Tag Archives: Bill Barr

Cheers to You if You’re Ready for the Next 95 Days.

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With everything coming at us, an unrelenting pandemic, a long winter lockdown and the most berserk election season any of us have ever experienced, I took eight days away to infuse myself with some Big Sky Montana social distance and peace of mind.

It was a valuable respite … that ended, since returning on Monday … with Donald Trump hyping a witch doctor who believes in “demon sperm”, who says that children should be whipped and claims that some government leaders are “reptilians” and space aliens. That in addition to revealing that in eight recent conversations (eight!) with Vladimir Putin he still hasn’t confronted him about Russian bounties for U.S. troops, and saying that those of us living “The Suburban Lifestyle Drem” no longer have to worry about “low cost housing” moving in next to us, and then this morning twitting that mail-in voting is so fraudulent he may have to “delay” the election.

And that, folks, is just skimming off the top. It leaves out Bill Barr seeing no legal reason why a guy running for reelection can’t accept “foreign assistance” … like from say, oh I don’t know, Vladimir Putin … again.

One easy way to become a master prognosticator is by extrapolating out the most obvious trendlines. For that reason I can’t claim wizardly powers for telling everyone who’ll listen, for months now, that we will enter a period of unprecedented chaos prior to this November’s election. And, for the record, I began saying that before the pandemic and America’s thug-like cop culture set off a new round of racial animosities.

If there’s a primary takeaway from the serene moments sitting on the hood of my rental car in a sprawling, mountain-ringed wheatfield, sipping a beer from the cooler, it’s the conviction that chaos is the only card Trump has left to play, and that it, like everything else about his sordid, fraudulent career, depends on … Vladimir Putin.

As hundreds have pointed out, nothing Trump is doing makes any normal, tactical election sense. Every day he hypes witch doctors, shows indifference to the killing of American soldiers, ignores the death of legendary civil rights leaders, bemoans the loss of confederate statues, sends (a la Putin) anonymous “Little Green Men” into American cities to gin up viral social media videos of “terrorists” and “rioters”, he loses another chunk of rational, functionally intelligent voters.

The thing is, by now he knows that simply hardening and “exciting” the always-Trumper base isn’t going to win … a normal, uncontested election. But what it will do is inflame their fundamentally racist, paranoid passions to the point that they will instinctively respond — passionately and recklessly — to his inevitable claim that the November vote against him was “rigged.”

Since no one ever knows what Trump talks to Putin about, (remember, Dan Coats, former Director of National Intelligence, left office without ever being briefed on what Trump and Putin discussed for two hours alone in Helsinki), it seems fair to suspect a coordination of nefarious strategies for election night chaos has been on the agenda.

And, as we are coming to understand, rather than election night, we are looking at something much more like election month, as mail-in ballots are sluggishly counted, contested and invalidated by legal challenges. My prediction being that Trump will declare victory based on in-person results from a handful of red states and then commence, with Barr’s help, a torrent of legal assaults designed to once again push the decision on a winner to the Supreme Court.

I truly wish I could imagine something more honest and straightforward. Something more respectful of “norms.” But this is the world modern Republicanism — the governing vehicle for rancid, know-nothing tribalism, anti-science voodoo hysteria and hyper-micro legal parsing — has ordained for the majority of the rest of the country.

I wish there was another beer in the cooler.

The Grand Unifying Theory of Trump’s Demise

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Like the scene in “A Beautiful Mind” where the now fully-mad John Nash has diagrammed his Grand Unifing Theory of Everything with lengths of thread maniacally criss-crossing pins in calculations, photos and clippings, I have completed my life’s work. Or at least this past month’s work. I see where Trump is going with his full dive into reckless bigotry and corruption.

Follow this if you can.

While those who tell him such things fear his spittle-flecked wrath, Trump, since giving up on any kind of plan to fight COVID-19, has by now processed if not accepted that he is going to lose in November. He understands that he is so deeply and intensely despised by such a substantial majority of voters there’s no way short of outrageously criminal voter suppression and election manipulation he can reassemble the 77,000-votes-in-six-counties Electoral College freak act he did in 2016. Put bluntly, it’s over.

