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In the end, when you get past all the punditry and spin about Robert S. Mueller III’s appearance before Congress, there are two exchanges that capture what this whole scandal is really about — and they both tell a damning story about President Trump’s conduct.The first one occurred when the former special counsel appeared before the Intelligence Committee in the afternoon, and was questioned by Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairman. Schiff noted that Mueller’s report found that Russia interfered in our election in “sweeping and systematic fashion.”Here’s what happened next:Schiff: During the course of this Russian interference in the election, the Russians made outreach to the Trump campaign, did they not?Mueller: That occurred. [. . .]Schiff: The campaign welcomed the Russian help, did they not?Mueller: We report indications that that occurred, yes. [. . .]Schiff: The president himself called on the Russians to hack [Hillary Clinton’s] emails?Mueller: There was a statement by the president on those general lines.Schiff: Numerous times during the campaign, the president praised the releases of the Russian-hacked emails through WikiLeaks?Mueller: That did occur. [. . .]Schiff: Apart from the Russians wanting to help Trump win . . . Donald Trump was trying to make millions from a real estate deal in Moscow?Mueller: You’re talking about the hotel in Moscow? Yes.Schiff: When your investigation looked into these matters, numerous Trump associates lied to your team, the grand jury and to Congress?Mueller: A number of people we interviewed in our investigation, it turns out, did lie. . . .Schiff: When the president said the Russian interference was a “hoax,” that was false, wasn’t it?Mueller: True. [. . .]Schiff: In short, your investigation found evidence that Russia wanted to help Trump win the election, right?Mueller: I think, generally, that would be accurate. [. . .]Schiff: Russia committed federal crimes in order to help Donald Trump?Mueller: You’re talking about the computer crimes charged in our case? Absolutely.Schiff: Trump campaign officials built their strategy, their messaging strategy, around those stolen documents?Mueller: Generally, that’s true.Schiff: And then they lied to cover it up?Mueller: Generally, that’s true.This confirms the basic outlines of what this scandal has been about all along. The president and his advisers eagerly expected to gain from a massive foreign attack against our political system — one undertaken to elect Trump in 2016. Trump and his advisers repeatedly sought to coordinate with those efforts, in the full knowledge of who was behind them — the Russian government. Trump secretly pursued a lucrative real estate deal, with Kremlin involvement, while voters were choosing the Republican nominee. Trump and his advisers repeatedly lied to cover all of this up.That was all documented — along with much, much more — in the special counsel’s report. But it was incredibly damning all the same, because the report itself was already incredibly damning, and Mueller stated all these basic, unvarnished facts from it on live television.Indeed, at one point, Mueller flatly stated that Trump’s public encouragement of the interference effort gave a “boost to what is and should be illegal behavior.”The other exchange came during the morning session, when Mueller appeared before the Judiciary Committee. Its chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), straightforwardly asked Mueller to summarize his findings. Nadler began by asking Mueller about the central claim the president has made about Mueller’s work:Nadler: Director Mueller, the president has repeatedly claimed that your report found there was no obstruction, and that it completely and totally exonerated him. But that is not what your report said, is it?Mueller: Correct. That is not what the report said.After going over the fact that Mueller was bound by Justice Department policy forbidding the indictment of a sitting president — which led Mueller to avoid making public conclusions about the president’s culpability — this exchange, concerning the multiple obstructive acts committed by Trump, took place:Nadler: Now, in fact, your report expressly states that it does not exonerate the president.Mueller: It does.Nadler: And your investigation actually found, quote, “multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian interference and obstruction investigations.” Is that correct?Mueller: Correct.Nadler: Now, Director Mueller, can you explain in plain terms what that finding means so the American people can understand it?Mueller: Well, the finding indicates that the president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed.Nadler: In fact, you were talking about incidents, quote, “in which the president sought to use his official power outside of usual channels,” unquote, to exert undo influence over your investigations, is that right?Mueller: That’s correct.Mueller flatly disputed two of the biggest lies Trump has for months told about the special counsel’s findings. No obstruction? False. Total exoneration? False.As Mueller confirmed, after Trump and his campaign eagerly sought to benefit from and coordinate with this sweeping foreign attack on our political system, the president committed multiple acts meant to impede and obstruct the investigation into all of it.Mueller did not quite confirm explicitly that he viewed these acts as criminal. But he did confirm unequivocally that he was precluded by Justice Department guidelines from bringing charges for them. And the