Has the accused bank robber been proven guilty? No, he hasn’t! So how can you justify making public, at trial, these unfounded allegations? You call this “evidence” but actually it’s plainly unfounded disparagement of the accused. I will not permit introduction of evidence against an innocent man! When you have ironclad proof he committed the crime I’ll agree to a public airing of the evidence, but until then what you’re attempting is a slander and defamation the court cannot countenance!
It is an easy path to GOP victory, for one simple reason: the GOP’s absurd dominance of the economic competence narrative and the borderline criminal failure of the Democratic Party to do anything about it. We’re all complicit in this failure here at TPM, from @josh down. We’re constantly agitated by day to day scandals and culture battles, while Trump slaughters us on the key issue of perceptions of the economy. If Dems asserted every day that Republicans are crashing the economy again, we’d win. Our path to victory is simple too. But our Dems are too timid and undisciplined to repeat this message at every opportunity, and we don’t hold them to account for their failure, and the media, even TPM, buys into the fake narrative of a booming economy, and here we are.
Rosenstein has proven very adept at surviving, despite having personally done more to upset Trump than probably anyone else in the government.
Very carefully-worded letter with no red flags really either way.
He and Barr are just trying to keep Trump in check until they can drop the report, as if they projected the extent of things then Trump would summarily fire them and we’d be back to waiting while a new AG was found…
Mueller is dedicated to the rule of law. There’s enough information out there to suggest Donnie Moscow is central to transnational forces trying to subvert our Republic and that Mueller will do everything legal to make him experience justice.
I would tend to agree with you, we don’t know what Mueller knows, if he has the goods on Trump then he has an obligation to do what is best for the country. Parsing Rosensteins’s words one can conclude that Mueller will be bringing indictments because disparagement (and more, a whole lot more) is necessary. If Mueller fails in this regard, then his whole life has been a meaningless sham.
IANAL but the one thing that I can’t wrap my brain around is why Flynn, Gates, and Cohen would be offered plea deals if they didn’t provide information that would implicate members of the Trump crime family. It makes me believe that there are additional indictments to come, possibly through the NY office.
I don’t think he had an enraptured audience in Ohio this week. There are cracks in the foundation of their arguments, and it only takes a 1% - 2% swing in vote totals to throw the states to the blue side of the aisle. There’s only so much bullshit-nationalist-spackle you can put over the emerging truth that the middle class is getting fucking hammered before the cracks fully reveal the ugly truths of the tax cuts and other trickle down bullshit.
E-x-a-c-t-l-y! Many folks are unnecessarily worried, reading too much into the tea leaves. There’s already a crop of sealed indictments, we don’t know who is in that group.
And since you flip up when offering deals (have do deliver someone higher in the food chain), there’s not much above the National Security Advisor whose name doesn’t rhyme with “Dump”.
Jr. is going down for lying to Congress-- his problem is identical to what Cohen already copped to, so by that charging standard, it would be unethical to not also bring Jr. down on the same charges.
Comey was trying to play politics, and he did so very poorly. Clearly he should never have made his snarky comment about Clinton. That’s not his job. But of course that wasn’t his worst mistake of 2016.
The practice of trying to infer facts from scant information is, unfortunately, something journalists do. Reminds me of the “Kremlinologists” of the 1950s who tried to draw grand conclusions based on who was standing closer to Stalin in various photos. This kind of analysis doesn’t stand the test of time very well.
Much as I would like to agree with you, a four decades long porking of the working and middle class in terms of real wage growth (ie precious damned little) would suggest that the reality has yet to sink in.
People need to remember that Bob Mueller’s mandate is to uncover and PROSECUTE CRIMES.
That is all.
It’s not his mandate to point out shady, or immoral, or unethical, or partisan political behavior, just to PROSECUTE CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR.
If he cannot PROVE criminal behavior enough to secure indictments against individuals, he won’t mention them.
That is SOP in DOJ reports.
He will secure indictments against those he can in Federal Courts and pass off to State Prosecutors any STATE-LEVEL CRIMES he uncovers. Nothing more.
I think a large number of people are going to be very, very disappointing in the Mueller report (if we ever see it) for this reason.
It won’t be a damning moral document, it will be a cold, clinical list of indictable crimes by individuals (and maybe some RICO indictments of groups.)
Thanks for braving the Doom and Gloom Society to offer an opposing view. They certainly are in ascendance this morning.
Dooming and Glooming can certainly make the D&G-er look “smart” and informed…and it does have that effect in the Age of Trump (how can D&G be a losing proposition???)…
But what it really does is enervate.
Not to mention the incalculable damage it does to readers who may not even be members of this site who come to us for info and inspiration.
Has my caffeine not yet taken effect or is this letter almost a year old? Maybe that doesn’t change the interpretation, given that it’s more in the way of general principles, but on the other hand, much has happened (or at least made its way to the public) since then. Reading the article - and again, maybe I missed something quite obvious - I got the sense that this letter was a recent development.
Very much agree. The economy is a fraud. Public finances are catastrophic. What’s going wrong is that we’re counting on voters in Ohio to figure this stuff this out on their own, in the face of constant Republican propaganda. The GOP should be under water on wealth creation and business competence at this point, particularly given the outrageous promises they made. But people still trust them more than Dems to manage the economy.
But what happens is this:
Media: “Mr Trump, what do you say about the caged children on the border?”
Trump: “I don’t know about any caged children, but what I do know is that the economy is the best we’ve ever had.” Dems: “Caged children! He’s lying!”
Media: “It’s true that there are caged children but to be fair the economy is booming.”
What should be happening is this:
Media: “What does the Manafort conviction mean?”
Dems: “First of all, the Republicans always crash the economy and bankrupt the country. They’re doing it again. Second, Manafort means…”
