t have this hangup-are cowed by the idea that Trump is a master manipulator of the media. But another benefit of the impeachment process is that it would take away his ability to control the narrative:

“The first is that once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered this, much to their chagrin. Johnson, the irascible Tennessee Democrat who succeeded to the presidency in 1865 upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, quickly found himself at odds with the Republican Congress. He shattered precedents by delivering a series of inflammatory addresses that dominated the headlines and forced his opponents into a reactive posture. The launching of impeachment inquiries changed that. Day after day, Congress held hearings. Day after day, newspapers splashed the proceedings across their front pages. Instead of focusing on Johnson’s fearmongering, the press turned its attention to the president’s missteps, to the infighting within his administration, and to all the things that congressional investigators believed he had done wrong.

“It isn’t just the coverage that changes. ”

“When presidents face the prospect of impeachment, they tend to discover a previously unsuspected capacity for restraint and compromise, at least in public. They know that their words can be used against them, so they fume in private. Johnson’s calls for the hanging of his political opponents yielded quickly to promises to defer to their judgment on the key questions of the day. Nixon raged to his aides, but tried to show a different face to the country. “Dignity, command, faith, head high, no fear, build a new spirit,” he told himself. Clinton sent bare-knuckled proxies to the television-news shows, but he and his staff chose their own words carefully.Trump is easily the most pugilistic president since Johnson; he’s never going to behave with decorous restraint. But if impeachment proceedings begin, his staff will surely redouble its efforts to curtail his tweeting, his lawyers will counsel silence, and his allies on Capitol Hill will beg for whatever civility he can muster. His ability to sidestep scandal by changing the subject—perhaps his greatest political skill—will diminish.As Trump fights for his political survival, that struggle will overwhelm other concerns. This is the second benefit of impeachment: It paralyzes a wayward president’s ability to advance the undemocratic elements of his agenda. Some of Trump’s policies are popular, and others are widely reviled. Some of his challenges to settled orthodoxies were long overdue, and others have proved ill-advised. These are ordinary features of our politics and are best dealt with through ordinary electoral processes. It is, rather, the extraordinary elements of Trump’s presidency that merit the use of impeachment to forestall their success: his subversion of the rule of law, attacks on constitutional liberties, and advancement of his own interests at the public’s expense.”

“The Mueller probe as well as hearings convened by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have already hobbled the Trump administration to some degree. It will face even more scrutiny from a Democratic House. White House aides will have to hire personal lawyers; senior officials will spend their afternoons preparing testimony. But impeachment would raise the scrutiny to an entirely different level.In part, this is because of the enormous amount of attention impeachment proceedings garner. But mostly, the scrutiny stems from the stakes of the process. The most a president generally has to fear from congressional hearings is embarrassment; there is always an aide to take the fall. Impeachment puts his own job on the line, and demands every hour of his day. The rarest commodity in any White House is time, that of the president and his top advisers. When it’s spent watching live hearings or meeting with lawyers, the administration’s agenda suffers.

This is the irony of congressional leaders’ counseling patience, urging members to simply wait Trump out and use the levers of legislative power instead of moving ahead with impeachment. There may be no more effective way to run out the clock on an administration than to tie it up with impeachment hearings.

This clearly shows just how valuable the impeachment process is-again it’s a process not simply the ‘remove him from office’ gambit where if you don’t remove him it’s better not even trying.What Barney Frank fails to get with his talk of ‘just vote him out in 2020’-despite Frank having being there for it all-the Clinton impeachment, the Bush years, the 2016 campaign, perhaps he was too close to see it clearly?-is that we’ve done this before. We tried this with Nixon and then with W-‘just beat him next time no need to be punitive.’

In 1974 Ford for clearly self serving and partisan reasons pardoned Nixon. He claimed it was for the country but the country didn’t want Nixon pardoned. Ford claimed this would help the country ‘heal’ but it had the opposite effect-folks became more cynical as Nixon was able to escape accountability-all his underlings went to prison but he escaped accountability.

Footnote: kind of like Chris Christie, thinking of his recent book tour.