But in the mind of Donald Trump accepting that it’s over doesn’t mean he has to, you know, lose.

There’s money, big money, to be made in a grand, vain glorious defeat. But there are steps that need to be taken to prepare the final battlefield.

1: He must re-engergize the hardest core of his base. Suburban women? College educated whites? Traditional Republicans? Screw ’em. They’re not the target consumer bloc, not that they ever have been. But now, in preparation for What Comes Next/The Big Cash Out, they’re fully expendable. The people Trump has to re-commit himself to is the rock solid 35%, or roughly 40 million maskless, MAGA-loving, AR-15 brandishing, cop-cuddling, immigrant-hating, QAnon-inhaling base. They must not only be fed the same toxic offal as always, but more of it, and more ferociously with less and less “Presidential” mealy-mouthedness. And this — as we see — he has begun doing with raw abandon. (And wait until he delivers his “acceptance” speech in Jacksonvile.)

2: He must clear away as many money-sucking legal obstacles to his post-presidency while he still has Bill Barr to do it. Many of us have been startled by the brazen nature of the moves Barr has already made, flagrantly lying about SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s “resignation”, as well as his greasy paw prints all over the cases of Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen. There’s nothing remotely subtle about it. Plainly Barr has been instructed to “move on this now“. The long, long list of pardon-immune SDNY prosecutions in particular. This list represents potentially tremendous legal costs to post-presidency civilian Trump, assuming a Biden administration ignores tradition and allows SDNY to continue prosecuting rather than, um, “moving on for the good of the country.”

The “now” part of Barr’s act this last couple weeks continues to baffle legal experts. What’s so important that he’d do something this naked and clumsy …now? Suspicions are that Berman and SDNY had entered a new and more dangerous phase of investigation into — well, take your pick — cases involving Trump’s Russian-curated relationship with Deutsche Bank, his influence-peddling inauguration scam, his taxes, any or all of Trump Inc.’s real esatate deals, the squirrely $13 billion scandal with that Turkish bank or, maybe, his long, close bromance with Jeffrey Epstein and the case his former Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta signed off on prohibiting indictment of others “known and unknown.”

Point being, whatever can be done to snuff out or mitigate damage coming out of New York needs to be done …now … to protect the revenue stream produced by a righteous martyr’s defeat in November.

3: There is no money be made betting against Trump and Barr shrieking and howling about a “rigged” election. Hell, it’s already begun. Mail-in ballots! Too many polling stations in black neighborhoods! The “rigging” is already happening. But — I predict — nothing today compares with the indignant rage that will explode on election night over “serious discrepancies”, “irregularities”, “alarming misconduct”, “clear examples of voter faud” and on and on and on and on.

Such sore-loser pissiness might strike you as pathetic, futile whining, which it would be — even in the event of a Biden landslide — if it weren’t for the fact Mitch McConnell, Barr and The Federalist Society have now stocked the courts, in particular the Appelate Courts with so many Trump-sympathetic judges, there’s a better than 50-50 chance they can get one or more of them to uphold a challenge to the election results for weeks if not months. Certainly long enough for Trump to close the deal on his next chapter.

4: Money. It’s all that matters. Everyone who has known him or worked for him understands the foundation of his only ethos. A “rigged” election, even what is clearly a blow-out, has the advantage of acting like an accelerant over all the festering greivances and whack-doodle conspiracy theories of Trump’s non-college educated, self-pitying white base. And as Trump fully understands, there’s money be made in them thar rube-covered hills.

Out of the White House, (which he clearly won’t miss … too much work …not enough Donald time), Trump’s move is to tap that raging 35% base, or hell, even 10% of it with some new media platform. An ad-based rival to FoxNews (which will happily replace their affection for louche and stupid Trump in exchange for a more devious and competent version, like Tom Cotton) is a distinct possibility. A buy-out of the nitwit One America Network (OAN) would not be a bad investment. Or there’s always a subscription-driven streaming platform. That might reduce the 35% to 5%, as paying customers, but 8-9 million at $10 a month … you do the math.

