The Commentariat -- March 24, 2019

Afternoon Update:

** Mark Mazzetti & Katie Benner of the New York Times: "The investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III found that neither President Trump nor any of his aides conspired or coordinated with the Russian government's 2016 election interference, according to a summary of the special counsel's findings made public on Sunday by Attorney General William P. Barr. Mr. Barr also said that Mr. Mueller's team drew no conclusions about whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice. Mr. Barr and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, concluded that the special counsel's investigators lacked sufficient evidence to establish that Mr. Trump committed that offense, but added that Mr. Mueller's team stopped short of exonerating Mr. Trump." ...

... Barr's supposed summary is here, via the New York Times. ...

... Devlin Barrett & Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post: "Mueller 'ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment,' Barr wrote, leaving it up to the attorney general and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to decide whether the president had committed obstruction. Rosenstein and Barr 'concluded that the evidence developed during the special counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction of justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president,' Barr wrote." ...

... Neal Katyal said on MSNBC, "It looks like a whitewash here." He said, "We should be very concerned about 'even-handedness.'"

~~~~~~~~~~~

The Trump Scandals, Ctd. -- Waiting for Bill Barr

Eric Tucker, et al., of the AP: "Attorney General William Barr scoured special counsel Robert Mueller's confidential report on the Russia investigation with his advisers Saturday, deciding how much Congress and the American public will get to see about the two-year probe into ... Donald Trump and Moscow's efforts to elect him. Barr was on pace to release his first summary of Mueller's findings on Sunday, people familiar with the process said. The attorney general's decision on what to finally disclose seems almost certain to set off a fight with congressional Democrats, who want access to all of Mueller's findings -- and supporting evidence -- on whether Trump's 2016 campaign coordinated with Russia to sway the election and whether the president later sought to obstruct the investigation." ...

... Heather Caygle, et al., of Politico: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats on Saturday she'll rebuff any efforts by the Justice Department to reveal details of ... Robert Mueller's findings in a highly classified setting -- a tactic she warned could be employed to shield the report's conclusions from the public. Three sources who participated in a conference call among House Democrats said Pelosi (D-Calif.) told lawmakers she worried the Justice Department would seek to disclose Mueller's conclusions to the so-called Gang of Eight -- the top Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate -- which handles the nation's most sensitive secrets. The substance of Gang of Eight briefings are heavily guarded." ...

... Philip Rucker, et al., of the Washington Post: "... Trump allies claimed vindication while Democrats demanded transparency and vowed to intensify their own probes. Trump and his attorneys and aides were clouded by uncertainty because they did not yet know the contents of the Robert S. Mueller III's report.... Ensconced for the weekend in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump exuded optimism while playing golf, lunching at the clubhouse and chatting with friends. At the urging of his advisers, he also exhibited uncharacteristic caution, refraining from publicly crowing that the 'witch hunt' was over or declaring victory prematurely. Asked mid-Saturday to evaluate the president's mood, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said simply, 'He's good.'" ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Here's hoping Mueller passed off his Donnie Junior & Jared dossiers to prosecutors in New York (or elsewhere) & we'll see a few perp walks yet. ...

... Neal Katyal in a Washington Post op-ed: "The public has every right to see Robert S. Mueller III's conclusions. Absolutely nothing in the law or the regulations prevents the report from becoming public.... [The] that text [of the special counsel regulations, which I helped write,] expressly included a key provision saying the 'Attorney General may determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest,' even if the public release may deviate from ordinary Justice Department protocols. The regulations at their core are about a central problem that can be traced back to the Roman poet and satirist Juvenal many centuries ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: Who will guard the guards? Whenever there are allegations of high level executive branch wrongdoing, there is a justifiable worry that the executive branch itself cannot adequately investigate it.... Fears of a government coverup are at their apogee when we are talking about a criminal investigation of the president." ...

... All Quiet on the Palm Beach Front. J.M. Rieger of the Washington Post: "On Friday night, just hours after ... Robert S. Mueller III delivered his report to Attorney General William P. Barr, President Trump got up to give a speech. Addressing guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, during a Republican fundraiser that was closed to the media..., Trump [made no] ... mention of Mueller or collusion." Mrs. McC: I checked Trump's Twitter account at 8:30 pm ET Saturday, & so far not a peep about the report. Surely someone confiscated Trump's phone. ...

