North Korea has fired several short-range missiles from its east coast, South Korea’s military said, amid growing tensions with Washington following a failed nuclear summit in February.
South Korean and US authorities are analysing details of the missiles, which were fired towards the east from the Hodo peninsula at around 9am local time.
The missiles flew distances ranging from 70kms to 200 kms (44-124 miles), according to South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff.
The plot that failed: how Venezuela’s ‘uprising’ fizzled
When the coup was hurriedly launched a day early, defections from the regime failed to materialise, Maduro remained in power and the US government looked like it had badly miscalculated
The video that appeared on Tuesday morning had the appearance of history in the making. In the purple light of dawn, it showed a group of armed men and a military vehicle on a road leading to La Carlota airbase in eastern Caracas.
In the foreground, stood Juan Guaidó – the head of the national assembly recognised by most western countries as the rightful leader of Venezuela – declaring the “final phase of Operation Freedom” with oratory seemingly destined for legend.
“Today, brave soldiers, brave patriots, brave men loyal to the constitution have heard our call. We have finally met on the streets of Venezuela,” Guaidó said.
Pakistan urges Facebook to take down polio vaccine misinformation
Pakistan urged Facebook to remove harmful polio-related content from the social networking site on Friday, saying it was jeopardising eradication initiatives and putting the lives of vaccinators at risk.
Polio vaccination campaigns have faced stubborn resistance for years in Pakistan.
In recent months Pakistani social media has been inundated with fake news reports and videos — garnering thousands of views and shares in the last week alone — claiming numerous children have been killed by the polio vaccine.
Thousands of parents have refused to allow their children to be inoculated.
“The parental refusals due to propaganda on Facebook regarding the vaccine is emerging as the major obstacle in achieving complete eradication of the virus,” Babar Atta, who is helping oversee the country’s vaccination drive, said in a statement.
Rockets fired from Gaza day after Israel kills four Palestinians
No casualties reported as dozens of rockets reportedly land in Israeli settlements and towns surrounding Gaza Strip.
Dozens of rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, a day after Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in two separate incidents in Gaza.
There were no casualties reported after the rocket fire on Saturday morning, the Israeli army said.
The Iron Dome missile system intercepted dozens of projectiles, the army said, adding that about 90 rockets were fired from the besieged enclave.
WHEN ERIK PRINCE arrived at the Four Seasons resort in the Seychelles in January 2017 for his now-famous meetings with a Russian banker and UAE ruler Mohammed bin Zayed, he was in the middle of an unexpected comeback. The election of Donald Trump had given the disgraced Blackwater founder a new opportunity to prove himself. After years of trying and failing to peddle a sweeping vision of mercenary warfare around the world, Erik Prince was back in the game.
Bin Zayed had convened a group of close family members and advisers at the luxurious Indian Ocean resort for a grand strategy session in anticipation of the new American administration. On the agenda were discussions of new approaches for dealing with the civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Libya, the threat of the Islamic State, and the United Arab Emirates’ longstanding rivalry with Iran. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE had used its oil wealth to become one of the world’s largest arms purchasers and the third largest importer of U.S. weapons. A new American president meant new opportunities for the tiny Gulf nation to exert its outsized military and economic influence in the Gulf region and beyond.
8chan, a nexus of radicalization for the Poway and Christchurch shooters, explained
The online platform is a dark, toxic corner of the internet.
On April 27, a 19-year-old man opened fire at a San Diego synagogue, killing one person and injuring three others. The incident took place six weeks after a 28-year-old man murdered 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The two have a disturbing commonality: They were both hanging out in the same dark corner of the internet, specifically a site called 8chan.
8chan is an online message board that since its 2013 launch has become the home of some of the most vitriolic content on the internet. It characterizes itself as the “darkest reaches” of the online world in its tagline and has fostered a reputation as a nearly lawless space for free speech — however hateful or dangerous it may be — to flourish.
On Wednesday night, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for an extended interview that was sobering and enlightening.
In the first segments, Secretary Clinton talks about the importance of Americans keeping focused on the themes and findings in the Mueller report amid the antics and obfuscation that William Barr has brought to the Special Counsel process. She also discusses the dubious legal arguments being made by Attorney General William Barr on Donald Trump’s behalf and the disdain it shows for Congress and the American oversight process. She said that Barr is doing the job he was hired to do, protect Donald Trump.