report actually establishes multiple cases in which Mueller determined that the threshold of corrupt intent was, in fact, met.The argument that Trump supporters make about this is either that any such obstructive acts are entirely legitimate by definition, because a president can shut down an investigation into himself and his associates for any reason, as head of the executive branch (the case his lawyers have made). Or it’s that Trump’s obstructive acts were justified, or at least understandable, because Trump thought he was being unfairly targeted by the investigation. As Attorney General William P. Barr has said, “the president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency."But Trump didn’t try to impede the investigation solely to protect himself from an investigation he allegedly thought was unfair (we doubt the president is even capable of evaluating anything that tries to hold him accountable by any meaningful fairness-versus-unfairness metric to begin with). He also sought to impede a full reckoning with this “sweeping” attack on our political system, irrespective of whether there was any criminal coordination with it. This point often gets lost, but Mueller testified to it vividly.It is doubtful whether all this will be enough to push Democrats into an impeachment inquiry, or to push public opinion into supporting one. But there’s no more remaining doubt about what Trump and his associates did. At the end of the day, Mueller’s testimony laid all of it bare.
Does Pollyannaish have an antonym?
After live-tweeting through most of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony in Congress today, President Trump briefly took questions from reporters at the White House and promptly had a total meltdown.Journalists recounted asking him straightforward questions about the report only to have him sneer back things like “YOU’RE untruthful when you ask that question.”https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1154142542054776832Trump also got very testy about the notion of “exoneration”:https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1154134141635612673Although the president doesn’t usually call reporters “fake news” to their faces, he’s had hissy fits like this before. But this one was significantly more tantrum-y. Look at this big baby head insisting “No, he didn’t say that!” and saying Mueller put forward a “fake set of facts.”https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1154135084762447872Although Republicans and the conservative media were already doing victory laps over the testimony, Trump’s anger doesn’t seem like he feels he won this round. A great way to round out a day that made me feel wonderful and optimistic about the future!
I wonder if General Flynn -who plead guilty- still needs to be made whole.I'll hang up and listen for my answer.
Quote from: Athos_131 on July 24, 2019, 11:49:15 PMI wonder if General Flynn -who plead guilty- still needs to be made whole.I'll hang up and listen for my answer. Totally not rhetorical.[/facetious]
When General Flynn has been made whole in every way, I will be partially satisfied; and I hope to see many of these cretins, you all know the names well, dragged through the courts, dragged in cuffs with their families in early morning raids, and broken financially, and professionally, prior to finding themselves incarcerated.
What to expect is 41 members consuming their own full time, bloviating, and attempting to convince anyone listening that they are working hard, should be returned to Office... in reality, Democrats have been conducting Mock Hearings, fine tuning their spin and sharpening their points, if not fully scripting their speeches and questions, to get the most favorable press reaction, as they make this desperate attempt to make a boring 448 page report seem interesting to those who do not, have not, will not bother to read it... the Cliff Notes is what they hope to accomplish today... who knows what Republicans will say, as the script has been written pretty much, so the questions they should be asking will not be fully addressed or answered, by agreement between Democrats and the co conspirators in the Witness chairs today.Questions that need to be asked and answered, and will not happen:Why, when you knew you could not charge a sitting president, did you accept the job?When did you discover/learn that the FISA Warrants used to begin this quest to unseat a sitting President were based upon untrue and unnsubstantiated claims and not 'facts' as was stated, and therefore knew this case was not worthy of the 35 Million you spent on this investigation.Was your discovery that you could not find/charge Obstruction, and that there was no underlying crime, made prior to the 2018 Election? If not, why not? If so, why did you not make the announcement then?How many Clinton Campaign lawyers and contributors does it take to investigate Donald Trump? How many lawyers with NO Democrat ties were on the team?How did you determine that the DNC Server was hacked, tampered with, if you did not ever inspect the DNC Server? What did the FISA Judges have to say, when you told the FISA Court that the entire premise of the multiple Warrants they gave to the FBI were based on lies?, and the FBI knew it when they were presented as evidence?More, many more, and we shall see our esteemed and less esteemed legislators present the rehearsed farce that will consume 5+ hours of CSpantoday, and the rest of the week, this coming weekend, and maybe the entire Congressional Break, in another attempt, by no means final, to attack the Office of the President...