... MEANWHILE. Ben Protess, et al., of the New York Times: "Even as ... Robert S. Mueller III submitted his confidential report to the Justice Department on Friday, federal and state prosecutors are pursuing about a dozen other investigations that largely grew out of his work, all but ensuring that a legal threat will continue to loom over the Trump presidency. Most of the investigations focus on President Trump or his family business or a cadre of his advisers and associates, according to court records and interviews with people briefed on the investigations. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, with about half of them being run by the United States attorney's office in Manhattan. Unlike Mr. Mueller, whose mandate was largely focused on any links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government's interference in the 2016 presidential election, the federal prosecutors in Manhattan take an expansive view of their jurisdiction."

Manu Raju of CNN: "... Jared Kushner is providing records to the House Judiciary Committee for its probe into obstruction of justice, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler had sent Kushner a letter requesting information about a wide range of topics spanning the 2016 campaign, transition, inauguration and Kushner's time in the White House. The New York Democrat asked Kushner to tell the panel about matters that include the firing of James Comey as FBI director, his role in a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russians, his knowledge of the pursuit of a Trump Tower Moscow project and documents about Trump's hush-money payments to silence his alleged affairs."

Steve M.: "Watergate spoiled us. No scandal has worked the way Watergate worked in the years since, and for the foreseeable future nothing will. We certainly won't bring a Republican president down the way we did then -- whoever said that Nixon would have survived if Fox News had been around during Watergate was absolutely right.... We live in the apparently endless Reagan and post-Reagan era. Sacred cows aren't slain. Masters of the universe -- Jamie Dimon, Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Kraft, even Michael Jackson -- don't go to jail. They're better at defending themselves, and they're more ruthless -- plus, we don't like to jail the men at the top. Which is why I believe that no Trump or Kushner will ever spend a day in jail. Prosecutors and investigators won't save us.... We have to save ourselves.... We do have to elect the Democratic nominee in 2020, but after that we have to fight on issues as if we haven't accomplished anything by electing the Democrat, because on many issues the system just wants to revert to the mean, and the mean is plutocratic conservatism." ...

... digby: "Putting so much weight on the Mueller probe was risky. Unless this report is an extremely compelling narrative of Trump's unfitness, a lot of people may just agree that it's time to 'move on.'"

Rachel Frazin of the Hill: "Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) blasted former FBI Director James Comey for not doing enough to stop Russian election meddling in 2016 in an interview that aired Sunday. 'In the last Congress that I served in, I wrote a letter in August to the director of the FBI Comey and said "Russia is meddling with our elections and you need to do something about that" and by October he had done nothing,' Reid told radio host John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York.... 'The hindsight from his troops are "well he didn't do it because he thought Hillary would win the election. He therefore thought It'd be too political for him to get involved,"' Reid added." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: In fairness to Comey, he has spent the last two-and-a-half years making excuses for the many screw-ups he made in the run-up to the 2016 election "because he thought Hillary would win" & because he was skeert Republicans would criticize him.

Trump takes sale of Lincoln Bedroom to new extreme. Remember those Photoshopped pictures of "White House for Sale"? They were supposed to be parodic metaphors. Once again, Trump proves he cannot be parodied. ...... Mary Papenfuss of the Huffington Post: "... Donald Trump has emblazoned the 'Trump' brand name on images of the White House to sell in his Trump Store and at the Trump International Hotel in the capital. The products give the bizarre impression that the White House is a Trump hotel. Walter Shaub, who was director of the Office of Government Ethics..., sharply criticized the products as the latest move to 'monetize the presidency' for private gain.... The products among the new 'Cherry Blossom Collection' now online bearing the White House image include soap, mugs, a T-shirt and a long-sleeved shirt."

Lloyd Green of the Guardian: "Vicky Ward's book is subtitled: 'Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.' It is a damning depiction of the Kushner clan and 'Javanka'.... If nothing else, Kushner, Inc reinforces the well-founded conviction that we are governed by a kakistocracy, from the president on down." --s

Once a Con Man, Always a Con Man. Katelyn Polantz of CNN: "Prosecutors suspect Paul Manafort might be trying to secretly claw back about a million dollars he agreed to hand over to the government for his financial crimes -- and he could be using the same type of shell company at the core of his legal problems to fake a loan. A mysterious shell company named Woodlawn LLC -- which formed in the middle of ... Robert Mueller's investigation into Manafort in August 2017 -- claimed in court that it deserves $1 million from Manafort's forfeiture proceeding. The company says Manafort ... still owes that amount to pay back a 2017 mortgage loan. In a court filing Saturday, the prosecutor said he could not tell if the Nevada-registered corporation's $1 million loan to Manafort was a real or sham transaction. The prosecutor says more evidence collection 'is necessary because the United States lacks information to be able to discern whether Woodlawn is a person other than the defendant,' the court filing said.