She then turns the discussion to impeachment which she believes must take a back seat to fact finding as it did in Watergate in 1973. Sec. Clinton talks about the importance of the role of the House Judiciary Committee in continuing to explore and publicize the findings of the Mueller report with an eye toward whether what is learned leads to the impeachment of Donald Trump.
The conversation then turns to the Mueller report and the Russian interference with the 2016 election and how successful it was and the dangers of Republicans putting partisanship ahead of national security just because their candidate was the beneficiary of that interference. Since Republicans are blocking legislation on orders from the White House, Sec. Clinton dropped this supposition:
Let’s suppose that you had one of the Democratic nominees for 2020 on your show, and that person said, you know, ‘The only other adversary of ours who is anywhere near as good as the Russians is China. So why should Russia have all the fun? And since Russia is clearly backing republicans, why don’t we ask China to back us?
And not only that, China, if you’re listening, why don’t you get Trump’s tax returns? I’m sure our media would richly reward you. Now according to the Mueller report, that is not conspiracy because it’s done right out in the open. so if after this hypothetical Democratic candidate says this on your show, within hours, all of a sudden, the IRS offices are bombarded with incredibly sophisticated cyber tools looking for Trump’s tax returns, and then extracts them and then passes them to whatever the new Wikileaks happens to be and they start being unravelled and disclosed, nothing wrong with that.
I mean, if you’re going let Russia get away with what they did and are still doing according to Christopher Wray, the current FBI director who said that last week, they’re in our election systems. We’re worried about 2020, he said. So, hey, let’s have a great power contest, and let’s get the Chinese in on the side of somebody else. Just saying that shows how absurd the situation we find ourselves in.”
The interview ends with a discussion of the Republicans’ and Trump’s obsession with her. The secretary said, “I’m living rent free inside of Donald Trump’s brain.” She says that repeated calls for re-investigations, and the effectiveness of Republican smear campaign are tactics appealing to their base of supporters.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Neither man seems ready for harsh political reality.
It’s still very early, but Joe Biden has emerged as the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Bernie Sanders is in second place, although he appears to be fairly far behind, and one poll shows him in a statistical tie with Elizabeth Warren. So what should we think about the men currently leading the field?
Well, I have concerns. Not about electability, a topic about which nobody knows anything. Never mind what today’s general election polls say: What will polling look like after the inevitable Republican smear campaign? The answer to this question depends, in turn, on whether news organizations will cooperate with those smears as gleefully as they did in 2016.
No, my concerns are about what will happen if either man wins. Are they ready for the political trench warfare that would inevitably follow a Democratic victory?
The trouble with both Biden and Sanders is that each, in his own way, seems to believe that he has unique powers of persuasion that will let him defy the harsh reality of today’s tribal politics. And this lack of realism could set either of them up for failure.
In America, no one is above the law — except the president and everyone who does wrong in his name.
On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”
Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.
He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”
“The Good Fight” is entertainment for the resistance.
In the second season of the serial drama “The Good Fight,” Diane Lockhart, an attorney played by the regal 67-year-old actress Christine Baranski, makes a heated speech at a meeting about a legal strategy for impeaching Donald Trump. “I have spent the last few months feeling deranged,” she shouts, though she uses an expletive before “deranged.” “Going numb! All Trump, all the time. What’s real, what’s fake? Well, you know what? I just woke up.”
This captures a pretty widespread feeling among Americans right now — consider all the women who mobilized for Democrats in the midterms — but it’s surprisingly rare to see it expressed in pop storytelling. Part of the dystopian character of Trump’s presidency is his ubiquity; he dominates the news cycle, late-night TV, and book publishing. Yet Trumpism has, with only a few exceptions, gone weirdly unprocessed by fiction, either written or filmed.
Perhaps that’s because people are desperate for a respite from Trump, or because the imagination can’t compete with the strangeness of reality. It means that while there’s an explosion of news stories about the current moment, there’s a lack of the sort of human tales that might help discombobulated Americans make sense of what we’re going through.
President Trump’s latest position on the Mueller report is that it both totally exonerates him and is fatally flawed at its very core — because it doesn’t totally exonerate him.
Signs are mounting that House Democrats are reaching a breaking point in the face of Trump’s maximal resistance to any and all oversight. That resistance just took a new turn, when Trump told Fox News that former White House counsel Donald McGahn should defy a subpoena to appear before Congress.
McGahn’s testimony to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III provided the basis for the report’s conclusions on some of Trump’s worst obstruction of justice efforts, and Democrats hope he can shed more light on them. A major confrontation looks all but inevitable.
