The January 6 Hearings - Part Two

Yesterday's January 6 hearing produced a new term - "team normal."

A hybrid of taped and live testimony centered on the comments of former Attorney General William Barr, Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien, former U.S. Attorney for Northern District of Georgia Byung Jin Pak, Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg (who represented George W. Bush on the 2000 Florida vote recount), and former Republican Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, who all looked into claims f afraid from Donald Trump at one time or another.  Among those testifying, Barr and Pak were Trump appointees, and Stepien joined the Trump 2020 presidential campaign late in the game to improve Trump's poll numbers against Biden.  All of them came to the conclusion that there was no fraud and that Trump. assuming he really believes he defeated Biden in the presidential election, doesn't know what he's talking about when he claims fraud.  These Trump aides and appointees were called "team normal" because they looked at the accusations of fraud objectively and thoroughly and ultimately told Trump what he didn't want to hear.  But "team normal" last to the crazies - including an inebriated Rudolph Giuliani - advising Trump.

Well, we all knew that.  We also knew, as former Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt testified yesterday, that once Biden won Arizona, there was no way Trump could win nationally.  So there were no bombshells today?  Well, there was this one.  January 6 Senior Investigative Counsel Amanda Wick revealed, in a pre-taped explanation, that Trump raised a quarter of a billion dollars off the lie that there was voter fraud and said it was going to fight voter fraud.  Instead, it went to conservative activist groups engaged in anything but that.

Everyone is calling yesterday a horrible day for Donald Trump.  But it was also a horrible day for President Biden - the Dow fell 876 points over worries of inflation and a possible recession.  To those worried that Trump might try to steal the 2024 presidential election - he actually might win it fair and square.

The danger on the rocks has surely not passed. 

The January 6 Hearings - Part One

I think it's fair to say that the House January 6 select committee's televised hearings stormed out of the gate the other night. 

The committee showed new footage of the insurrection from that day, putting it into proper context and outlining a basic narrative that subsequent hearings will follow.  In addition, ranking Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming laid out a blunt, outlined seven-point plan Trump had to keep the Presidency despite his loss to Joe Biden.  It reads as follows:

• President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
• President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.
• President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.
• President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.
• President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.
• President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.
• As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

The facts as Cheney and Democratic Chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi presented them certainly ft this narrative like a velvet glove.  And then came the iron fists: Former Attorney General William Barr insists that Trump lost the election fair and square, and Ivanka Trump, Donald's pseudo-attractive daughter, agrees with Barr!

Fleshing all of this out was testimony from Capitol Policewoman Caroline Edwards, who recalled the violence at the insurrection and explained how she was pushed back with brute force and blacked out momentarily before resuming her efforts to hold back the mob.  Even more devastating was the testimony from British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was making a film about the polarization of American politics and filming leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers involved plotting the takeover of the Capitol - on the night of January 5! - thus belying the idea that this "demonstration" was "spontaneous." 

The best is yet to come.  Over the course of more televised hearings this month, the January 6 committee will offer greater details of how that day played out - the better to place the blame for the insurrection squarely on Trump.  Republicans - and Trump - are already calling this a partisan witch hunt, insisting that it's better to investigate the root causes of January 6 by looking into electoral irregularities involving vote-by-mail practices as a result of the pandemic - irregularities  that didn't exist - and questions into Speaker Pelosi's role in beefing up security for the electoral vote count.  Liz Cheney, for one, isn't having any of that.  As she said the other night at the first hearing, when she said her fellow Republicans were "defending the indefensible":

"There will come a day when Donald Trump will be gone. But your dishonor will remain."

Will any of this matter? We'll see.