Chris Matthews was discussing the other night how many Americans felt short changed-they wanted to know what happened but instead the process was shut down and Nixon was protected on the specious premise that this was in the national interest-rather than the interest of the Republican party.

This is what the Democrats who are always Waiting for Mr. Mueller fail to get-there is a public interest and a public right to know what Mueller knows and everything about what the Trump campaign did in 2016 with Russia-and others wether the Saudis and UAE. or rogue FBI agents-to rig that election as well as what steps Trump has taken post election to obstruct and impede this investigation.

As noted above by Applebaum, impeachment is also extremely valuable in terms of discovery. At this point the Democrat need to stop with the Waiting for Mr. Mueller and act like the coequal branch of government who has authority-and the ultimate power to decide on Trump. They are not simply passive vessels waiting for Mueller’s report. And indeed, based on William Barr’s testimony-the man who not only called the Mueller investigation fatally misconceived but pardoned Casper Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra co-conspirators at the height of Bush Sr’s 1992 reelection campaign-we may never see the full material Mueller report-making the Democrats own work even more vital.

We also have no idea when it’s coming-assuming it’s coming at all, many argue that there will be no Mueller report in the sense there was a Ken Starr report-which if true is pretty deserves an explanation-and if there is one, William Barr hasn’t promised to show us. As Senator Chris Murphy points out Mueller needs to show the Dems something sooner rather than later-so there’s even time to have hearings. Indeed, sometimes you wonder if this is the plan-‘wait for Mueller’ but Mueller won’t be ready for a long time then we only get a sanitized version of the report a la what Bill Barr doesn’t think embarasses ‘the President’ and then Barney Frank and friends declared ‘oh well there’s no time now, let’s just win the 2020 election.’

Let me tell you if this is the plan of the Democrats then I may sit out the 2020 election myself and I’ve never sat out an election in my adult life. But if the Dems won’t fight back here then they never will-if not now, when? Clearly never. If Trump isn’t impeachable no Republican President ever will be and it’s game set match. With Frank and friends fretting about these sensitive Obama-Trump voters in the Midwest they might worry more about actual Dem voters who made 2018 happen and who maybe won’t come out in 2020 =if they let Trump and his GOP co-conspirators walk like they did the Bush-Cheney criminals in 2009-2010.

Maybe they need to stop taking their own voters for granted. Yes I want Trump gone but not at the price of legitimizing another rigged election. Not at the price of again agreeing that the Democrats always let their vile enemies off the hook when these very same vile enemies will  use anything-Whitewater, Emailgate, the Clintons’ Christmas list-to destroy them. The Dem base has every right to say enough is enough if this is the plan-call it the Barney Frank plan. 

One thing the Democrats have been willing to discuss is the other I word-indictment. It’s ironic that they are willing to discuss indictment, they are much more comfortable discussing indictment-which they have no control over-then impeachment-which they do. One obvious interpretation of this is they are hoping Mueller-or maybe SDNY or NY AG-take the pressure off them and do the dirty work.

If so that’s not only pathetic it’s also-a la Bill Barr0-fatally misconceived as indictment is about Trump as an individual-Individual 1-but what concerns us as a country is his illegitimate ‘Presidency.’  What matters more than indicting Individual 1 is indicting illegitimate ‘President Trump’-ie, impeachment.

Again, as the language in Mueller’s memos makes clear, this is crime against the American people-their Presidential election was rigged and subverted. The relevant indictment is not against Trump the individual but Trump the illegitimate President. So even if Mueller were willing to indict-and the conventional legal wisdom is that he’d never do this in a million years-it would not be a substitute for impeachment. Sorry,  Democrats, as one of the greatest Democrats who ever lived put it: the buck stops here, that is to say, with you.

Stop trying to hand it off to Mueller. Beyond that we have the very questionable and worrisome ‘correction’ by Mueller’s office on Friday of the Buzzfeed story, a ‘correction’ that raised far more questions than it answered-it actually answered darn near nothing at all.