So the White House is justifying its maximal resistance with a broadened set of claims. These are set forth in a newly released letter that White House lawyer Emmet Flood sent to the Justice Department, complaining bitterly about Mueller’s investigation.
Because the Mueller report disclosed his conclusion that he could not conclusively determine that Trump hadn’t committed criminal obstruction of justice, the letter argues, the investigation is hopelessly tainted.
What’s more, it argues, Trump fully cooperated with that tainted investigation. But now that it’s over, he retains the right to exercise executive privilege to prevent his advisers from testifying to Congress — that is, to resist all efforts to further flesh out Mueller’s conclusions.
The argument is ludicrous but revealing. It shows in a roundabout way that Trump’s real position is that he should be beyond the reach of accountability entirely.
No wonder President Trump thinks he can defy Congress, tell his aides and former aides to defy Congress, threaten to fire the special counsel and mislead the American people: Attorney General William P. Barr told him (and us) that a president can end any criminal inquiry if he thinks it is unjustified. (Financial fraud? Witness tampering?) The Founders might be surprised to find out that the term of a U.S. president is the equivalent of a “stay out of jail” card, good until he leaves office — but not before pardoning himself, presumably.
With such advice, the equivalent that a president can do no wrong, Trump is convinced that he can fight “all the subpoenas.” Those Democrats are such meanies, why should he have to endure a co-equal branch investigating him? [..]
On one level, you might say this is just Trump saying stupid things. He cannot stop McGahn, so what is the harm? The harm is that the president is the chief executive who took an oath to faithfully execute the laws, not to think up groundless, absurd ways to block an investigation.
And this is precisely the kind of conduct Barr inspired with his declaration that the president can cut off any investigation he thinks is unjustified. Barr now invites and incites Trump to become even more brazen in his defiance of Congress and his disdain for the rule of law. Barr has created a monster who now roams through the landscape destroying norms, tearing up the statute books and encouraging lawlessness by others. (Why wouldn’t every witness in a criminal proceeding brought by the feds try the same sort of shenanigans?)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli born; The U.S. Supreme Court rules racial covenants in real estate are unenforceable; Joe DiMaggio makes his baseball debut; Singers Pete Seeger and James Brown born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.
His imposing image stares out from government buildings, bridges, billboards, shops and tuk tuks as Thailand prepares for its first coronation in seven decades.
This weekend, two years after he ascended the throne, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, also known as Rama X, will finally be officially crowned.
The ceremony, which will last three days, is a historic moment for Thailand. The monarchy is considered the spiritual protector of the people and commands, particularly among older generations, a deity-like reverence. The death of Vajiralongkorn’s father, the widely beloved King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 2018 aged 88, was marked by a national outpouring of sorrowand an official year of mourning.
Sudan demonstrators vow to take protests to Europe and US: ‘This is our last chance’
Hundreds of thousands gathered in rallies across Sudan on Thursday demanding the immediate creation of a civilian-led government
Protesters in Sudan have vowed to take their rallies to embassies across Europe, as hundreds of thousands marched in Khartoum and other parts of the country to demand the military hand over power to civilians.
Three weeks after president Omar al-Bashir was overthrown, demonstrators gathered across the capital and marched to a main sit-in outside the military headquarters.
A coalition of activists led by the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) said Thursday’s self-styled “Million Man March” was held because talks with Sudan’s military council have reached a deadlock.
Reporters Without Borders head: ‘Journalism in Europe has been weakened’
Jamal Khashoggi, Daphne Caruana Galizia, Jan Kuciak: Their murders are among the most serious attacks on press freedom and a symptom of a deep-rooted problem, says Christophe Deloire of Reporters Without Borders.
Almost one person in two in the world does not have access to freely reported news and information. As Europeans, we can count ourselves lucky that we enjoy “this freedom that allows us to verify respect for all the other freedoms.”
In the World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), our continent is by far the one where freedom of the press is the most widely observed. But let us not turn a blind eye on the fact that, in recent years, a dam has burst and this cornerstone of our democracy has been seriously damaged.
Seoul says Pyongyang must show ‘action’ to win sanctions relief
South Korean foreign minister Kang Kyung-wha said Friday that Pyongyang needs to show “visible, concrete and substantial” denuclearisation action if it wants sanctions relief, as the North’s deadlock with the United States continues.
Kang’s comments at a press conference come just days after a senior North Korean official warned Washington of an “unwanted outcome” if it didn’t adjust its stance on economic sanctions.