Traps For Biden

Okay, Mitch McConnell actually congratulated Joe Biden for winning the Presidency once the Electoral College certified the President-elect's win, after having said that he would recognize a winner once the electors actually voted.  But I'm not going to give McConnell brownie points for being consistent.  Mitch Mac is acknowledging Biden's win because he wants to give Georgia Republicans an incentive to vote in the U.S. Senate double runoff election on January 5.  If they think Donald Trump still has a chance of being declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election as a result of voter fraud, they have no reason to vote in the runoffs or expect them to be fair and secure, which helps the Democrats and makes it more likely that they can win both seats and, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris's vote, control the Senate.

McConnell is craven and power-mad, but he's nowhere nearly as nefarious as Trump, who forced Attorney General William Barr out of his post in order to put a caretaker Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department and facilitate the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Biden's son Hunter (above) - something Barr was reluctant to do.  (Barr also wouldn't report that Hunter was being actively investigated until after the election so as not to include the vote.) Such an appointment would ensure that investigations of Hunter Biden's business dealings will dog his dad for at least a year and prevent him from getting anything done.  Biden's Attorney General would be powerless to stop such an investigation.

So what, you say?  It's the son being investigated, not the father.  Except that Hunter is accused of trading in on his dad's previous position as Vice President in his dealings, meaning that Uncle Joe would be deemed guilty by association.  Or guilty of worse.  One caveat, though - any special prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden would have to actually find something.  There's no real evidence that Hunter did anything wrong.

Give Biden credit for not being distracted by any of this.  Give him credit also for going hard after all of the Republicans who backed Trump's futile attempts to overturn the election in his speech to the nation after the Electoral College declared Biden the winner of the election.  My only concern with Biden's speech was his constant throat-clearing, which, surprisingly, did not lead Trump to start tweeting insinuations about Biden's health in the middle of a pandemic.

Biden moves on, having appointed Pete Buttigieg to get us moving again; Mayor Pete is Biden's choice for Secretary of Transportation.  (Maybe Martin O'Malley can get the ambassadorship to Ireland.)  I'll have more on Mayor Pete later.     

No Holds Barred

Attorney General William Barr (below) testified before the House Judiciary Committee this past Tuesday, and I'll give him this much - despite fears to the contrary, he showed up.

But as to the question of whether the Democrats or Barr and his fellow Republicans made the case for Barr's heavy-handed response to people demonstrating against racial injustice,  his recommendation against a seven-to-nine year jail sentence for Roger Stone, or the Russia probe investigation, I fear that Barr and his congressional allies may have made the better arguments - mainly by lying and obfuscating at loud volumes and with righteous indignation.  Barr defended his recommendation on Stone's prison sentence, citing his age, and he maintained that force from the civilian government agents in Portland was necessary to protect the courthouse from the more violent elements of the demonstrations, whose rights to free speech he supported so long as they were peaceful.  And GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee backed him up with their spins on the issues, as well as displaying  eager anticipation of the report on the Russia probe investigation. 

The Democrats landed some effective punches, such as Representative Jerrold Nadler (NY) citing the mothers, veterans and public officials that make up many of the peaceful demonstrators against racial injustice, as well as Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (TX) going after Barr for not hiring any black aides while trying to sound sanctimonious in invoking the recently deceased John Lewis (still lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda during the hearing).  Democratic Representative Joe Neguse (CO) even got Barr to suggest that former New York District Attorney Geoffrey Berman resigned without knowing it, a preposterous idea.  But Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) and his opening salvo in the form of an eight-minute montage video that contrasted TV news reporters and commentators talking about "peaceful demonstrators" with scenes of violent confrontations seemed to overshadow all that.  And why not?  It had more noise and chaos than another famous eight-minute montage, "Revolution 9."

Take this, brother, may it serve you well.

Democratic Representative David Cicilline (RI) countered Jordan's video montage with one of his own, showing still pictures from the same demonstrations featuring peaceful protesters.  Too bad one of those still pictures - which aren't as effective as videos - showed one demonstrator holding up a sing with an obscenity on it.