Trevor Aaronson of The Intercept: "An Intercept analysis of federal prosecutions since 9/11 found that the Justice Department has routinely declined to bring terrorism charges against right-wing extremists even when their alleged crimes meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism: ideologically motivated acts that are harmful to human life and intended to intimidate civilians, influence policy, or change government conduct.... According to The Intercept's review, 268 right-wing extremists prosecuted in federal court since 9/11 were allegedly involved in crimes that appear to meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism. Yet the Justice Department applied anti-terrorism laws against only 34 of them, compared to more than 500 alleged international terrorists." --s ...

... Alleen Brown of The Intercept: "[In the late 1990s, s]o-called eco-terrorism became the Justice Department's No. 1 domestic terror concern -- 'over the likes of white supremacists, militias, and anti-abortion groups,' as one senator pointed out at the time.... [T]here's a reason law enforcement took a less aggressive approach to right-wing white supremacists and anti-government attackers. In the case of the eco-extremists, the government had a powerful ally: industry.... Now, in the wake of the 2017 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer..., Justice Department officials have argued that a new domestic terrorism statute is necessary to better respond to far-right violence.... But law enforcement and federal prosecutors already have powerful counterterrorism authorities at their disposal.... No new law was required to treat eco-saboteurs as terrorists in the wake of 9/11." --s

Bankrupting America. Josh Israel of ThinkProgress: "According to a Bloomberg report on Friday, the monthly budget deficit for February was $234 billion -- the largest in American history. A year ago, February's gap was a mere $215.2 billion. A significant part of this gap came from declining revenue, especially from corporations. Corporate tax revenue so far in 2019 has been just $59.2 billion. Bloomberg noted that, in 2018 as the tax cuts were partially in effect, corporations paid $73.5 billion over a similar time period. In 2017, before the Trump tax cuts, corporate revenue was $87.4 billion at this point in the calendar. This $28.2 million dollar drop-off means that corporate revenue has dropped by almost a third since before the cuts." --s

Conservative economist Greg Mankiw: "... [Friday] the president nominates Stephen Moore to be a Fed governor. Steve ... does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job. If you doubt it, read his latest book Trumponomics (or my review of it). It is time for Senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed."

Cashing the Check. Lauren Gardner of Politico: "If Ambassador Kelly Craft ends up before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the ritual grilling of presidential nominees, she'll be looking back at some of her favorite Republican senators.... President Donald Trump has said he'll nominate [Craft] to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.... At least half of the GOP members of the panel, which would have to vet the current U.S. ambassador to Canada again should Trump officially nominate her, have received donations from Kelly or Joe Craft since the 2012 cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by Politico." --s

Capitalism is Awesome, Ctd. Joe Romm of ThinkProgress: "Just before the [December 2015] Paris [climate agreement], JPMorgan Chase signed a statement with Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and other big financial companies embracing the need for strong action.... But since the Paris Agreement, those institutions have devoted $700 billion in financing to fossil fuel expansion, including coal mining, coal power, the tar sands, and oil drilling in remote locations like the Arctic.... In 2017, [JPMorgan CEO Jamie] Dimon also said he 'absolutely' disagrees with President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the historic climate deal. However, this week's report shows that JPMorgan Chase has since become the leading banker of fossil fuels and fossil fuel expansion.... Both Dimon and JPMorgan Chase have spent this week trashing the Green New Deal[.]" --s

People Power. Joanna Walters of the Guardian: "Earlier this year at the Guggenheim in New York, activists objecting to donations from the Sackler family draped protest banners from the museum's famous spiraling balconies, dropped flyers down through the atrium and pretended to die all over the floor. A gobsmacked public looked on. Tate Modern [in London] has just escaped a similar fate. On Thursday, the Tate group announced it would not take any more donations from the Sacklers, the family whose most prominent billionaire members own the company that makes OxyContin, a prescription painkiller implicated in America's opioids crisis.... The Tate decision came two days after the National Portrait Gallery in London said it was not going to take a £1m gift offered by the Sacklers.... The controversy has echoes of fights over cultural sponsorship by tobacco companies and the oil industry and comes at a time when many in the arts are strapped for cash." --s

Kyla Mandel of ThinkProgress: "Devastating floods across the Midwest are expected to cost the country at least $3 billion in damages to homes and farms. This is likely only the beginning as unprecedented flooding is expected to continue into the spring across the United States, according to a new forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), putting millions of Americans at risk of serious inundation. According to NOAA, an extremely wet winter is driving the flood risk, as 'several portions of the country received accumulated precipitation exceeding 200 percent of average to date.'" --s

Gina Salamone of the New York Daily News: "Barbra Streisand is under fire for comments she made about two men accusing Michael Jackson of sexually assaulting them as children. The legendary singer and actress said that Wade Robson and James Safechuck -- whose allegations against the late King of Pop resurfaced in the recent documentary Leaving Neverland -- 'were thrilled to be there' and that what allegedly happened to them 'didn't kill them.' Streisand, 76, made the strange comments to British newspaper The Times in a piece out Friday, in which she also said that Jackson's 'sexual needs were his sexual needs.'" Mrs. McC: Nice of Barbra to make Steve M.'s point (post linked above). Probably you think she is a talented singer (I don't & never did), but it's impossible to be more tone-deaf. To say the least.