Once you factor all this together, drawing 50 or 60 different colored threads back and forth across the wall, you see how Trump could actually embrace defeat, even will it.

How great would be to be a martyred hero to millions of fee-paying acolytes if you not only didn’t have to be burned at the stake but got to live in an even grander style than before?

And with that I’ll breakfast on another couple peyote buttons and await my next vision.

And What If Mitch Has Finally Had Enough of Donny?

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Watching the shock wave rippling out after what should be Donald Trump’s fatal blunder, I keep wondering how close we are to Mitch McConnell at deciding at long last that Trump is no longer a useful idiot?

The fundamentals of McConnell’s support, (with McConnell being the most prominent face of establishment conservatism), remains what it has always been. Any intelligent, calculating conservative — in politics or business — can see clearly that America’s demographic trend lines are not moving in their favor. The USA will soon be a minority majority country with more and more citizens refusing to vote for, much less protect the oligarchic ambitions of rich white guys.

The great backstop to this inevitability therefore is stocking the U.S. court system with hundreds of conservative-to-right-wing judges who will reliably thwart liberal legislative goals designed to realign the country’s wildly out-of-whack economic balance.

And to date McConnell, in mitered-tight coordination with the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal club — Bill Barr, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh being among its most celebrated members — has done a superb job. With Donald Trump sucking up all the attention the media has to give, McConnell and Barr’s re-fitting of the country’s judicial system has gone on with very little notice and resistance.

In the wake of this week’s Trump meltdown(s) we’ve heard more about how Capitol Hill Republicans “loathe Trump”, and how if the vote could be taken in secret, without their names attached, 30 GOP senators would vote for impeachment. Allowing the usual 50% for hyperbole and bullshit, this rings true.

Trump has been a useful dunce. He’s inattentive to policy, bored by “intellectuals” and think tanks and, as we see with this self-inflicted Ukraine fiasco, all but entirely focused on his personal needs. In other words, up to this point, he’s been a nearly ideal fool, easily manipulated by characters like MCConnewll who truly understand the long-term demographic peril facing the Republican party and are skilled at manipulating the bureacraciesa most critical levers of power.

But now … McConnell has to be reassessing this relationship.

Trump appears to have blundered so badly, so flagrantly, and in a way so easily understood by the general public, that Moscow Mitch has — has — to be running separation scenarios. It’s simply due diligence.

Trump has always been expendable to McConnell (and Barr, et al) if they could do it without infuriating Trump’s base. (Please note that for once I’m not referring to them as slack-jawed racist goobers.) That’s still a tricky move. But with the control they already have over the court system, McConnell and Barr could effectively throw Trump under the bus simply by lifting the myriad obstructions they’ve planted.

By allowing subpoenas to take effect and permitting key witnesses to testify — given that impeachment is a clear “legislative purpose” — and letting the Democrats’ case proceed they could argue to Trump’s low-information voters that they resisted as best they could. “But those damned radical Democrats just built up too much of a head of insane steam and (illegally) railroaded the process!”

Better yet, they could maneuver in a replacement for Trump appealing enough to the base and far, far more appealing to traditional Republicans repulsed by Trump’s vulgarity and corruption.

And no, I don’t mean Mike Pence. Pence is what he appears to be, a vacant stooge. In that way he would be every bit as easy to manipulate as Trump. But he possesses not even a scintilla of charismatic attraction for “the base.”

Far better — McConnell’s dream — would be somehow replacing Trump with the scariest proposition of all, namely, “competent Trump”. A candidate every bit as reliably retrograde and autocratic as Trump, only vastly smarter and therefore capable of functioning — of doing McConnell’s will and protecting conservative power for another generation without a popular majority — in a manner that presents the public face of a thoughtful adult, not a scatter-brained teenager without impulse control.

And who might that be? Among all the names regularly churning among conservative deep thinkers (sic), Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton strikes me as Candidate #1. His style of corrupted intellect — in the vein of Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and that ilk — could reliably sell and deliver everything McConnell and stegosaur Republicans believe they need to maintain power as places like Texas and Arizona and Florida tip blue.