It was left to CNN's Jake Tapper to point out that Jordan had marshaled and edited clips for his video selectively without offering the comments from reporters and commentators about peaceful demonstrators in their proper context, with Tapper showed the original news clips to illustrate that these reporters and commentators, some of whom were Tapper's coworkers, were saying that the demonstrations mostly peaceful but turned violent when provoked by federal agents.  Yes, but how many people are going to pay attention to Jake Tapper? Jordan's' tactic was slimy propaganda but smart politics.

Hopefully, a few days or so will shed more light on how evasive and arrogant Barr and his Republican defenders were and make them look more preposterous than they already do.  But for Trump supporters - still comprising two-fifths of the electorate, making them a dangerous, large minority - evasion and arrogance are badges of honor. 

Trump Unbound, Justice Undone

Trump is feeling emboldened after being acquitted of crimes and misdemeanors by the Senate, which is why he tweeted his desire to have the Justice Department intervene in trying to get a lesser sentence for crony Roger Stone rather than seven to nine years that staffers at the Justice Department recommended.  Three of the four lawyers handling the Stone case quit it, and the fourth quit the Justice Department entirely.

Doing Trump's bidding has been the modus operandi of Attorney General William Barr (above), who has been shielding Trump from numerous threats to his power, going as far as to deliberately take the Mueller report out of context and misrepresenting the facts in it.  His politicization of his office and the department he administers has had a chilling effect on career prosecutors in the government, now suddenly reluctant to conduct any investigation that Trump may not like.

Barr did speak out against Trump this past week, urging him not to tweet any input into the Stone case or any other, saying that it makes him hard to run the Justice Department with any impartiality.  Don't be fooled.  Barr is happy to do with Trump wants.  He's opposed to Trump's tweeting on Stone and other matters not out of the need to preserve the good standing of the Justice Department but because Trump's openness in demonstrating his manipulation of justice has gotten so obvious it's become a public relations problem.

With the Republican Senate staying silent and House Democrats having few options in trying to stop him, Trump will continue to wreck havoc on the justice system unabated until and unless he's voted out of office.   Will that happen in November?  Well, it depends on the intelligence and the voters and the integrity of the electoral process.

Sorry to disappoint you. :-( 

The Gloves Come Off

Donald Trump is going after Joe Biden big time.  Fearful that Biden would be a formidable opponent to his re-election bid in 2020 should he be the Democratic presidential nominee, Trump sent Rudolph Giuliani to Ukraine to try to get the government there to open an investigation into his interference reading an investigation into some potential funny business including his son Hunter's service on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.  Giuliani reversed course after a public outcry over his efforts, as he is not a government official acting on Trump's behalf but merely Trump's lawyer, but the damage may have been done.  Even though a recent Bloomberg story debunked the story about any wrongdoing on the Bidens' part, this story helps sow the seeds of doubt among Democrats who might end up nominating someone Trump can take out more easily.  Like Bernie Sanders.

This comes just after Trump's son Donald Jr. was subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for its investigation of possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, which sounds like payback against Biden.  In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee's chairman, who issued the subpeona, is Senator Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, and he is less interested in backing up Trump than he is in getting to the bottom of what exactly the Russians did in the 2016 election.  This has nothing to do with Biden's son except for the fact that it's Trump's son who's being subpoenaed.  It's a weird case of tit-for-tat with Trump getting revenge against Biden for trying to have Biden's son investigated because of a subpoena against Donald Trump, Jr. that Biden didn't initiate!  And now Trump may ask Attorney General William Barr to look in to the Biden "case" himself.

Even if Biden is the best choice to go against Trump, he has his work cut out for him.  Trump will stop at nothing to win another term, and he's willing to destroy anyone to make it happen.  But he's so hell-bent on destruction that the person he may end up destroying most is himself.

A Dark Future

The economy is doing extremely well in the United States right now, which is why I think the future of this country looks ominous and foreboding.