That it was seen as somehow vindicating “President Trump’ with the usual intellectually vacuous members of the MSM rushing in to declare the entire Buzzfeed story ‘fake news’ was alarming enough.

I mean calling it fake news-for a member of the media using this loaded, vile phrase in the way Trump uses it, thereby giving him ‘vindication’-when you don’t even know what specifically was supposed to be false in the story is risible in the extreme but it shows the true colors of the MSM-always very quick to ‘give President Trump the benefit of the doubt’ despite the world records he’s set in lying-forcing the Washington Post to invent a new category of lying, the Bottomless Pinocchio.

And from a former member of the media like Ron Fourier.

Even if elements-that Peter Carr didn’t identify-were inaccurate to call the entire thing ‘fake news’ is intellectually indefensible and obscene.

It became even more alarming when it was reported that a major motivation was because the Buzzfeed story had raised impeachment talk among the Democrats-Marcy Wheeler:

“The WaPo story suggested that the statement was issued because Democrats were discussing impeachment.”

[W]ith Democrats raising the specter of investigation and impeachment, Mueller’s team started discussing a step they had never before taken: publicly disputing reporting on evidence in their ongoing investigation.

“I’ve since heard the same.”

“It is not appropriate one way or another to issue a statement that otherwise would not have gotten made solely to tamp down discussion about impeachment — as opposed to reestablish what Special Counsel claims it can prove with regards to Cohen’s lies. If Trump suborned perjury about his own doings with Russia — and Congress already had abundant evidence that he had done so before Buzzfeed’s story — then that is grounds to discuss impeachment. That is a proper function of Congress. It is not the function of the Deputy Attorney General’s office to suppress perfectly legitimate discussions of impeachment.”

Why should the SCO feel it needs to knock down a story because it led to legitimate-or even illegitimate-impeachment talk? Since when has managing public opinion been a function of the SCO? Until now, it clearly hasn’t-this is the first time Mueller’s probe has ever knocked down a story. Since when? Perhaps since Trump’s stooge Matthew Whittaker took over as AG?

It got even more alarming when it emerged that Rod Rosestein’s office called Mueller to ask for the correction. But it turns out it’s even worse than that. Back to EmptyWheel who noticed something about Rudy Giuliani’s interview with Jake Tapper the MSM has missed-what else is new?

“In his appearance on Jake Tapper’s show today, Rudy Giuliani (starting at 14:25) appears to take credit for SCO’s statement. After agreeing with Tapper that the NYT had corrected their claim that Paul Manafort had shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik with the intent that it in turn get shared with two Ukrainian oligarchs he worked for, he noted that the NYT had not issued the correction on their own. He then said that the Special Counsel’s office had not, either.”

Rudy: Originally the NYTimes ran with the story [about Paul Manafort sharing polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik] — again, fake news — that he shared it with a Russian, not true. [note: actually it is true, because Kilimnik himself is a Russian citizen]

Tapper: They corrected that. They corrected that.

Rudy: They did correct that. They didn’t correct that — my friend, they didn’t correct that, they didn’t correct that just completely on their own by the way. The same thing with Special Counsel. That didn’t happen spontaneously.

“At the very least, this undermines WaPo’s claim that Mueller already had a correction of Buzzfeed in the works before Rosenstein’s office called.”

So not only was Rosenstein’s office involved but Rudy intimates that someone from the Russia House was directly involved-my money’s on Whittaker.

UPDATE: Rudy cops to ‘reaching out’ to the SCO the Friday morning after the Buzzfeed piece came out:

UPDATE 2.0:

With all this it becomes even more untenable to simply sit back and wait for Mueller-we don’t know how independent Mueller will be in the future. And while you can give him credit for being the anti Ken Starr-who leaked like a sieve at this point he owes us something, he needs to give us some idea what’s happening.

As it stands we’re in the untenable position that on the one hand Mueller doesn’t believe in indictment, on the other, the Democrats are too squeamish and ‘Fraidy Cat’-Jamie Rakin’s apt phrase-about impeachment and instead want Mueller to bail them out by indicting but on the still other hand Mueller’s office intervenes and knocks down stories that lead Democrats to finally start taking impeachment seriously. Something has to give.