Quote from: psiberzerker on July 25, 2019, 12:01:58 AMQuote from: Athos_131 on July 24, 2019, 11:49:15 PMI wonder if General Flynn -who plead guilty- still needs to be made whole.I'll hang up and listen for my answer. Totally not rhetorical.[/facetious]Quote from: joan1984 on March 26, 2019, 12:29:17 AMWhen General Flynn has been made whole in every way, I will be partially satisfied; and I hope to see many of these cretins, you all know the names well, dragged through the courts, dragged in cuffs with their families in early morning raids, and broken financially, and professionally, prior to finding themselves incarcerated.
Over the course of nearly six hours, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III testified before two House committees. Here’s a guide to some of the claims made by lawmakers that were factually shaky or misleading.“The special counsel’s job — nowhere does it say that you were to conclusively determine Donald Trump’s innocence, or that the special counsel report should determine whether or not to exonerate him. It’s not in any of the documents. It’s not in your appointment order. It’s not in the special counsel regulations. It’s not in the OLC opinions. It’s not in the Justice Manual. And it’s not in the Principles of Federal Prosecution. Nowhere do those words appear together because, respectfully, respectfully, director, it was not the special counsel’s job to conclusively determine Donald Trump’s innocence or to exonerate him. Because the bedrock principle of our justice system is a presumption of innocence.”— Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.)Ratcliffe essentially accused Mueller of overstepping his bounds. For various reasons, Mueller did not file charges against Trump. Yet the report lays out substantial evidence of potential obstruction of justice by the president.Mueller said in his report and in public comments that he was neither charging nor clearing Trump. “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” the report says.Ratcliffe in his line of questioning suggested that Mueller went rogue with that declaration and that the special counsel should have refrained from commenting on Trump's guilt or innocence once he reached the decision not to bring charges.Mueller in response said he was in a “unique situation.” The Justice Department has a long-standing policy that prevents the indictment of a sitting president, on the one hand, and Mueller’s team found substantial evidence of obstruction, on the other.It should be noted, also, that Mueller's statements about Trump were contained in a confidential report to Attorney General William P. Barr. The special counsel regulations required Mueller to explain his prosecution or declination decisions to Barr. The attorney general, not Mueller, made the decision to release the report to the public — at the urging of President Trump.“After an extended, unhampered investigation, today marks an end to Mr. Mueller’s involvement in an investigation that closed in April.”— Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), ranking Republican member on the House Judiciary Committee“President Trump cooperated fully with the investigation.”— Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.)This Republican talking point crosses the line from spin to fiction. An entire volume of Mueller's report covers multiple episodes of potential obstruction of justice.Trump tried to fire the special counsel. The president ordered former White House counsel Donald McGahn to have Mueller removed, but McGahn declined to carry out those instructions and threatened to quit, according to the Mueller report.McGahn refused to correct a New York Times report about the attempt to fire Mueller, despite Trump's insistence that he do so. McGahn also refused Trump's request that he create an internal record falsely stating that the president never ordered Mueller's ouster.Trump also tried to curtail the investigation, though that too was unsuccessful. The Mueller report says Trump asked Corey Lewandowski, his onetime campaign manager, to tell then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit the investigation to future election interference. Lewandowski did not convey the message to Sessions, who by that point had recused himself from the Russia investigation.To have the president bearing down like this is no small matter for a prosecutor, but let's set aside these unsuccessful attempts to fire or restrain Mueller. Let's also set aside Trump's drumbeat of public attacks on Mueller and his investigation over two years, many of which were false or misleading.Mueller's report says he was impeded in other ways.Trump declined to sit for an interview with Mueller’s team despite multiple requests. The president’s written answers to