Why?  Because, with economic growth exceeding expectations and unemployment down to levels we haven't seen since the Beatles released Abbey Road,  Trump looks like a favorite for re-election to the Presidency.  Even though he and his Attorney General, William Barr, are stonewalling and blocking efforts into looking at possible Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and the likelihood that Trump may have committed some dastardly deeds not even related to Russia (notice how he's trying to block access to his financial records), none of that matters because, well, it's the economy, stupid.  And Americans are, in fact, a stupid bunch when they vote strictly on their own economic well-being and disregard neglect of problems like climate change, white nationalism, and the undermining of the rule of law.  

It doesn't look good for the Democrats.  They don't want to be seen as going on an Ahab-style pursuit of Trump when they should be demonstrating what they're trying to do for the people.  And they are.  However, an agreement with the White House on an infrastructure program or support for the Untied States (not a typo, I meant "Untied") rejoining the Paris Agreement won't get the ink or the airtime that their investigations of the White House and their demands for the full Mueller report are getting, leading them to defend a presidential investigation that people don't relate to while Republicans get to brag about higher incomes and more jobs.  But if they don't investigate Trump, they let him get away with all sorts of misdeeds.  The Democrats really are in a no-win situation.              

And the Democrats aren't doing themselves any favors.  So hell-bent are liberals on nominating a woman, a person of color or Bernie Sanders that they won't even accept the idea that any white dude not named Bernard by his mother is the best choice to go against Trump.  And I don't necessarily mean Joe Biden.  I saw Michael Bennet, the Democratic senior senator from Colorado who just announced his presidential candidacy, on Rachel Maddow's show, and I found him to be quite impressive.  (More on why later.)  He would be a first for the Democratic Party if he became its 2020 presidential nominee - a candidate from a Western state - but he's running for President in a party where racial and ethnic diversity matters more than geography; hence, California's Kamala Harris is the only Westerner with a real shot at the nomination.  I have a problem, guys, with this obsession with diversity because diversity is all about celebrating differences without setting any common standards for people who differ from each other.  And while I'm not on board with Biden, the petty attacks on his policies and his character coming from Sanders supporters (and, to some extent, Sanders himself) are almost enough to make me volunteer for the Biden campaign.

All of my previous declarations that the Democratic Party was on its way to Whig-like extinction have proven to be premature (a fancy word meaning "dead wrong").  but if the Democrats can't unseat Trump in 2020, they might as well disband before Trump assumes dictatorial powers and has opposition parties outlawed.   

Mueller Time Again

When Attorney General William Barr - whom everybody keeps calling "Bob Barr," confusing him with Bob Mueller and ironically naming a former Republican congressman from Georgia who supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton - released the Mueller report (with redactions) on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, we found out some interesting facts.  First Trump campaign officials made overtures to Russian nationals, some of whom were believed to be Americans because they contacted them through the Internet. (The Russians pretending to be Americans were sending out anti-Hillary propaganda and operating out of building in  St. Petersburg - St. Petersburg, Russia, not St., Petersburg, Florida.)  Robert Mueller's report offers a caveat that, while there were many contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians while the Kremlin was hacking computers, including that infamous June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and Russians operatives over possible "dirt" on the opposition, there was no agreement of collusion between the two parties.  There was no collusion . . . but only because there's no evidence that Paul Manafort and a Putin operative met at a hotel in Prague or Bratislava or wherever and hashed out a plan to sabotage Hillary Clinton.

"While the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign," Mueller wrote, "the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal. And our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks' release of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign-finance violation."

Trump also tried to have Mueller fired or at least reined in, and he even asked then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to withdraw his recusal.  Sessions may be a bigot, but he's not dishonorable; he refused to listen to Trump.  ("Death before dishonor," as they say down in Sessions' native South.)  Many more White House officials stopped Trump from committing any act that could be perceived as a crime; in instances when they failed to do so, Trump himself didn't commit a criminal act only because he didn't know what the hell he was doing.  Because justice was not obstructed - mainly because Trump himself never actually tried to stop Mueller, preferring that someone stop Mueller for him - Mueller decided there wasn't enough evidence to accuse Trump of obstructing justice, but because of all the obvious examples of how Trump wished to impeded the investigation, that was why he could not exonerate Trump either.