Washington and Pyongyang have been at loggerheads since the collapse of a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump in February.
Their homes were burned down in racist violence. Then officials told them to flee
Story by Denise Hruby
Photographs by Arno Friebes
When rocks crashed through the windows of their home, the bathroom seemed the safest place to hide. Huddled together, the family of Vasil Velichkow Hristov — including his six young grandchildren — listened as an angry mob chanted threats and racial slurs.
“Come out, Roma, we’ll make soap out of you,” they yelled, according to several people who were nearby at the time.
Once a positive example of integration of the ethnic Roma community in Bulgaria, the northern central city of Gabrovo has been engulfed by racist violence and anti-Roma protests since April 10.
“We define a coup d’état as the sudden and irregular (i.e., illegal or extra-legal) removal, or displacement, of the executive authority of an independent government,” wrote the Coup D’etat Project at the University of Illinois’ Cline Center for Democracy in 2013.
Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told PolitiFact that the Russia investigation “is not a coup, because the FBI had very good reasons for commencing an investigation of Trump. It beggars belief that anyone in the FBI had the intention of subverting a duly elected president.”
Anthony Clark Arend, a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University, agreed.
“By using the term ‘coup,’ the president is suggesting that Mueller, and by extension his own Justice Department, are acting outside the law,” Arend said. Yet Mueller “was appointed and supervised by Rod Rosenstein, the president’s chosen deputy attorney general.”
Of the 12 types of coups recognized by the Cline Center, nine do not seem to have anything to do with what Trump is talking about, including military coups, rebel coups, popular revolts, dissident actions, palace coups, foreign coups, internationally mediated transitions, forced resignations, and self-coups, in which the leader strong-arms other branches of government to entrench power.
Two other types cited by the center are defined by how far they got — attempted coups (which try and fail) and coup conspiracies (which never get to the stage of being carried out). Any supposed coup against Trump would have been a coup attempt, since he’s still in office. But that doesn’t mean there actually was a coup attempt.
“Inasmuch as the Russia investigation began before Trump was elected, and at a time when it was universally assumed that Hillary Clinton would be elected, it cannot have been an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government,” said Richard Bulliet, a Columbia University historian. “It was an attempt by duly established arms of the state to prevent seizure of the government by a witting or unwitting Russian agent.”
The lead author of the Cline Center report, University of Illinois political scientist Peter F. Nardulli, agreed that Trump’s definition wouldn’t fit.
“The vast proportion of extralegal overthrows of the government involve violence,” Nardulli said. “What happened with Trump was simply the unfolding of a normal governmental procedure in accord with the rule of law. It was a totally different genre from a coup.”
Of the Cline Center’s categories, Trump would presumably be referring to a “counter coup,” which is defined as involving “the elimination of a usurper by members of the prior regime within a month of the initial coup.”
But in Trump’s case, he didn’t take office through a coup (he was duly elected by the Electoral College) and the supposed counter-coup actually began before he actually won the presidency. So calling it a counter coup is problematic, too.
“I cannot see in any way shape or form how this would be a coup in any reasonable sense of the word,” said Richard Nephew, adjunct professor and senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “We have a long, historical legacy of holding to account our senior officials and representatives for their conduct.”
You want a Coup? I’ll give you a Coup, albeit a failed U.S. sponsored one.
For weeks, the Venezuelan opposition had been working on a comprehensive blueprint to finally force President Nicolás Maduro from office. Several of his top military and civilian aides were said to have been persuaded to switch sides, while others would be allowed to leave the country. There was a strong suggestion that Maduro himself might peacefully fly to Havana.
“They produced a pretty full plan,” a U.S. official said of the opposition. Implementation was tentatively set for Wednesday, although no date had been finalized.
On Monday, however, the plan started to fall apart.
Maduro, it seemed, had gotten wind of it, and opposition leader Juan Guaidó responded by rushing ahead. At dawn Tuesday, after alerting the U.S. State Department, Guaidó released a video saying that significant Venezuela military units were with him and that the moment had come to rise up against Maduro.
But after a day of bloody protests, the government remained intact. The Trump administration publicly blamed Russia and Cuba — Maduro’s top backers — for keeping him in place and discouraging expected high-level defections.
…
U.S. officials said the United States did not directly participate in the opposition’s secret negotiations with Maduro officials. “We were aware of the efforts, beginning about two months ago,” a second senior administration official said. “There were times when it seemed serious, and other times not so serious.”