questions were deemed insufficient, according to the report. Mueller indicated in response to Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) at a House intelligence committee hearing that Trump’s written responses were untruthful in at least some cases.Several Trump advisers or campaign officials gave false or incomplete testimony, including Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos, according to the report and subsequent criminal charges. “Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference,” the Mueller report says.Some witnesses asserted their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions, according to the Mueller report. Another “practical limit” was the fact that “numerous witnesses and subjects lived abroad, and documents were held outside the United States."“Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated — including some associated with the Trump Campaign — deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records,” the Mueller report says. “In such cases, the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.”“So most prosecutors want to make sure there was no appearance of impropriety, but in your case, you hired a bunch of people that did not like the President.”— Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Tex.)“That team of Democrat investigators you hired donated more than $60,000 to the Hillary Clinton campaign and other Democratic candidates.”— JohnsonA regular theme of Republican questioning was that Mueller stocked his team with Democratic partisans. The claims engendered rare passion from Mueller, who defended his team and noted that 14 of the 19 lawyers were on detail as career prosecutors from the Justice Department.“We strove to hire those individuals that could do the job. I have been in this business for almost 25 years. And in those 25 years I have not had occasion, once, to ask somebody about their political affiliation. It is not done,” Mueller said. “What I care about is the capability of the individual to do the job and do the job seriously and quickly and with integrity.”In fact, federal regulations prohibit the Justice Department from considering the political affiliation or political contributions of career appointees, including those appointed to the Special Counsel’s Office. So Mueller was legally prohibited from considering the political affiliations of the people he has hired.While Johnson noted $60,000 in donations to “Clinton and other Democrats,” by our count, only about $10,900 were made directly to Clinton during her presidential runs. About half of that amount came just from Jeannie Rhee, who joined the team from Mueller’s law firm, Wilmer Hale; she donated a total of $5,400 to Clinton’s campaign in 2015 and 2016. At WilmerHale, Rhee was a partner on the defense team representing the Clinton Foundation in a lawsuit over Clinton’s use of her private email server.All told, five of the 16 known members contributed to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Another six members had made political donations to Democrats over the years.But Mueller is a Republican. The special counsel investigation was overseen by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee and also a Republican.“Mr. Mueller, did you indeed interview for the FBI director job one day before you were appointed as Special Counsel?”— Rep. Gary Steube (R-Fla.)President Trump has made a similar claim from the start of Mueller’s appointment in 2017. But the Mueller report quotes Trump aides as privately telling Trump it was silly — and Mueller insisted in the hearing he was not interviewed for the FBI job, which he has already held for 12 years. Instead, he said he came to the White House to discuss the role of the FBI director.“It was about the job and not about me applying for the job,” Mueller told Steube. His statement was made under oath.Former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon told investigators the purpose of the meeting was not a job interview but to have Mueller “offer a perspective on the institution of the FBI,” according to the special counsel’s report, and “although the White House thought about beseeching Mueller to become Director again, he did not come in looking for the job.”The Washington Post has reported that when the issue came up of whether Mueller might be interested in once again becoming FBI director, he said he could not take the job unless a law was changed. Mueller has already served a full ten-year term as FBI director and Congress in July 2011 passed legislation allowing Mueller to serve an additional two years.According to the report, the president’s advisers — including then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Bannon — “pushed back on Trump’s assertion of conflicts, telling the President they did not count as true conflicts.” Bannon told investigators that he “recalled telling the President that the purported conflicts were ‘ridiculous’ and that none of them was real or could come close to justifying precluding Mueller from serving as Special Counsel.”