[News] Trump, Russia, and the 2016 Election

All news related to Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia and to the Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. New details should be cited to reputable sources.

I'd like a chrome extension that replaces live video of republicans talking during senate hearings with Tuba playing.

Or just Porky Pig's laugh here on a loop:

Booker is mostly playing to the camera rather than asking questions. Which isn't useless--the evening news will probably play some clips from it--but doesn't pin Barr down on anything new.

Up next is Thom Tillis, Senator from North Carolina and therefore complicit in a racist GOP organization. And my former senator. I might have opinions about him.

EDIT: And now Kamala Harris is hammering him with questions.

Gettin' snitty wit' it.

The hearing, as you might expect from something run by Lindsay Graham, didn't end anything--though Harris got Barr to admit that neither he nor Rod Rosenstein looked at any of the underlying evidence. And the two of them apparently made up their minds about the charges between the 22nd (when they got the report for the first time) and the 24th (when they released their statement).

Or, of course, Barr made up his mind a long time before that. He refused to say when questioned.

I'm very curious of how much of the report Barr actually read. He didn't seem familiar with it when asked specific questions about details in it.

Gremlin wrote:

The hearing, as you might expect from something run by Lindsay Graham, didn't end anything--though Harris got Barr to admit that neither he nor Rod Rosenstein looked at any of the underlying evidence. And the two of them apparently made up their minds about the charges between the 22nd (when they got the report for the first time) and the 24th (when they released their statement).

Or, of course, Barr made up his mind a long time before that. He refused to say when questioned.

I'm very curious of how much of the report Barr actually read. He didn't seem familiar with it when asked specific questions about details in it.

My favorite moment was

Barr: "where is that in the report?" *victory chuckle*
D sentator: "page x, paragraph Y, line z"
Barr: *Deer in headlights head cocked look*

re: Thom Tillis, as a North Carolinian I have nothing to say about him that wouldn't get me rightfully MOD'd

Well, thanks to Senator Harris, we know how well he does with being questioned by lawyers.

I would have been surprised if Barr showed up.

Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono said rather than wrote:

Mr. Barr, now the American people know you're no different than Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once-decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office.

You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney. At your confirmation hearing you told Senator Feinstein that the job of attorney general is not the same as representing the president. So you know the difference. You've chosen to be the president's lawyer and side with him over the interest of the American people.

To start with, you should never have been involved in supervising the Robert Mueller investigation. You wrote a 19-page unsolicited memo, which you admit was not based on any facts, attacking the premise of half of the investigation. And you also should have insisted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recuse himself. He wasn't just a witness to some of the president's obstructive behavior; we now know he was in frequent personal contact with the president, a subject of the investigation. You should have left it to career officials. Then, once the report was delivered by the special counsel, you delayed its release for more than two weeks and let the president's personal lawyers look at before you even deigned to let Congress or the public see it. During that time you substituted your own political judgment for the special counsel’s legal conclusions and in a four-page letter to Congress.

And now we know, thanks to a free press, that Mr. Mueller wrote you a letter objecting to your so-called summary. When you called Mueller to discuss his letter, the reports are that he thought your summary was giving the press, Congress, and the public a misleading impression of his work. He asked you to release the report summaries to correct the misimpression you created, but you refused. When you finally did decide to release the report, over a congressional recess, and on the eve of two major religious holidays, you called a press conference to once again try to clear Donald Trump before anyone had a chance to read the special counsel report and come to their own on collusion. But when we read the report, we knew Robert Mueller’s concerns were valid, and your version was false.

You used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the president was cleared of misconduct. You selectively quoted fragments from the special counsel report, taking some of the most important statements out of context and ignoring the rest. You put the power and authority of the office of the attorney general and the Department of Justice behind a public relations effort to help Donald Trump protect himself. Finally, you lied to Congress. You told Rep. Charlie Crist that you didn't know what objections Mueller's team might have to the March 24 so-called summary. You told Sen. Chris van Hollen you didn't know if Robert Mueller supported your conclusions, but you knew. You lied.