Sci-fi scenario: Pence resigns for “health reasons” and is replaced by Cotton sometime in the spring.

Far be it for me to give Donald Trump any advice, but Donald, if you’re listening, I hope you’re not so stupid you believe Mitch McConnell has your back come hell, high water and catastrophic election defeat.

Trump’s “Are You [Bleeping] Kidding Me!?” Moment, Episode 3216

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Frankly, I could give you a dozen other reasons why Trump should have been impeached months ago. But if this latest WTF! moment — where he’s (apparently) “promising”/i.e. threatening to withhold US military support to Ukraine (a leverage against Donald’s pal, Vladimir Putin) unless Ukraine coughs up some dirt Team Trump can use against Joe Biden — is without question the great rotting egg of Trump in-the-White Houe corruption. It’s an abuse so flagrant and impeachment-worthy that if that if it isn’t the tipping point for Nancy Pelosi to fire the impeachment starting gun nothing ever will.

And I say that as someone who has appreciation for Pelosi playing the calendar — the months between now and Election Day 2020 — strategizing to deliver a maximum blue wave while simultaneously thwarting the shameless mendacity of Bill Barr and “Moscow Mitch” McConnell. But now, with Trump (apparently) caught red-handed corrupting foreign policy for rank personal political purposes, Ms. Pelosi truly has no other choice.

She can expect the volume of outraged (regularly contributing) liberal voices to rise to an air raid siren pitch for her to consent to the Full Monty of Trump trials. (My apologies for the imagery.)

Part of Pelosi’s concern about pushing impeachment to the forefront, and thereby making it effectively The Only Story Anyone Talks About all through the election cycle — screw health reform, climate change, etc. — is that it would alienate voters (blue collar whites, mainly) who think DC never gets around to doing anything for them. To translate that thinking: Pelosi worries voters who never pay any great attention to the details of politics and never will, will digest Trump’s impeachment as just more of the never-ending DC food fight and stay home — or vote for next year’s Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.

The counter argument has always been that No Impeachment makes Democrats look timid and ineffectual (yet again), this time in the face of the most flagrant presidential corruption and incompetence in US history. If you don’t have the cojones to impeach Donald [bleeping] Trump, a manifest fool, you might as well strike impeachment from the Constitution.

Liberals will flock to the polls to exorcise Trump next November no matter what. But lacking an aggressive counter-attack on Trump, their faith in and fervor for Pelosi-like establishment Democrats is going to seriously dissipate. Much of Elizabeth Warren’s appeal is big time structural change and a head-on fight against corruption.

I have also emphasized that Pelosi isn’t playing impeachment chess so much with Trump’s band of White House nitwits, (good god, Rudy Giuliani) as she is with McConnell and Barr and the judges — a disproportionate number on appellate courts — those two Federalist Society warriors have squeezed into service. Each with very real power to ram a wrench into every subpoena Democrats issue.

Finally, there’s the fact that Senate Republicans remain so terrified of Trump’s base, the star-spangled twits, bros and goobers hootin’ and stompin’ at his backwoods bund rallies, voting to convict him in a trial remains the equivalent of self-immolation.

For me the answer to that has always been a matter of sequencing and timing — which may turn out to be Pelosi’s game all along. Namely, never give McConnell’s craven Senate caucus a chance to vote. Stage hearings — along the lines of the Corey Lewandowski farce last week — steadily all through the election cycle, laying out more and more (and more) details of Trump’s clown car kleptocracy until — oh, sorry Mitch, no time left on the clock — it’s Election Day.

Does that mean enduring 12-15 more months of an ugly, rancid, hyper-partisan, pigs-in-the-slop brawl right through priaries and conventions and fall campaigns? Yeah, but we’re going to get that impeachment or not.

Does anyone seriously expect anything about the coming year to be precedented and polite? People! It’s going to be insane. You know it and I know it.

Trump long ago went to cornered rat tooth and nail. He knows he’s looking at jail time and financial ruin if he loses the next election. Given a clear existential crisis for a reckless sociopath, I don’t see how Democrats have any option other than girding up and fighting the war they’ve been presented with on much the same (albeit it smarter) terms.