“Your report famously links Russian Internet troll farms with the Russian government. Yet, at a hearing on May 28th in the Concord Management IRA prosecution that you initiated, the judge excoriated both you and Mr. Barr for producing no evidence to support this claim. Why did you suggest Russia was responsible for the troll farms, when, in court, you’ve been unable to produce any evidence to support it?”— Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.)McClintock attacked Mueller with an interesting argument that mirrors one of the defenses offered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.In his line of questioning, McClintock pushed back on a widely accepted finding from the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department: that Russia's government ordered up a social-media influence campaign to help Trump and hurt Clinton.Before Mueller’s grand jury indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers working directly for Putin’s government, it indicted several Russian individuals working for a “troll farm” called the Internet Research Agency. Two Russian companies — called Concord Catering and Concord Management and Consulting — provided the Internet Research Agency with millions of dollars to buy digital ads and to pump pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messaging into the U.S. ecosystem in 2016, Mueller’s indictment alleges.Among those indicted was Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, one of the richest men in Russia. Prigozhin “controlled” the two Concord companies that funded the troll farm and directed its work, Mueller alleged. “He is a caterer who has been nicknamed ‘Putin’s chef’ because of his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin,” The Washington Post reported. The New York Times reported that Prigozhin has received contracts from the Russian government worth $3.1 billion over the past five years, citing research by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a group set up by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.The U.S. Treasury Department in 2016 imposed sanctions on Prigozhin and Concord over Russia’s occupation of Crimea and military actions in Ukraine, and then imposed more sanctions in 2018 based on “malicious cyber-enabled activities.” “Prigozhin has extensive business dealings with the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense, and a company with significant ties to him holds a contract to build a military base near the Russian Federation border with Ukraine,” the Treasury Department said in 2016 when it announced Prigozhin’s Ukraine-related sanctions. “Russia has been building additional military bases near the Ukrainian border and has used these bases as staging points for deploying soldiers into Ukraine.”In a 2018 news conference with Trump in Helsinki, Putin said Concord did not “represent” or “constitute” the Russian state. But the indictment leaves open the possibility that Russian government officials contributed to the Internet Research Agency’s efforts; it says the named defendants worked “together with others known and unknown to the Grand Jury.”“Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations — such as cyber activity — with overt efforts by Russian government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls,’” according to the January 2017 assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.The IRA indictment, however, does not state that the Russian government was behind the troll farm. U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, who is handling the Concord case, ruled July 1 that out-of-court comments from Mueller and Barr linking the Russian government to the IRA’s efforts would prejudice the jury at an eventual trial.But the judge did not say that the allegation was false or that Russia’s government had no hand in the troll farm’s campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.“There will be a lot of discussion I predict today and great frustration throughout the country about the fact that you wouldn’t answer any questions here about the origins of this whole charade, which was the infamous Christopher Steele dossier, now proven to be totally bogus, even though it is listed and specifically referenced in your report.”