But “the last few weeks, it was clear that . . . they were reaching agreement” with Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, along with the head of the Maduro-appointed Supreme Court and the commander of his presidential guard, to switch sides, this official said.
While not officially recognizing Guaidó, Padrino and the others were said to be ready to sign documents declaring their loyalty to the Venezuelan constitution, under which the opposition-led National Assembly had declared Maduro’s reelection last year invalid and, on Jan. 23, named Guaidó interim president. The United States and more than 50 other countries, primarily in Latin America and Europe, have also recognized him.
In exchange, the Venezuelan officials would keep their jobs and be integrated into the new administration. For those who might want to leave the country, the United States had given indirect assurances they would not be barred from doing so, and might even be allowed access to any assets stashed overseas.
Over the past two weeks, administration officials said, they had received indications that even Maduro himself might be prepared to fly to Cuba.
On Monday, however, the opposition and the administration received word that Maduro was aware of the plan. Early Tuesday, Guaidó appeared at a military base in eastern Caracas, along with a small band of armed men in military uniforms, to announce that “Operation Liberty” had begun.
“People of Venezuela,” he said, “we will go to the street with the armed forces to continue taking the streets until we consolidate the end of [Maduro’s] usurpation, which is already irreversible.”
At about 6 a.m., Bolton called Trump and his own top aides to say the announcement had come.
At midmorning, however, Padrino appeared on live television, wearing combat fatigues and body armor, surrounded by other military officers under a large portrait of Maduro. He declared the uprising an attempted coup and denounced protesters gathered in the streets. Reports of defections and government collapse, he said, were “fake news.”
The administration, seeking to undermine Maduro’s trust in those around him, decided to out Padrino; Maikel Morena, the chief justice of the Supreme Court; and presidential guard commander Ivan Rafael Hernandez Dala by name, saying they had agreed to sign documents supporting the constitution.
When Maduro failed to appear throughout the day, Pompeo eventually declared that the Venezuelan leader “had his plane ready” but had been dissuaded from leaving by Russia.
The senior administration official noted that “when times get tough” for Maduro, including a number of failed coup attempts in the past, “he has always had a plane ready.” But, the official said, “the information we had was that he was very seriously contemplating” a departure on Tuesday morning.
“Then the Russians said don’t leave,” said the official, who characterized Russia’s intervention as “advice,” perhaps based on a reading of how the day would unfold.
Besides, Brown Commies bent on Word Domination which is our gig.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
We have a system in place for our government to uncover evidence against a sitting president. And it’s working.
Many who watched Attorney General William Barr’s testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which followed the revelation that the special counsel Robert Mueller had expressed misgivings about Mr. Barr’s characterization of his report, are despairing about the rule of law. I am not among them. I think the system is working, and inching, however slowly, toward justice.
When it comes to investigating a president, the special counsel regulations I had the privilege of drafting in 1998-99 say that such inquiries have one ultimate destination: Congress. That is where this process is going, and has to go. We are in the fifth inning, and we should celebrate a system in which our own government can uncover so much evidence against a sitting president. [..]
The underappreciated story right now is that we’ve not only learned that it was Mr. Barr — and pointedly not Mr. Mueller — who decided to clear President Trump of the obstruction charges, but also discovered the reasoning behind Mr. Barr’s decision. The American public and Congress now have the facts and evidence before them. The sunlight the regulations sought is shining.
Admitting the truth is the first step toward our country’s restoration.
Not completely gone and not irrevocably ended, but forever altered. Or, maybe it is fair to say that our concept of America itself was a concoction, that it was always one solid body blow away from buckling at the knees.
Whichever the case, it is certainly true now that Donald Trump has tested our institutions and our constitutions — both government and personal — and found them all wanting, found them all weak, found them all vulnerable to the ravaging.
In the course of three years, he has completely taken over one of America’s two primary political parties, the Republican Party, a 165-year-old institution, the party of Abraham Lincoln. [..]
America naïvely believed that the presidency was for honorable men (women, shamefully, still haven’t been given a shot), that the president of us would always in some form be the best of us. Few could conceive that a character who lacks character would get the chance to sit in that seat. And now that he’s there, it has been painfully underscored that removal is nearly impossible and that power can go nearly unchecked.
Yes, we may as well say the eulogy for the enigma we assumed was modern America and quickly turn to the truth: No one is coming to save us. No one is coming to restore this country and it won’t self-resurrect.