It’s an all-in game. Indisputably.

Who Believes We’ll Ever Get the Full Story About Jeffrey Epstein?

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Is it too much to dream that just once we got the whole story behind one of these Jeffrey Epstein-like episodes. … and that we got it within weeks, not years-to-decades after the event?

Of course you, me and every pig flying overhead thought “conspiracy” when we heard Epstein killed himself. As every pundit has been saying, the guy with possibly criminal-quality stories to tell about Presidents, royalty, other politicians, Nobel-level academics and god knows who else, was the highest profile prisoner in US custody when — we’re to believe — the overworked, screwed-up jailers in Manhattan just kinda forgot about him long enough for Epstein to hang himself (with what? from what?) in the cell that against standing policy he had to himself.

All that would be highly suspicious enough were it not for the fact that the man who will now “oversee” the investigation into what happened is … Bill Barr, the raw embodiment of precisely the kind of institutionalist corruption that routinely drops a dense official shroud on uncomfortable truths.

Lord knows there are hundreds of truly insane conspiracy theories choking the sluice gates of our infotainment culture. Think Hillary Clinton and that child sex ring run out of a DC pizza parlor as an example of what a certain quality of thinker is prepared to believe. But … but … unlike the self-proclaimed “cooler heads” of media and government, people who protect their professional credibility by reflexively assuring us that, “You know, I’m not a big conspiracy theory guy”, the plain fact is that throughout human history individuals have plotted together to steal, cheat and murder to protect their nefarious interests. Why, it’s almost as basic as breathing and self-defense. Despite what we here in ‘Murica prefer to think, conspiracies are not the sole provenance of medieval royal courts and Russian apparatchiks.

Proof is everything, of course. And that’s where the likes of characters like Bill Barr are so frequently present and prepared to slow the hunt for truth, cloud up transparency and bury come-what-may resolution under a cloud of convoluted legalism, often in the name of “healing” and “moving on .”

Like you, I have no idea what went down with Epstein over the weekend or what, if anything, Barr already knows. But, based on what we do know, almost entirely from the reporting of Julie K. Brown and The Miami Herald, everything about Epstein’s sweetheart “prosecution” in Florida a dozen years ago stinks like an open sewer. And … and … we still have no real idea how Epstein assembled a financial empire that clearly required the liquid cash wherewithall of an actual billionaire, not a false facade like some cheesy con-man making a show with a leased Maserati.

The larger point being that this — again — is one of those episodes where intelligent, fully-functioning adults have little to reason to believe — much like as in Russia — they will ever get the whole story from their government officials. Maybe from Ms. Brown or another news organization … work that will be derided as “fake news” by those of whom we are most suspicious, but not from the most senior people in charge of the “investigation”/creation of “alternative facts.”

Let me then apologize for this eruption of skepticism, cynicism and faithlessness. Maybe it’s just me. But I really don’t think so.

Impeaching Trump Will Require Smart, Savvy Storytelling

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If the Democrats are going to impeach Donald Trump — and there’s zero doubt that’s what Trump wants them to do — they’re going to have to be a hell of lot better storytellers than they’ve been so far.

All the reasons not to impeach Trump remain as valid as they’ve ever been.

A: No amount of evidence will convince the Republican controlled-Senate to convict him. As headlines go, he will be found “innocent.”

B: The “verdict”/acquittal will be strung out by Trump’s legal team and Mitch McConnell to conclude dramatically in the heat of next year’s election season, allowing Trump to rant with true finality, “Total exoneration!”

C: As infuriated as every anti-Trump voter will become over the course of the process, there’s no reason to believe the critical fraction of voters who pay little to no attention to details will respond in any other way than by voting in Trump’s favor in 2020.

D: Impeachment will be the only topic every Democratic candidate will be asked about and judged on until election day 2020.

If you are “the chaos candidate” (tutored and guided by the international maestro of chaos, Vladimir Putin), the all-consuming, total partisan warfare of impeachment with certain acquittal is a dream campaign strategy.

