I believe the advice to “follow the money” has paid off in the past. Trump has a long history of Russian deals and low and behold Russia is the country that came to save him. As Josh Marshall called it, the money pot, is where any competent investigator would start. Look, these guys know how to do this. Mueller doesn’t seem the type to get bogged down in tangents or the extraneous nor is he a witch hunter. He knows what he’s looking for and he knows where to find it.
13 Likes
TPM isn’t going to do anything about him. This isn’t Raw Story or Crooks and Liars where you get banned if you don’t tow the ideological line. But…if you want trolls to go away just skip their posts and move on to the meaningful ones. Let a trolls posts sit…un-responded to. They’re here to get a rise. If they don’t get that they move on. As my Grandmother used to say “consider the source and ignore it”. Don’t give them what they want. That post of yours is what they want.
13 Likes
Agreed. Instead Comey would still be trying to do to trump what he did to Clinton.
I’m really looking forward to Comey hitting the promotional circuit for his new $2m book, and being forced to respond directly to the criticisms in Rosenstein’s congressional statement on his fitness. Not sure who the hard hitting journalists are in major US news outlets, but an interview on BBC Hardtalk ought to do the trick.
As Republicans have said to minorities time and time again, if you didn’t do anything wrong, you shouldn’t be worried about stop & frisk or racial profiling. It seems this adminstration is full of chickens, chicken hawks, and chickens coming home to roost.
18 Likes
Are you fucking nuts?
Oh, it’s you. Never mind.
11 Likes
And when has that ever worked as a means of getting rid of them?
1 Like
Mueller isn’t going to slow down one iota just because right-wing extremists are screaming about a fishing expedition. Let the losers cry foul all they want. Trump’s crimes will be exposed and then everyone can say, “Hey, that was one hell of a fishing expedition…Mueller caught his limit and then some; including a certain heinous white (or is that orange) whale.”
8 Likes
So, in a normal administration, you’d handle an investigation into Russian interference with our electoral process as a serious matter of concern to All Americans of Whatever Party. You’d want to say things like “If anyone in my campaign is shown to have blah blah blah they’ll be fired and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the blah blah blah.” Because such an act is, simply, a genuine matter of bi-partisan concern–or should be, as even a “UK observer” should be able to recognize, no?
And if you genuinely had not been doing the horizontal bop with Russian intelligence, but maybe suspected it wasn’t impossible someone down there in the bowels (lower or upper GI) of your organization may have stupidly let themselves be compromised, well, that would be a bit scarier. Still, if you genuinely hadn’t authorized or known or you’d turned a deliberately blind eye to such shenanigans, you’d be supremely pissed at anyone exhibiting that degree of stupidity (even if deep in your heart you might understand why they maybe coulda thought they were helping), or at least you’d be setting yourself up to adopt that pose and would still be doing everything you could to keep the frame around the Russians and the hacking and not around yourself. You’d be all “We’re all concerned! bi-partisan! threat to 'Murican Democracy! not a partisan ishyew! etc,” and positioning yourself, whatever the outcome, to be the happiest spectator at the auto da fé.
What you wouldn’t do, if you were a) genuinely not playing Russian footsie, and b) sane, is to lie, get caught, lie again, get caught, then lie some more, then get caught, tell some more lies and so on ad almost infinitum. Because (follow me closely here) the effect of such behavior is to absolutely ensure that the focus shifts from “what did Russia do” to “what did Trump and/or his minions do.” And if you were absolutely bound and determined to MAKE yourself the focus of the investigation, you could hardly do better than to top off all those lies by committing blatant obstruction of justice in the well established and legally attested tradition of Tricky Dick himself by firing the chief person charged with investigating the whole mess. Oh, and just for kicks, admitting that’s why you did it on the public TeeVee machine.
Which brings me around to the genuine question of how any of this could be seen as a) innocent, b) a good idea, and most of all c) not insane. Because it is not Teh Democraps or Teh Libruls who have forced this investigation to zero in on Trump & collusion rather than Russia and Russian election hacking. The person who has accomplished that with a truly bizarre and single-minded determination is Trump himself. I say it’s a genuine question because it does seem so deliberate, yet I’m not able to conceive how anyone acting this way could see it as a good idea, except by positing an even uglier scenario about wanting to provoke such a Constitutional crisis in order to break said Constitution as part of an insane but maybe possible scheme to establish a genuine authoritarian autocracy here in imitation of Putin himself. My brain isn’t twisted enough to parse how to get there via this path but I don’t see any other explanation other than, yeah, he’s genuinely guilty and also incredibly stupid.
Either way, it’s hard to see how even a “UK observer” could look at it and think “Good idea!” unless said observer just happens to be a big fan of fascist rule, at least for other people.
17 Likes
How adorable! You’re focused on Comey suffering some minor discomfort, if any, on the way to the bank while the rest of the world is watching the undoing of an American presidency. It’s like a guy who once coached a team who made it to the state championship bragging to the guy about to coach the Super Bowl. Nobody cares.
9 Likes
Maybe “fishing expedition” means something entirely different in the UK (or Moscow) than it does here?
3 Likes
6 Likes
Let the losers cry foul all they want
With all the chickenshit, maybe they’re trying to call “fowl”?
(Badum, Tish…)
I’ll let myself out…
3 Likes
My surmise is that Mueller and Congress both want to do the same thing: lock up any ill-gotten gains (and principal) involving Russian money. They’ll leave other misbegotten and legitimately begotten money alone - they just want to impound the laundered rubles. If taxes are due and owing from the Trump-Kushner gang, they’ll get a bill from the IRS - possibly delivered on the front page of the Washington Post.
5 Likes
Yup, Trump fired Comey so that Mueller would be appointed Special Prosecutor and would finally “get to the bottom of things”. And Trump’s Twitter fusillade against Jeff Sessions is unfairly interpreted as the actions of a cornered rat.
9 Likes
Perhaps if DT’s defenders could convince him to make his financials public as all modern federal politicians have, Mueller wouldn’t need to spend his time looking.
8 Likes
No, a fishing expedition is investigating a failed real estate deal, where everyone lost money, and turning it into one about blowjobs and adultery.
19 Likes
DT could make all of his financials public as all past modern presidents have done.
4 Likes
Investigating the whole ball of wax is also crucial because you have to know about how collusion might have been carried out. The usual GOP outrage is like saying “Sure, you can investigate a conspiracy, but only if you deliberately avoid figuring out who the conspirators were.”
1 Like
You know you’re getting close to finding something really bad when the protests from the GOP faithful start to get loudest. Keep following the money.
5 Likes
Really? I think they whine about everything at the top of their lungs. It is always nice to see them do it when their fear is warranted rather than after some BS Alex Jones thing, though.
4 Likes