Attorney General William P. Barr lost whatever credibility he had left. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) once more revealed himself incapable of putting country over party. (He confessed not to have read the Mueller report but nevertheless proclaims the whole thing “over.”) Most members on the committee spoke too much, argued too frequently and failed to pin down Barr on key facts. There was one exception to the political demolition derby.
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) asked clipped, insightful and fact-based questions. She left Barr stammering and got him to concede that he had not looked at the underlying evidence before giving his own prosecutorial opinion on obstruction of justice. Even worse, he fumbled around when asked if the president or anyone else at the White House had asked or suggested he investigate someone
As those watching could see, she did it all calmly and methodically, directing Barr to answer questions and not interrupt her. (The sight of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), partly bemused and partly impressed watching her, confirmed how effective she was.)
It was the highlight of the hearing for Democrats, and her performance is not likely to be lost on Democratic primary voters. To the extent that they are looking for someone to take down President Trump, the veteran prosecutor offers Democrats someone entirely capable of slicing and dicing a Republican who refuses to acknowledge easily established facts.
As the political world struggles to digest the enormity of Attorney General William P. Barr’s profound corruption of his role on President Trump’s behalf, it’s worth stepping back and surveying a distilled version of what we know, now that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s redacted report has been released:
Russia launched a massive attack on our political system, undermining the integrity of our elections, to elect Donald Trump president.
U.S. law enforcement launched an investigation primarily aimed at getting to the bottom of that attack so that we could fully reckon with what happened and ensure the integrity of future elections.
Trump tried in multiple ways to derail that accounting of this massive attack on our political system — and then tried to bury the truth about that derailment effort — in a manner that was at best corrupt, and at worst criminal.
The simplest way to understand much of what Barr has done — and what Trumpworld will be doing to impede inquiries going forward — is that it’s mainly aimed at obscuring the broad contours of that larger story.
The point here is not that everything they’re doing is deliberately aimed at this end. It’s that this bigger story is at the center of everything — and by “biggest crime of all,” I mean Trump’s most monstrous wrong — and thus efforts to keep smaller truths from coming out will inevitably be about obscuring that larger story.
Former FBI director James Comey has published in the New York Times the most insightful analysis I have read of how President Trump corrupts those who work for him — such as Attorney General William P. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. “Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from,” Comey writes. “It takes character like Mr. [Jim] Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.”
This reminded me of something I wrote in USA Today on Feb. 29, 2016, while Trump was still one of many candidates seeking the GOP nomination: “This is, in general, a moment of testing for Republicans. It is a character test. Do you believe in the open and inclusive party of Ronald Reagan? Or do you want a bigoted and extremist party in the image of Donald Trump?” [..]
The surrender by conservatives outside the administration has proceeded through a gradual process of compromise and corruption similar to that on the inside. The most important factor driving this process, I believe, is fear of the professional consequences of opposing the vengeful occupant of the Oval Office.
Members of Congress have seen what happened to former senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and former representative Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), who had the temerity to occasionally criticize the great Trump. From the standpoint of a political careerist (someone like Graham, who has held elected office for the past 26 years), they have suffered a fate worse than losing their lives: They have lost office.
The Republican-dominated Congress clearly thinks it’s no longer an impeachable offense to abuse power
There was a point during the Senate’s alternate grilling and chilling with Attorney General Bill Barr when you could hear the ghost of Richard Nixon crying.
Nixon took one final helicopter flight from the White House a generation too soon. He shuffled off this mortal coil a decade too early for redemption.
Because judging from the Republican response to the Mueller report, there is no way today’s Congress would have come close to impeaching Tricky Dick.
It was Kamala Harris, the former prosecutor and current presidential candidate, who exposed the very long distance traveled by Republicans over the last 45 years.
She began with a simple question of an attorney general who was supposed to apply some establishment lacquer to the grifters and jokers who are the best and brightest on Planet Trump. Instead, he revealed himself to the biggest grifter of them all: a fake attorney general defending a fraudulent administration. [..]
And so it came to pass that the attorney general of the United States pretended that he couldn’t remember if the president had tried to use the justice department to pursue his personal enemies.
Nixon was unlucky enough to be president at a time when Republicans and Democrats thought it was an impeachable matter to abuse power.
Reasonable people might disagree about what constitutes an abuse of power. But reasonable lawyers would all agree that a president suggesting, inferring or hinting at an investigation of someone like a political opponent would be just such an abuse of power.
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