That said, Elizabeth Warren and others are absolutely correct when they say Democrats have a constitutional obligation, based only on what is known about the Mueller report today, to bring charges against Trump, politics be damned.

The essential issue is storytelling, which in modern America does not come in the form of a legalistic, 448-page government document, or blockbuster reporting like the two New York Times stories on Trump’s freakishly fraudulent tax-filings. Big complicated stories — a bit like “Game of Thrones” — are best presented on television, serially, regularly, with heavy advance marketing, an eye and ear for sympathetic characters and shrewdly ascending drama.

Raise your hand if you think today’s Democrats have that skill set.

In addition to the enormous obstacles everyone can see in plain sight, (the GOP Senate looking at Trump’s 91% approval among their voters), Democrats have to be aware of what lurks hidden beneath the surface.

A lot of what explains Bill Barr’s behavior — a 68 year-old establishment Republican coming back to go all-in for a flagrant fool and scoundrel like Trump — has to do with his sympathy for the power game as played most recently by Dick Cheney. Barr’s “go [bleep] yourself” attitude toward both Congress and legal tradition is a step-for-step repeat of Cheney’s reign “under” George W. Bush. (I refer everyone interested to Bart Gellman’s “Angler” for a full dramatic narrative of The Cheney Process.)

More to the point — and this is absolutely critical — as Bill Barr plays lead pharisee for a fundamental restructuring of American governmental (and economic) power, he can draw confidence that McConnell, with the conservative and highly influential Federalist Society, have now thoroughly stocked most levels of the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court, with judges sympathetic to their belief system. This is key to support of the so-called Unitary Executive Theory.

As of 2019 the court stocking is so thorough — or at least adequate — that (Republican) presidents truly are immune to any kind of traditional criminal prosecution. The guess is Barr believes that there are now enough judges on “the team” that the wheels of investigation can be gummed up, delayed and conflicted so badly that the only likely result of anything as supposedly conclusive as impeachment is … confusion.

Mitch McConnell, accurately reading the changing demographics of America, where white Americans are rapidly diminishing toward minority status, has long understood that gaming and stocking the judicial system is the best (only?) way to sustain control over American culture well past the point Republicans are able to win presidential elections … by normal means.

However Democrats imagine impeachment playing out, are they truly prepared to deal with how far outside the bounds of good faith, normal politics and litigation McConnell will take Republicans to protect Trump?

I have no confidence that they do.

Democrats are still playing the game as though the rules matter, while McConnell, Barr and others are quite literally writing new rules on the fly.

But … good storytelling is as powerful an emotional device today as it was around the cave fires of the Neolithic age. The Trump-Russia saga has so many primary characters, so many sub-plots, supporting characters and red herrings, unless you’re a sad nerd consuming this episode daily like a tele-novela (guilty) it’s mostly a blur.

Democrats would be smart to seek out some crowd-sourced expertise from professionals with a demonstrated talent for strategic storytelling. When to play up or play down certain characters and information. Key emotional plot lines. Where personality matters. Likewise, they have to conceive of a way to advance their investigation beyond the realms that Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr can control.

The normal, traditional judicial system is not going to be their friend in this matter.

A Short List of Questions Post-(Redacted) Mueller Report

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As the specifics of The Mueller Report kept exploding like cherry bombs all day yesterday and into this morning, my list of questions and reactions kept getting longer and longer. As a confessed Trump/Russia obsessive nerd, here’s an abbreviated list (in no particular order) of where I’m at roughly 24 hours after release:

1: Mueller decided not to subpoena Trump for an in-person interview, the most conclusive way of determining “corrupt intent” in obstruction and a host of other wildly sketchy behaviors. He didn’t want a “protracted” fight with Trump, one that almost certainly would have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Plus, there was the high likelihood that if Trump did get in front of a grand jury, a la Bill Clinton, he probably would have pleaded The Fifth from start to finish, rendering the whole fight meaningless. That said, Donald Trump truly is “Individual #1”, everything emanates from him and revolves around him, and the case against him (or even for him) is hobbled by not getting the best possible evidence from him. The fight for his in-person testimony should have gone forward. And let’s remember, it was only a bit over four months from the time Nixon got a subpoena for his White House tapes and the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that he had to turn them over. After 22 months of Mueller, we could have waited until July.