— JohnsonAs has been well-documented, the memos written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, on behalf of a firm working for Democrats and the Clinton campaign, did not spark the investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian entities. Even the memo written by the the-Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee in 2018 — and released by the White House — acknowledged: “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok.”Crossfire Hurricane was the name of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, which was opened on July 31, 2016, after the Australian government reported that George Papadopoulos, then a foreign-policy aide to Trump, told Alexander Downer, the top Australian diplomat to Britain at the time, during a May meeting that the Russian government had “damaging” material on Clinton and was prepared to release it late in the election.Downer had sent a cable back to the Australian capital about his meeting with Papadopoulos. He had sought the meeting to gain some insight into Trump’s foreign policy views but decided that Papadopoulos was “surprisingly young and inexperienced” to amount to anything in a Trump administration. Buried in the cable was a reference to Papadopoulos saying the Russians had damaging material on Clinton and were prepared to use it.After WikiLeaks started releasing Democratic National Committee emails during the Democratic National Convention, held July 25-28, Downer suddenly remembered “with a shudder” his meeting with Papadopoulos, according to Greg Miller’s “The Apprentice.” He immediately requested a meeting with the top U.S. diplomat in Britain at the time, who in turn alerted the FBI.The Steele “dossier,” which contained salacious allegations, certainly generated substantial media attention after it was made public in 2017. The FBI also cited it in a footnote seeking a court order allowing surveillance of a former Trump adviser. Since then, many elements of Steele’s reporting for the “dossier” have not been confirmed and have been called into question by the Mueller report.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, Nuisance of the Nation, was gaggling outside the chambers of the House Judiciary Committee, and he was fairly glowing with the kind of radioactive glee common to shady used-car dealers and the peddlers of aluminum siding to infirm widows."Republicans," Gaetz burbled, "are taking a victory lap."This is curious, indeed. In the first of his two appearances before congressional committees on Wednesday, former special counsel Robert Mueller testified that a) he didn't indict the president* on obstruction at least partly due to that godawful Office of Legal Counsel opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted, an opinion that should be burned and have its ashes scattered on Sam Ervin's grave; b) that a president*—like, say, this one—can be indicted once he leaves office, thereby implying that there is something there for which he could be indicted; c) that his report did not exonerate the president*; d) that there was a concerted effort on behalf of the White House to hamstring his investigation into the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election; and e) that Russia definitively wanted the president* to become the president*. And, remarkably, two of these statements came as answers to Republican senators. If this is a victory lap, I don't know what a crash-and-burn would be.(An aside: if Chuck Todd uses the word "optics" ever again in connection with American politics, I am going to raise William Allen White from the dead and make him put Todd on the night rewrite desk until Jesus comes home.)Otherwise, the hearing was a matter of having Democratic members of the committee soliciting damaging, "Yes," answers while Republicans yelled at Mueller, called his actions un-American, waved at him so the folks at home got the notion that Mueller was doddering, and basically loosed all the pent-up soundbites that they hadn't yet gotten to deliver on Sean Hannity's program. There ever was a citing of Hillary Rodham Clinton's email procedures. I mean, when you can line up Louie Gohmert, Padishah Emperor Of The Stupid People, Jim Jordan, and Gaetz, you have firmly set up headquarters in the Land of the Lost.At one point, Jordan just started rattling off names that may be familiar to people in 4Chan chatrooms, but that were otherwise baffling.THEY DIDN'T GO TO THE COURT. THEY USED HUMAN SOURCES. FROM THE MOMENT PAPADOPOULOS JOINS THE CAMPAIGN YOU'VE GOT ALL THESE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD STARTING TO SWIRL AROUND HIM. NAMES LIKE HALPEL, DOWNER, MEETING IN ROME AND LONDON, ALL KINDS OF PLACES. THE FBI EVEN SPENT A LADY POSING AS SOMEBODY ELSE WHO AND DISPATCHED HER TO LONDON TO SPY ON MR. PAPADOPOULOS. IN ONE OF THESE MEETINGS MR. PAPADOPOULOS IS TALKING TO A FOREIGN DIPLOMAT AND HE TELLS THE DIPLOMAT RUSSIANS HAVE DIRT ON CLINTON. THAT DIPLOMAT THEN CONTACTS THE