Tag Archives: Robert Mercer

Post-Mueller: Raw Politics and a Million Questions

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All morning I’ve been thinking about the famous video of Bill Clinton explaining for the camera what the real meaning of “is is”. It was not Bubba’s finest moment, but it was the President of the United States, under oath for four hours and forty minutes answering questions before a grand jury. He was answering them badly and, uh, excessively legalistically, mind you. But he was answering them.

Donald Trump has not done that — about a matter considerably more relevant to the protection of the American public than canoodling with a White House intern — and it appears Robert Mueller never pushed to force him to answer any questions live, in person and under oath. Nor, as far as we know at this moment, did Mueller ever bring Donald Trump Jr. in to ex-plain what exactly he was doing (or did afterward) as organizer of the infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with multiple Russians offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (aka “Little Adam Shitt”)* has been wondering aloud for weeks about this investigatory oddity.  Not that it means that Mueller is part of an establishment cabal (the deep state underlying “the deep state”, you might say) conniving to keep Trump in office. But rather it could be an indication of a strictly legalized, small-“c” conservative, only by-the-book process designed exclusively to deliver foundational information to Congress and let Congress to then take it wherever they may.

Too many obsessive Mueller-watchers have held a belief that somehow an hour after Mueller finished his work, a half-dozen FBI agents would grab Big Donny by the nape of the neck and frogmarch him out of the Oval Office.

That was never going to happen, which is one reason even Trumpy-insiders like the much abused and humiliated Chris Christie have been saying for a while that Trump’s biggest problem has never been Mueller as much as the Southern District of New York, (and all the other legal offices in his home state). That crowd, furiously filing terabytes of information about Donny’s flagrantly corrupt business activities in Manhattan for the past 50 years, has the power to bring charges that present Trump with the likelihood of complete financial ruin … once he leaves the White House.

But for the moment — as in the last 72 hours — the most salient point is that while, yes, Mueller found no (prosecutable?) evidence of collusion and did not “exonerate” Trump for obstruction, all any of us really knows about the two-year investigation, the 500+ witnesses and the 2800 subpoenas, is what Attorney General Bill Barr characterized in his four-page “op-ed” as critics are calling it.

Given that 800,000+ pages of raw data on the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation, (you know, the one that almost certainly meant a Sixth Extinction apocalypse for the American way of life), there’s no excuse whatsoever for all of Mueller’s raw data — not just his full report, but everything in his taxpayer-funded files — to also be turned over to Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and others.

The basic idea of a Special Counsel is to keep the investigation away from politics, but then when completed, turn it over to politicians for wherever the grand battle royale will take it. That is obviously what has to happen here, and pronto. The public interest in what has been going on — about a cyber attack on our election system, not intern canoodling or a private e-mail server  — has unprecedented public interest.

Without over-playing the partisan hack card, Bill Barr is a true believer of Dick Cheney’s “unitary executive theory”, which basically places the president above and beyond any standard of law applying to everyone else. Barr is also the guy who “auditioned” for his current job with an unsolicited multi-page memo last year reinforcing those beliefs to Trump’s legal team.

Whatever else Barr may be trying to achieve by his minimalist characterization of Mueller’s investigation, what he has achieved over the weekend, by allowing Trumpland to crow loudly about “total exoneration”, is new handicapping of Democrats in the grand political fight that was always to come. With Trump now unleashed to bellow “no collusion” to every MAGA rally he can schedule, the Democratic counter-attack on what are still literally dozens of potent legal fronts, will be viewed by the Trump base as just the wretched whining of poor losers.

All that could shift pretty fast with a crowd-sourced scrutiny of Mueller’s entire report and all his raw data.

Maybe then we’d get answers to hundreds of questions.

Like:

1: Did Mueller ever get Trump’s tax returns?  If not, why not?

2: Mueller’s team included the much-celebrated Andrew Weismann,  a renown pitbull on money-laundering scams, something the Trump family has engaged in flagrantly for years. What did he find? And given the collection of Russians characters using Trump properties for criminal purposes and the leverage that played against Trump, how did that not lead to conspiratorial links?

3: What about the case of Cambridge Analytica? It’s an episode where we find not only Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Trump campaign aid Brad Parscale, but Michael Flynn and most significantly Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the wackadoodle climate change-denying billionaire father-daughter team behind the creation of both Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica. We know Cambridge had a way to micro-target voters down to precise precincts. Who weaponized that information? How exactly was it used?

And 4: If nothing else. For god’s sake tell us why virtually everyone in Trump’s orbit was constantly, perpetually lying about their contacts with Russians?

*As described by our president.

Paul Ryan Cashes In

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Raise your hand if you’re surprised Paul Ryan wants to spend more time with his family.

As a “small government conservative” Ryan has spent essentially all of his adult life cashing government checks, (with those sweet, sweet government health care benefits). His ascension to national influence is due primarily to his deft cooperation with and service to Wisconsin’s and then the country’s wealthiest citizen benefactors. His promise to them has forever been two-fold. A: Repeated rounds of tax relief followed by, B: a dramatic gutting of social services, otherwise known as social spending “reform”.

Having delivered the former, in a package that guarantees a return to trillion-dollar deficits, he has in effect accomplished both, and can now dump the daily aggravation of his political gig in favor of a Tim Pawlenty/Norm Coleman style pay-off in the private sector, or put another way, by going to work directly for the .1%-ers who have kept him in DC for 20-plus years.

(Ryan achieves a fresh gutting of social services to poorer Americans by driving deficits up so high conservatives have fresh horrifying numbers to rage and rail that “spending is out of control” … once Democrats are back in power and red ink matters again.)