2: Likewise, how do we explain Mueller calling in the hapless Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an interview but not anyone in the immediate Trump family? Not Donald Jr., the “I love it!” recipient of the Russian offer to assist the campaign? Not Ivanka, arguably her father’s key advisor (can’t make it up), and not Jared Kushner, his Swiss Army knife of a lieutenant who had clearly demonstrated influence on obstruction by advising Trump to fire Jim Comey? I really want to hear Mueller explain that one.

3. There is nothing — zero — in the redacted report about Trump’s absurdly squirrely finances. Was a full investigation of Trump’s long, long experience with Russian “investor”/oligarch/gangsters truly not part of Mueller’s mandate? A lot of people, not just me, were believing that the presence on Mueller’s team of ace money-laundering prosecutor Andrew Weismann, was proof that Mueller was looking closely at how long-term Russian “investment” in Trump not only explained a comfortable existing relationship with Russians, but a key element in the Russians’ on-going leverage over him. Did Mueller farm all that out to the Southern District of New York? If so, what is anyone doing to prevent Bill Barr from putting a fat thumb on that scale? Never mind “collusion”. Never mind “conspiracy”. “Compromise” is the issue here.

4. Also in finances — understanding that money and the pretense of fabulous, Croesus-like wealth is absolutely essential to Trump’s highly suspect “brand” — was nothing more learned about Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, a.k.a. the only bank who would still do business with him? Subpoenas are now out from the House Oversight Committee. But was anything investigated regarding the credibly estimated $300-plus million Trump apparently still owed Deutsche Bank as recently as early 2018, (much of it for the construction of the Trump-branded tower in Chicago)? We have good information that many, if not all of Trump’s loans came from a bank within Deutsche Bank, a private bank with assets provided by … who, exactly? In that context it’s interesting to note the number of times in recent weeks the question has been asked whether Trump’s Deutsche Bank debt has been forgiven or dramatically restructured? Wildly speculating here, but if that bank-within-a-bank is in fact a depository for well-laundered Russian money and the Russians have agreed to “relieve” some of Trump’s debt burden … well that’d be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it?

5. It’s already understood that Muller’s obstruction section is in essence a road map for Congress, (i.e. Democrats) to begin aggressive investigation … or more. And everyone is making much of all the Trump aides who just ignored his “crazy shit” and refused to cooperate in flagrant obstruction. But, come on! Since when does it matter that the perp was too stupid or lazy to actually pull off the obstruction? The fact he — the President of the United States — tried so often (and so recklessly) to obstruct investigation(s) doesn’t make it less of a crime. And  again people, this is over a matter — Russian rigging of an American presidential election — about a quadrillion and a half times more serious and relevant to you and me than Bill Clinton obstructing “justice” into sexy time with an intern.

6. Speaking of flagrant, Bill Barr’s gobsmacking defense of Trump was of course appalling, and it reaffirms a key (and politically exploitable) factor in explaining the seething in American culture today. Namely that every system that matters is gamed out in favor of the wealthy and connected — the “insiders”, the people who can leverage — via money or favors — any and all rules in their defense, no matter how naked their crimes. That said, how much do we know about Bill Barr’s private finances? Not to go all tinfoil hat here, but it’d be reassuring to take that question off the table.

7. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing the long-strategy of Barr and the White House (and Mitch McConnell and the Freedom Caucus) being basically a taunt to Democrats to press the impeachment button. Given the picture Mueller does paint and things likely to emerge out of all the other investigations into Trump’s epically sleazy business career, the rest of Trump’s term is going to be more of the same. But what turbo-charges the conflict in Trump’s favor is a full-out impeachment. Total war is where Team Trump is preparing to go anyway to win reelection (and thereby postpone an avalanche of indictments when he does leave office). But impeachment is nuclear fuel for the base. Torches, pitchforks and precious Second Amendment rights. Democrats are going to have to be especially canny in keeping the fires red-hot without setting MAGA-world aflame.