And now we know. A lot of respected nonpartisan legal experts and elected officials were surprised by your efforts to protect the president. But I wasn’t surprised. You did exactly what I thought you would do. It is why I voted against your confirmation. I expected you would try to protect the president and, indeed, you did. In 1989—this isn't something you hadn't done before. In 1989, when you refused to show Congress an OLC opinion that led to the arrest of Manuel Noriega. In 1992, when you recommended pardons for the subjects of the Iran-Contra scandal, and last year, when you wrote the 19-page memo telling Donald Trump that a president can't be guilty of obstruction of justice. And then didn't recuse yourself from the matter.

From the beginning, you were addressing an audience of one. That person being Donald Trump. That is why, before the bombshell news of yesterday evening, 11 of my Senate colleagues and I called on the Department of Justice inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the way you have handled the Mueller report. I wanted them to determine whether your actions complied with the department's policies and practices and whether you have demonstrated sufficient impartiality to continue to oversee the 14 other criminal matters that the special counsel referred to in other parts—to other parts of the Department of Justice. But now we know more about your deep involvement in trying to cover up for Donald Trump.

Being attorney general of the United States is a sacred trust. You have betrayed that trust. The American people deserve better. You should resign.

Wow. Mazie Hirono is my new favorite person for saying all that.

Well, I'm glad I got to watch this.

I know she's a cop but if she doesn't get a democratic nomination for p or vp, I hope she gets an AG nod.

She absolutely unloaded on him. Good for her. Yet somehow CNN’s headline story is about a tick in a 9yr olds ear.

I think we absolutely should prosecute and impeach the elected official who prevented the Obama administration from properly investigating the Russian interference in 2016.

Bill Maher had me in stitches tonight. Oh yeah. That’s Moby sitting to his left.

“Dream on, traitors!”

Ben Wittes at Lawfare wrote a great break-down of Barr's layers of failures:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...

NBC News: Nancy Pelosi has set House Democrats on a road that may lead to Trump's impeachment

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has placed House Democrats on the same path that Congress took with President Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s — a path that ultimately led to his resignation on the eve of being impeached.

Today, Pelosi is supporting the ongoing House Judiciary Committee investigation into President Donald Trump and the Mueller report. Left unsaid is that this is similar to the kind of investigation that would take place if the panel were conducting a formal impeachment proceeding. The investigation will serve to educate the American people about the depth and extent of Trump’s malfeasance just as the Senate Watergate Committee’s investigation did with Nixon.

Pelosi’s position recognizes that the American people must be fully informed about the specific abuses laid out in the Mueller report. It also recognizes that public support currently is not there for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Polls taken after the report’s release show that only 34 percent and 37 percent of the American people support moving to impeachment.

On March 4, the House Judiciary Committee announced an investigation “into the alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates, and members of his Administration.”

This is historically parallel to what the Senate did on Feb. 7, 1973, when it created the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, also known as the Senate Watergate Committee, to investigate the extent to which “illegal, improper or unethical activities” occurred in the 1972 presidential campaign and election.

It is a mistake to assume that the American people know the many important details of Trump’s wrongdoing revealed in the 448-page Mueller report. That is why this story must be told to the American people through televised congressional hearings. The Mueller report’s printed words of Trump’s wrongdoings must be brought to life through televised hearings and other media formats, just as the story of Nixon’s wrongdoings was told through the Senate Watergate hearings.

In this age of the internet and social media, more than 20 million Americans watched on television the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. And that number does not include the millions more who streamed it on their phones and computers or who watched in public places. Similarly, 19.5 million Americans watched on television the June 2017 testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before Congress about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Millions more watched on live streams.

In 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee conducted an extensive investigation and held nationally televised hearings that educated the American people about Nixon’s widespread abuses. The panel began its public hearings on May 17, 1973 and held hearings on a regular basis until Aug. 7, 1973. “Thirty-seven witnesses testified during the period, hundreds of exhibits and documents were introduced into the record,” according to the committee’s final report, “and over 3000 pages of testimony were transcribed.”