As loathsome as Freedom Caucus torch-carriers like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are, they are at least naked about their subservience to Robert Mercer-scale political “investors”. What’s always disgusted me about Ryan is his snake oil image of a serious, concerned public servant all the while he consents to the same noxious policies promoted by the truly shameless wing nuts of the modern conservative movement.

Very much like Newt Gingrich before him, Ryan is “what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.”

Besides seizing the cash-out phase of his career, Ryan, being another character who is all about self-serving political calculus, knows that campaigning as a Republican this year is not going to be any fun. Not with Donald Trump looking ever more like a delusional third-tier mob boss and anger at DC descending from swamp to sewer more intense than it has been in a century. Even as Speaker of the House, Ryan was not going to have a pleasant time out in public in his own district. Like Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis here in Minnesota, he knew public appearances with an actual cross-section of voters was going to be an extraordinarily perilous experience.

I’m still not convinced that a giant “blue wave” is going to sweep across the land this November. There are hundreds of millions in dark money available to spread any hysteria imaginable to prevent that from happening.

But clearly Ryan, the calculator, (aka “the zombie-eyed granny starver”  TM Charlie Pierce), has read smoke signals on the horizon and decided that moving now to profiteer off his “public service” is a far better option than being screamed at and vilified across southern Wisconsin.

 

 

Al Franken and Our Paris-in-the-Terror Moment

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Image result for paris in the terrorThe set of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” will never be confused with The Algonquin Round Table. If for no other reason than Dorothy Parker would never allow Joe [Scarborough] to bloviate on as long and as loudly as he so often does. But the show’s cast of supporting characters — plenty of New York Times and Washington Post reporters and columnists — is bona fide, and given a topic in her wheelhouse, in this case th gross sexual misbehavior by men, soon-to-be Mrs. Joe, Mika Brzezinski, (a.k.a. “Mika-Boo”) is a force of nature.

And Mika the Force is all over our “me too” moment. Amid much high dudgeon about sexual harassment she has also been pushing the nuancy questions of proportionate punishment and “What do we do with the apologies?” This isn’t to say Brzezinski is the first to pose these questions, only that she’s making a persistent point of them.

And that it directly affects Al Franken.

Even following the latest accusation of … butt-palming … at the State Fair, liberal women are having a hard time lumping Franken in with Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore. For her part, (as a very committed feminist and liberal), Brzezinski is conceding her tribal affinities, while arguing that if this “moment” is going to accomplish something of lasting value, every woman has to have the right to speak and every offender should suffer or at least endure some measure of punishment. But, that said … butt palming/patting/caressing is not in the same universe as rape or pedophilia.

What Mika-Boo hasn’t yet gotten into in this Paris-in-the-Terror moment for men, is the twisty down side to a flat-out, unequivocal “believe the women” episode.

Some of us are old enough to remember the truly bizarre (and remarkably under-examined) frenzy over satanic sexual abuse, murder and mutilation of very young children in schools and day care centers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Sociologically and psychologically, it was a mind-boggler.

Here in Minnesota the focus was in Scott County. A zealous prosecutor, Kathleen Morris — like prosecutors in the McMartin Pre-School case in California and the Little Rascals Day Care case in North Carolina — insisted the public at large had a moral obligation to “believe the children”. (BTW: The PBS series on the latter case, “Innocence Lost” remains one of the most riveting documentaries I have ever seen. If you want a case study in tribal psychosis, there it is.) Eventually, after millions in court costs and the total ruination of reputations and lives, all of the cases fell apart and the frenzy subsided.

The media took the “believe the children” bait, big time.

My point is that in those environments it was difficult-to-impossible to not “believe the children” just as, for progressive liberals and Al Franken in particular it is not functionally,  socially possible to “believe the women” in this environment.

For example: Even if Franken knew for certain the tongue-in-the-mouth business with Leeann Tweeden was a “bit” or that the butt-caressing at the State Far never happened … he can’t in effect call either of the women liars by saying so. That simply isn’t allowed under the rules of this “cultural moment”. Not for liberals anyway. Conservatives, especially Donald Trump and Roy Moore, are free to condemn all female accusers as liars (and in Trump’s case argue that none of them were good-looking enough to warrant his attention, and then threaten to sue them).

It’s a liberal dilemma … and one that is ripe for exploitation.

Now, before I wander off into the bat[bleep] conspiracy phase of this screed, let me issue the disclaimer that: The United States has always been exceptional in the long march of human nature, in that unlike every other culture on the planet, here in the USA malicious adversaries have never ever concocted a plan to destroy a political opponent through nefarious means. That sort of thing only happens someplace else.

Personally, I don’t find it unimaginable that people like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and the toxic-but-well funded netherworld of Breitbart and the Mercers might find a way to, shall we say, “encourage” women like Ms. Tweeden and the State Fair victim to come forward with stories (and photographs) deeply damaging to a politician enjoying high regard as a clever, mediagenic assailant of their pet policies and personalities.

I know how insane that sounds. It’s real Elvis-stepped-off-the-UFO stuff. But I’m simply saying I can imagine it. (And yes, I’m taking medication to treat the hallucinations.)

Also, as we collectively try to come up with the appropriate scale to judge all the misbehaviors being tossed up, let me suggest that abuse and harassment stories coming through some form of professional vetting — like the editing pipeline of a major news organization — strike me as having more credibility than just someone holding a press conference.

Big news organizations have reputations to protect and don’t like getting sued. But no nationally renown public figure, of the progressive political persuasion, is in any position to denounce much less sue one poor woman recovering, like Ms. Tweeden and the young lady at the Fair, from the terrible, psychological scarring of sexual abuse.