8. Finally, (for the moment), Mueller’s “no conspiracy” decision teeters on the very thin edge of the fact that he couldn’t show anyone on Team Trump with a direct, almost contractual agreement with Russians to game the election. In other words Mueller couldn’t prove that Team Trump engaged — hands-on — in the technical aspects of the hacking, the WikiLeaks dumping, the Cambridge Analytica-style social media distortion, etc. Common sense that is cutting “conspiracy” implausibly fine. Trump knew about it. Trump accepted it. Trump continues to deny the Russians had any role in the attack. What’s more, neither Trump nor Bill Barr yesterday has ever expressed any concern, much less outrage, that the attack happened.

And then there’s the fact the … Trump and everyone around him has lied about their chumminess with Russians every goddam time they’ve been asked.

 

Does Bill Barr Really Think He Can Get Away With This?

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One week later, The Big Question is: does Bill Barr really think he can pull this off?

As many of us know, less than 48 hours after Ken Starr wrapped up his (far longer and more expensive) investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual hijinks he dropped a 400-page report Congress and the public. Oooo, stained dresses! Cigars! Dirty talk! Love it!

By contrast, Barr, arguing that Robert Mueller’s work, because it operated under a different legal arrangement, needs, you know, a lot of time-consuming finessing and redacting and re-phrasing and, well … mostly it needs delaying, in order for Trump’s claim of “total exoneration” to settle in.

Unlike say, Rudy Giuliani or Matt Whitaker or some other of Trump’s other legal “talent”, Barr doesn’t seem to be a sad fool with no regard for history’s verdict or his reputation. That said, he is playing a perilous game in those regards. He has to be smart enough to know that his narrow and vaguely paternalistic interpretations of law (i.e. “I’m the legal savant here, you lesser people just go on about your petty business”) could quite easily backfire on him, and badly when — not if — Mueller’s full volume of information is released … or leaked.

He’s heard the name, Robert Bork, I’m quite sure.

If Barr is so stupid as to play along with a White House strategy to declare victory, parade around the country and the Twitter-verse calling everyone who has followed the Russia case in extreme detail “losers” and “pencil necks” he’s in for a very rude awakening. While Trump and his usual crowd of “libtard”-hating dead-enders, the folks who only know what Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity tell them, are still doing their touchdown celebration ..,. they haven’t noticed that they’ve spiked the ball 40 yards short of the goal line.

Moreover, on a human-reputational level, this clumsy game Barr is playing with the non-release of everything Mueller found out — which is dead certain to be chockfull of damning details about how badly Trump may be “compromised” by his corrupt activities — is accelerating the infuriation of not just the Adam Schiffs and Elijah Cummings and Jerrold Nadlers of the world, but the mainstream press as well. None of those people — all of whom have invested thousands of hours analyzing Trump/Russia/obstruction — are any too happy about being smeared (by fools) with the assertion that they’ve been both wrong and “biased.”

Put another way, anyone who cares to know knows damn well that Trump has engaged in a Vegas buffet of corrupt business and campaign activities. How so? Because it’s been out there for everyone to see for years.

The country beyond the MAGA crowd wants this story told. In full, with all the juicy “blue dress” details. And they expected Mueller to tell it.

So now, in this interlude between Barr getting the report and figuring out how to release it with as little damage as possible to the man who appointed him, American adults are disappointed-to-disheartened that this storytelling is being twisted up into yet another round of rancid partisan legalisms.

In that context, if Barr “succeeds” in redacting or murking-up the most damaging evidence Mueller produced, I ask you, has there been a better, more righteous excuse for a Daniel Ellsberg – Pentagon Papers-style leak than this?

The Russians hacked into a presidential election on behalf of the improbable, disreputable character now in the Oval Office. A character now simultaneously alienating allies and abetting long-standing Russian goals at every possible turn … without ever … ever … acknowledging what the Russians did.

Seriously smart people are not going to put up with this.

Buh-lieve me.