FBI AND THE FBI OPENS AN INVESTIGATION BASED ON THAT FACT. YOU POINT THIS OUT ON PAGE 1 OF THE REPORT, JULY 31ST, 2016, THEY OPEN THE INVESTIGATION BASED ON THAT PIECE OF INFORMATION. DIPLOMAT TELLS PAPADOPOULOS THE RUSSIANS HAVE DIRT -- EXCUSE ME, PAPADOPOULOS TELLS THE DIPLOMAT THE RUSSIANS HAVE DIRT ON CLINTON, THEY TELL THE FBI. WHAT I'M WONDERING IS WHO TOLD PAPADOPOULOS? HOW DID HE FIND OUT?Beats me. I fell out of the train back on "Downer." I'm sure these conjuring words make sense to the initiates but, to me, it sounded like Jordan's hard drive was downloading at warp speed.The Democratic approach was best exemplified by Rep. Karen Bass of California, who led Mueller through a damning yes-no litany regarding the president*'s attempts to get Mueller fired through his then-White House counsel Don McGahn. Bass asked:COMMUNICATING THROUGH HIS PERSONAL ATTORNEY, McGAHN REFUSED, BECAUSE HE SAID, QUOTE, THAT THE TIMES STORY WAS ACCURATE IN REPORTING THAT THE PRESIDENT WANTED THE SPECIAL COUNSEL REMOVED. ISN'T THAT RIGHT?ON PAGE 113 IT SAYS, QUOTE, THE PRESIDENT THEN DIRECTED PORTER TO TELL McGAHN TO CREATE A RECORD, TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THE PRESIDENT NEVER DIRECTED McGAHN TO FIRE YOU, END QUOTE. IS THAT CORRECT?AND TO BE CLEAR, THE PRESIDENT IS ASKING HIS WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL, DON McGAHN, TO CREATE A RECORD THAT McGAHN BELIEVED TO BE UNTRUE WHILE YOU WERE IN THE MIDST OF INVESTIGATING THE PRESIDENT FOR OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. CORRECT?OKAY. BUT THE PRESIDENT STILL DIDN'T GIVE UP, DID HE? SO THE PRESIDENT TOLD McGAHN DIRECTLY TO DENY THAT THE PRESIDENT TOLD HIM TO HAVE YOU FIRED. CAN YOU TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED?WELL, ON PAGE 116, IT SAYS THE PRESIDENT MET HIM IN THE OVAL OFFICE, QUOTE, THE PRESIDENT BEGAN THE OVAL OFFICE MEETING BY TELLING McGAHN THAT THE "NEW YORK TIMES" STORY DIDN'T LOOK GOOD AND McGAHN NEEDED TO CORRECT IT. IS THAT CORRECT?Mueller answered, "Correct," or "True," or, "I refer you back to the report," to all of these. And if that isn't plainly an obstruction of justice, I don't know what you'd call it. And the fact that Mueller wasn't exactly Richard Pryor while delivering his answers doesn't matter a damn. He said the president* is a crook. Everyone in Congress knows it, and they knew it before Wednesday even had dawned. But now there's video.
Quote from: joan1984 on July 24, 2019, 01:49:52 PMWhat to expect is 41 members consuming their own full time, bloviating, and attempting to convince anyone listening that they are working hard, should be returned to Office... in reality, Democrats have been conducting Mock Hearings, fine tuning their spin and sharpening their points, if not fully scripting their speeches and questions, to get the most favorable press reaction, as they make this desperate attempt to make a boring 448 page report seem interesting to those who do not, have not, will not bother to read it... the Cliff Notes is what they hope to accomplish today... who knows what Republicans will say, as the script has been written pretty much, so the questions they should be asking will not be fully addressed or answered, by agreement between Democrats and the co conspirators in the Witness chairs today.Questions that need to be asked and answered, and will not happen:Why, when you knew you could not charge a sitting president, did you accept the job?When did you discover/learn that the FISA Warrants used to begin this quest to unseat a sitting President were based upon untrue and unnsubstantiated claims and not 'facts' as was stated, and therefore knew this case was not worthy of the 35 Million you spent on this investigation.Was your discovery that you could not find/charge Obstruction, and that there was no underlying crime, made prior to the 2018 Election? If not, why not? If so, why did you not make the announcement then?How many Clinton Campaign lawyers and contributors does it take to investigate Donald Trump? How many lawyers with NO Democrat ties were on the team?How did you determine that the DNC Server was hacked, tampered with, if you did not ever inspect the DNC Server? What did the FISA Judges have to say, when you told the FISA Court that the entire premise of the multiple Warrants they gave to the FBI were based on lies?, and the FBI knew it when they were presented as evidence?More, many more, and we shall see our esteemed and less esteemed legislators present the rehearsed farce that will consume 5+ hours of CSpantoday, and the rest of the week, this coming weekend, and maybe the entire Congressional Break, in another attempt, by no means final, to attack the Office of the President...Maybe another hearing about Benghazi would make you feel better.