Barr has since declared that Trump has been cleared, twisting the facts to suit Trump's argument while leaving out all of the evidence and the charges pointing in a different direction.  Trump, in fact, figured that the jig was up when Trump, upon hearing the Mueller would investigate Russian interference in the election, said, "Oh, my God.  This is terrible.  This is the end of my Presidency.  I'm f--ked."

This is all bad news . . . for the Democrats.

What???  The intent of the Mueller report is to avoid the issue of accusing Trump of any wrongdoing; rather, it is meant to provide Congress a guide for how to proceed.  He wrote that there should be a process where the evidence is weighed, the charges are made through Congress rather than through an indictment (you apparently can't indict a sitting President), and the accused defends himself.  But with enough cherry-picked conclusions to allow Trump, his supporters, and the whole goddamned Republican Party (one honorable exception: Mitt Romney) to claim exoneration at a time when most Americans don't have the stomach for a Watergate-type investigation, the Democrats have two choices, and either way they could give Trump an advantage in the 2020 elections.  If they investigate Trump in the House and possibly vote on impeachment, it will anger the Republican base and turn off swing voters more interested in health care and living-wage jobs than shenanigans in the White House.  If they don't investigate, they let Trump get away with everything he's done up to now . . . and will do later.

I've been told that the Democrats can focus on the issues for 2020 and still investigate Trump - "walk and chew gum at the same time" - but this is a party that famously blows it when faced with dealing with Republican scandals.  The Iran-contra affair should have been a boon for Democrats in the 1988 presidential election, but it was their third straight loss despite Vice President Bush, who won the Presidency over Michael Dukakis, having had more to do with that scandal than he was willing to admit.  How far back do you want to go?  The Teapot Dome oil scandal that occurred under President Harding and was uncovered after Harding's death in office in 1923 put Republicans in an embarrassing position going into 1924, but they kept the Presidency after the Democrats took 103 ballots at their convention to nominate one John W. Davis, an esteemed diplomat, to oppose President Coolidge, who won a full term.  (To be fair, Coolidge had nothing to do with the Teapot Dome.)  And those scandals were nothing compared to the Trump White House, a scandal in and of itself; the Teapot Dome scandal involved illegal profiteering on government oilfields and Iran-contra was an earnest attempt by President Reagan at détente with the Ayatollah Khomeini gone awry when renegades in his own National Security Council hijacked it to benefit right-wing mercenaries in Central America.

What we have going on now is even more serious than Watergate.  If the Democrats can't figure out how to capitalize on this level of corruption while still promoting a positive agenda for 2020, then they're finished as a party.

Less mentioned but just as important is the finding that the Russians tried (successfully, alas) to sow division, influence voters, and promote chaos and discord in the 2016 presidential election, interfering in what Mueller called a "sweeping and systematic fashion."  Even if Trump had lost, as was expected, Russia would have still divided people enough to make a Hillary Clinton Presidency a nightmare for Hillary herself.  Maybe the Russians weren't involved with WikiLeaks as much or as closely as suspected, and maybe the Democratic National Committee should have gotten a better firewall for their servers,  but even the most die-hard Julian Assange fan or the most ardent Jill Stein voter (again, I voted for Dr. Stein out of a personal dislike for Hillary that goes back long before Russian interference in our elections was an issue) has to admit that Vladimir Putin was up to something.  After all the evidence of Russian malfeasance not involving collusion or obstruction of justice, there's no other conclusion anyone can come to.  

As I believe I said once before on this blog, the twenty-teens have been a disastrous decade for the nation.  It began with Citizens United and is ending with citizens divided, with all sorts of social, political and cultural failures in between.  And no one has been able to get away with so much and profit over the polarization of Americans than Donald J. Trump.  How his Presidency unfolds and what ultimately happens with it could tear this country up eve n more.  Or it could be a catharsis preceding a rebirth and renewal of America.  On this Holy Saturday, I'm not optimistic of the latter possible outcome coming to pass. 