Mixolyde wrote:

Ben Wittes at Lawfare wrote a great break-down of Barr's layers of failures:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...

This is a remarkable article. Well worth reading. For those who don't know (like I didn't) who Wittes is, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, dealing with law, national security, and the public trust. He's also a co-director of a Harvard Law project on those topics. And he's written lots of books.

The best part is that his writing style is clear, concise, and neither partisan-combative, nor legalese-sleep-inducing.

The article begins:

I was willing to give Bill Barr a chance. Consider me burned.

He goes on to describe the multitude of ways in which Barr used his legal expertise to walk right up to the line of perjury without crossing it.

BadKen wrote:

For those who don't know (like I didn't) who Wittes is, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, dealing with law, national security, and the public trust. He's also a co-director of a Harvard Law project on those topics. And he's written lots of books.

He's also a great co-host on the podcast Rational Security, and occasional contributor to the main Lawfare podcast.

Mixolyde wrote:
BadKen wrote:

For those who don't know (like I didn't) who Wittes is, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, dealing with law, national security, and the public trust. He's also a co-director of a Harvard Law project on those topics. And he's written lots of books.

He's also a great co-host on the podcast Rational Security, and occasional contributor to the main Lawfare podcast.

I think it was you Mixolyde that has been posting links regularly to Lawfare's stuff. I followed one more than a year ago. Ben Wittes and Susan Hennessy and others have provided me with very interesting policy wonk perspectives ever since. Thanks!

Seriously though? I hope this is a feign while they nab trump's taxes. To me, that is the key to unlocking this whole thing and unraveling this administration.

fangblackbone wrote:

Seriously though? I hope this is a feign while they nab trump's taxes. To me, that is the key to unlocking this whole thing and unraveling this administration.

If the taxes are such a smoking gun, wouldn't the IRS be handing down penalties for breaking the law? I think that they'll be more of a source of embarrassment to show that he isn't as rich as he claims.

Couldn't it show legal, but suspicious, financial activities.
I dont expect any smoking gun from any of the Trump investigations. While Trump lawyers seems amazingly stupid in general, they are probably not that stupid. At least not until Giuliani joined, which would be after the tax fillings
But it seems like the tax returns could easily be relevant to an investigation into Trump, even if everything in there is technically legal.

Oh lets say Trump was stupid enough to make clockwork installments that totaled the exact amount of hush money promised to a porn star...
That wasn't the first time nor the most egregious I'd wager. Nor was it connected to Russian operatives.

The question I want answered is whether, when he forced contractors to take haircuts on what he owed them, did he take the full invoice or the actual payment as business expense deductions? Because that's straight-up tax fraud, and it's adjacent to behavior that's got to look pretty bad even to Republicans.

qaraq wrote:

The question I want answered is whether, when he forced contractors to take haircuts on what he owed them, did he take the full invoice or the actual payment as business expense deductions? Because that's straight-up tax fraud, and it's adjacent to behavior that's got to look pretty bad even to Republicans.

I 100% guarantee that he's been committing tax fraud for decades and the IRS has been too understaffed to even attempt to follow up with it.

qaraq wrote:

The question I want answered is whether, when he forced contractors to take haircuts on what he owed them

I actually don't know if that's a typo the way things have been going lately.

That must be Pence's influence for sure...

Gremlin wrote:
qaraq wrote:

The question I want answered is whether, when he forced contractors to take haircuts on what he owed them, did he take the full invoice or the actual payment as business expense deductions? Because that's straight-up tax fraud, and it's adjacent to behavior that's got to look pretty bad even to Republicans.

I 100% guarantee that he's been committing tax fraud for decades and the IRS has been too understaffed to even attempt to follow up with it.

The New York Times had an absolutely fantastic story last year about how the Trump family has been violating tax law for decades. Some parts of this story are already known even without Trump's current tax returns.

But that just brings me back to the "I'll believe consequences when I see them" thing.