The veiled threats the President often volleys across to his opponents, or people who simply do not agree with him, have been so normalized that we often rationalize them as "his public persona", or "that's just twitter", or "he's go people writing that for him", or anything that helps us better understand why a person with so much power could be so vindictive and petty. Yet, as the report shows, the Trump on twitter is not his "public persona", but Trump himself through the twitter megaphone. Right after...

According to the second part of the Mueller Report, James Comey's account of his interaction with the President is accurate. This is in spite of the many denials from the President about the matter. After Comey's account of the President's request to "let[] Flynn go" became public, the President publicly disputed several aspects of the story. The President told the New York Times that he did not "shoo other people out of the room" when he talked to Comey and that he did not remember having a one-on-one...

In the late 90s, another President was under Investigation, Bill Clinton. The genesis of the Mueller Report was the Starr Report. The Starr report was known as the Independent Counsel Report. Unlike the Special Counsel Report from Mueller, the Independent Counsel Report had much more latitude and fewer restrictions in their investigation. In fact, it was thanks to this wide-ranging and lengthy (4 years) investigation that politicians decided to limit the scope of any future such investigations and the Independent Counsel Investigation turned into the Special Counsel Investigation....

It has been about 2 weeks since the Special Counsel Report by former FBI director, Robert Mueller, was released to the public. The report was made public, in redacted form, about 3 weeks after Attorney General William Barr had sent a summary of the report to congress. The full report is close to 450 pages, hence when the AG (Attorney General) summarized it in 4 pages, there was considerable uproar and pressure for the eventual release the full report (in redacted form). The AG maintained the report does...

Robert Mueller held a 10-minute conference this morning and talked about two things; 1) he's resigning from the defense department and 2) he confirmed what he had already stated in his report. As we had covered before, Mr. Mueller reaffirmed there had not been enough evidence to indict anymore people, than he already had, with conspiracy. He further reaffirmed the only possible outcome of his investigation with regards to obstruction of justice were; 1) no obstruction, or 2) his report. In his report, he stated that under the...

#trump #impeachment #2020 The talk of impeachment is heating up in congress and with some Presidential candidates (all democratic at the time of this writing). Most folks think once Trump is impeached, he'll be removed from office. What most fail to realize is that impeachment is only the first step in a long and political minefield. In the late 90s, President Clinton was impeached, yet he finished his term. Prior to the impeachment of Clinton, the only other President to have been successfully impeached was President Andrew Johnson....

#muellerreport #trump #election2020 Today, Robert Mueller finally testified in front of the US Congress. This is one of the only times I have ever heard him speak. The first time was when he held a press conference to talk about his non-appearance of this very appearance. The testimony progressed both, as I had expected, and with a few surprises. First, the democrats and the republicans both played their game. The game of the democrats was to point out each one of the facts in the report Mueller provided...

Mr. Mueller was a busy man today. He spent 3 hours testifying at the House Judiciary committee in the morning, and another couple of hours testifying at the House Intelligence committee. And like in the first testimony, most of the outcome came as expected, though there were some surprises. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican, played the role of the party's puppet. His immediate focus was on bringing up, what seemed like, conspiracy theories about the FBI's biases towards the Trump campaign and its advisors. The Republican members of...

#muellerreport #election2020 Robert Mueller and his band of merry men (and women), spent nearly 2 years investigating Trump, his campaign and Russia. The output of that investigation was a 450-page report. The report was broken into two volumes, volume 1 focused on conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia and volume 2 focused on obstruction of justice. On the first subject, Mueller was clear in his conclusion, there was no conspiracy between the campaign and Russia and Russia's government interfered in our election. Sure, volume 1 included a...

#mueller #election2020 #lnsc #acloserlook I enjoy watching the late-night show's satirical take on the day's news. They are mostly sharp and entertaining. Because most of the hosts are left-leaning, they tend to satirize the Republicans more than the Democrats. The jokes and lambasting are tough, but they've mostly been true. And while true, they are lacking the necessary criticism to make them an effective force for change. Thus, all of the work and effort spent on these monologues are turning into nothing but echo-chambers for the viewers. Take...