Trump Trouble?

Don't look now, but Donald Trump could be in serious trouble.

The Mueller report, which may or may not get out soon, apparently has more damning information and conclusions that Attorney General William Barr has let on about.  Trump is still saying that he has nothing to hide, and he's so confident in his non-exoneration in the Mueller report that he says he wouldn't mind if its contents were in fact released to the public.  He is safe  - so he assumes - in the knowledge that Barr will find a way to release just enough of the Mueller report to appear transparent but not enough to get him in more hot water.

On the other hand, Trump has made it clear that his tax returns are off limits, and he refuses to release them.  The Democrats are trying to subpoena them as part of an overall investigation of his business dealings, though they are not necessarily expecting to find anything that would lead to impeachment.  And yet Trump is curiously - unless you think he does have something to hide - resisting calls for a look at his tax returns.  (So is Bernie Sanders, but that's another post.)  He's hoping to divert attention from them by threatening to close the Mexican border . . . and firing Kirstjen Nielsen as Homeland Security Secretary due to her refusal to go back to a migrant-family separation policy.  To illustrate just how clueless Trump is about domestic security, he will, with the appointment of Kevin McAleenan to succeed Nielsen in an acting capacity, have had three Homeland Security Secretaries - more Homeland Security Secretaries in one term than either Bush the Younger or Obama had in two terms.      

Trump is so unpopular that he could lose the 2020 presidential election running unopposed.  Fortunately for him, the Democrats have to nominate an opponent.  I've already commented on nine declared candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, expressing a preference for none of them, and there may be twice as many declared candidates left for me to comment on before I'm through.  Ugh.  And even after I've vetted Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Pete Buttgieg, Tim Ryan, Wayne Massam (who?) and a dozen-odd more candidates I don't know from Adam or Eve, Unn D. Sided will still remain my preference.                        

Mueller Time Is Barred

After Attorney General William Barr looked over the report on the Russia investigation handed in by Robert Mueller  (below), he issued a summary of the Mueller report this past Sunday - giving talking heads on cable news something to talk about all day along on the slowest news day of the week (pre-empting in the process a couple of CNN documentaries I'd been hoping to watch!) - that said there was neither evidence of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign nor evidence of obstruction of justice.

Trump quickly claimed victory, suddenly embracing Mueller as a truth-teller and blasting the Democrats for insinuating that a crime had been committed and that they will pay dearly for their attempted character assassination.

So is this the end?  Are the Democrats doomed to wearing egg yolk on their faces all the way to next November? Is Trump vindicated?  Not so fast.  Mueller was supposed look at the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election and catch the guys who were involved.  He did that.  And while he found no evidence to suggest that Trump went so far as to collude with Putin to get himself elected President, he did find a whole lot of other wrongdoing that highlighted the extent of Russian interference in our elections.  There's another problem - while Mueller's report said that he couldn't find enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice, he couldn't find enough evidence to exonerate Trump either.  It was Barr who said that Trump was exonerated, which makes sense, considering that he was appointed by . . .  Trump.

And Rod Rosenstein more or less agreed with Barr's conclusion.

And while this investigation had nothing to do with Trump's finances and tax returns, there is some information in the Mueller report that could be helpful in those investigations being handled by the Southern District of New York and the New York State Attorney General's office, as well as House oversight committees.  So this isn't over for Trump.  But this should put to rest the idea that this investigation would be the silver bullet that would take Trump down.  Of course, the Mueller report should be issued in its entirety, and, in matters like this, we should never take the word of an Attorney General appointed by the President on such a matter as the final word.  But while it may raise more questions than it answers, looking at the full Mueller report isn't necessarily going to answer any more questions.  Democrats were ready to accept Mueller's findings - which, by the way, yielded a lot of indictments - whatever they may be, and now they have to do so.   