As if Barney Frank didn’t endorse enough zombie ideas for the coup de grace on Bill Maher he declared the Democrats should focus on fiscal stimulus proposals and healthcare for the next two years-forget about oversight, that’s to his mind a political loser. Does the idea that the Democrats can partner with Trump on a great infrastructure deal and Medicare for All really still need to be debunked? At this point we see that Trump and Mitch McConnell’s intransigence is so great they won’t even open the federal government and yet Frank thinks Trump will be a constructive negotiating partner in the next two years if the Democrats just try being nice to him and giving him a pass on everything?

Frank shows a naïveté here-as someone who was in the House for all those years!-that is almost brutal.

Speaking of the-ahem, #McConnellShutdown-I’m happy to be able to give the Dems some kudos here-I know I’ve been quite tough in questioning their intentions on oversight and impeachment, though I believe deservedly so.

The #McConnellShutdown is more apt in a sense as it’s ultimately he who could end this at any moment if he gave a damn about anything other than naked GOP partisan political advantage.

I mean we should long since have figured out that there’s no bottom for McConnell’s partisan cynicism-not the health of the US economy, not the US credit rating, not even our national security and the legitimacy of Presidential elections matters a whit to Mitch McConnell the only thing that matters is GOP partisan advantage. Talk about the Vichy Republicans and McConnell is their leader.

So it’s child’s play for him to refuse to put up for a vote the same legislation that passed his GOP Senate 94-6 just three weeks ago. Of course, he’s at the same time shameless enough to lecture the Democrats from being inconsistent in opposing Trump’s wall-after all they voted for a wall just the other day-you know back in 2006!

But no doubt this is McConnell’s favorite position-outrageously illogical arguments and lying as an expression of naked GOP partisan power-Yeah I’m gaslighting you but you can’t do a damn thing about it. 

As Charles Pierce quite rightly says there’s no more loathsome creature in our political landscape than Mitch McConnell. 

But here the Democrats deserve great credit as they have not buckled despite the endlessly plaintive questions by the MSM-but shouldn’t you make ‘President Trump’ a counter offer?

After Trump’s ‘offer’ on Saturday the MSM was overwhelmed with how statemanlike Trump was suddenly-to quote Vance Jones Today Donald Trump became President. 

The Washington Post editorial board was immediately won over-those obstructionist Democrats need to make a deal with ‘President Trump’!

WE CAN recite many reasons Democrats should spurn President Trump’s Saturday afternoon offer to end the government shutdown. He should not be rewarded for having taken the government hostage. Any piece of a wall would reinforce his hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric. He’s unreliable, having made and withdrawn similar offers in the past. This one isn’t good enough; “dreamers” need a path to citizenship, not merely a three-year reprieve.

Those are serious objections. But here is something serious on the other side of the equation: Real people. Real people, with real lives that depend utterly on what Congress and the president do now.

The Posts’s view amounts to: he shouldn’t be rewarded for taking the government hostage but the hostages are really suffering so just reward him already!

Whatever happened to ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists?’ Isn’t that the official position of the American government? That even when terrorists kidnap Americans we don’t pay the ransom? The Democrats are absolutely right not to pay this ransom-while the Dems are slow learners it’s encouraging to see evidence that they do learn-since Obama’s fiasco in offering up that draconian sequester in exchange for raising the debt ceiling the Dems-starting with Obama himself in the 2013 after his reelection-have refused to negotiate to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling.

On the other hand the Post’s view amounts to the idea that the Democrats should be willing to pay Trump for giving them back-or more to the point the American people back-their milk money.

Even DACA for three years would only be Trump giving part of what he already stole.

Indeed, if the Democrats were ss foolhardy as the Post wants them to be, they’d essentially be themselves elevating Trump to the level of an American monarch:

But declaring that even if Trump committed impeachable offenses you won’t impeach him is also elevating him to the level of a King in a quite outrageous way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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