Besides, what if Trump is telling the truth and he did not collude with the Russians?  Could it be possible that the Russians did try to interfere in the 2016 presidential election even as Trump had nothing to do with it, and that any charge that he didn't win fair and square is being leveled by Democrats who are ready to blame everyone for Hillary Clinton's loss except Hillary Clinton herself for her lousy campaign and the Democratic National Committee for failing to get a reliable firewall for their e-mail servers when those same Russians decided to break into them?  No, of course not, that would destroy their narrative.

It seems nothing short of high irony that the biggest critics of what Trump called "this Russia thing" are not Trump supporters but are in fact liberals and anti-Clinton Democrats.  They saw the Russia investigation as another diversion from the real issues regarding the quality of life in America and a distraction from the fact that the Democrats have done little to help the people and have failed to pass universal health care or bank regulation.  The Russia story, as far as they're concerned, was just another ruse by establishment leaders to get people's minds off the real issues - Russophobia from the Cold War days repackaged to dupe the masses.  Well, guess what - the Mueller report is the best thing to happen for Democrats as well as for Trump.  It may be an even better thing for Democrats.  The Mueller report is the end of the beginning, a precursor to the other investigations I alluded to that will take place with a lot less noise for now.  This frees the Democrats, especially their 2020 presidential candidates, to talk about the issues affecting average Americans and not about Trump, even as Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Elijah Cummings lead their respective House committees' investigations of Trump outside the limelight of public scrutiny.  These subsequent investigations could find something to reverse Trump's fortunes, but for now, Democrats have the opportunity to change the subject to serious issues like health care and climate change.  Nancy Pelosi's decision to avoid pursuing impeachment looks more like a stroke of genius and less like a stroke.

Note to Democrats: It was never Mueller's duty to save the day.  It's up to you to save the day by energizing your base and nominating for President someone people can actually vote for, as opposed to having a place to cast a ballot against Trump, while providing congressional oversight over his conduct in office.  Mueller's work is done.  You are only getting started.

The Prez Trumps The Law

Can we impeach Trump yet?  Because I'm getting sick and tired of him even more than I already was.

Now it turns out that the FBI has been investigating Trump for working as Vladimir Putin's client head of state, pretty much running the United States the way the Russians want him to.  And there's even a report that he considered withdrawing the U.S. from . . . NATO!

Meanwhile, while Robert Mueller is zeroing in on whether Trump colluded with the Russians (isn't that obvious by now?), former Attorney General William Barr is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee to get his old job back, and he's likely to get it, even though there is plenty of reason to be concerned about him.  He thinks that the President should have greater power and always have the upper hand over the other branches of government.  He's making enough promises that Mueller will be able to complete his investigation and being just evasive enough to re-assure Trump.

We're entering our third year of Trump.  I have a feeling it will all turn out like this . . .

Trump's Latest Appointees

For Attorney General: William Barr, who already served in that post under the first President Bush but agrees more philosophically with the second President Bush, arguing that church and state are inseparable and believing that the President has lots of power and can't be investigated.  He also called for the investigation of . . . Hillary Clinton's e-mails. 

For United Nations ambassador: Heather Nauert, the State Department's PR woman, famous for celebrating our special relationship with Germany that goes back to D-Day - when we were . . . fighting the Germans?  She's a former Fox News Channel correspondent.   

For White House Chief of Staff . . . Er, no one.  Trump can't find anyone dumber than he is to do the job.  Despite considering six white males.  MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle was ticked off about the lack of diversity.  Is she saying that she'd like to see more dumb women and dumb people of color for consideration?  Well, they did get Heather Nauert for U.N. ambassador.   

Evangelical Protestants who support Trump want everyone praying again. They're succeeding . . . they've started with this Catholic.  

Oh yeah . . . Michael Cohen . . . three years in prison.  So we should expect the inevitable "60 Minutes" interview in 2022 or so?