Beyond the Beltway

Idaho. GOP Disdains Democracy. Dylan Scott of Vox: "Idaho Republicans are working to roll back the Medicaid expansion approved by their voters in November, another case of GOP lawmakers refusing to accept a Democratic mandate to expand health care to their constituents under the Affordable Care Act.... The Idaho ballot referendum passed overwhelmingly in November, 61 percent to 39 percent.... If implemented, it would offer health insurance to an estimated 120,000 of the state's poorest residents.... The fight in Idaho is following the same arc as the previous debate in Utah, where voters approved a full Medicaid expansion and then Republican policymakers sought to undo it." --s

Virginia. Trump's Amerika. Luke Barnes of ThinkProgress: "More than 4,000 students in Charlottesville, Virginia, were forced to stay home for the second straight day after an anonymous poster threatened to launch an 'ethnic cleansing' at one of the city's high schools. Residents say it's further proof of the persistent danger of white supremacy in the United States. The threat targeting Charlottesville High School originated on Wednesday from the imageboard 4chan and was quickly endorsed by other users.... On Friday morning, police arrested a 17-year-old boy in connection with the comments, charging him with threats to commit serious bodily harm to persons on school property, a felony, and harassment by computer, a misdemeanor." --s

Way Beyond

U.K. BBC: "Hundreds of thousands of people have marched in central London calling for another EU referendum, as MPs search for a way out of the Brexit impasse. Organisers of the 'Put It To The People' campaign say more than a million people joined the march before rallying in front of Parliament. Protesters carrying EU flags and placards called for any Brexit deal be put to another public vote. On Thursday, European leaders agreed to delay the UK's departure from the EU." ...

... Toby Hill & Michael Savage of the Guardian: "In one of the biggest demonstrations in British history, a crowd estimated at over one million people yesterday marched peacefully through central London to demand that MPs grant them a fresh referendum on Brexit."

... Lizzie Dearden of the (UK) Independent: "Islamophobic incidents have rocketed by almost 600 per cent in Britain following the New Zealand terror attack, a monitor has reported. Tell Mama said that in the week after 50 Muslim worshippers were gunned down, offenders used 'language, symbols or actions' linked to the atrocity to target Muslims in the UK. 'Cases included people making impressions of pointing a pistol to Muslim women and comments about British Muslims, and an association with actions taken by the terrorist in New Zealand,' the monitor said."

News Lede

New Your Times: "Rafi Eitan, the canny Israeli spymaster who commanded the Nazi-hunting team that captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and many years later was unmasked as the handler of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American Navy intelligence analyst who pleaded guilty to passing on more than 1,000 secret documents to the Israelis, died on Saturday in Tel Aviv. He was 92."

Comments

[PD Pepe]

Mary Papenfuss in her piece about the W.H gift shop says:

"The products give the bizarre impression that the White House is a Trump Hotel."

Dear Mary: The White House under this president* is indeed run exactly like a Trump Hotel with a high end clientele who curries favors from an odious owner whose modus operandi is like chaos multiplied by the thousands.

Something Trump can brag about: We had a $234 billion deficit for this Feb.–-largest in American History. Since he has told us how he has done this and that better, best, and mostest than any president in history he can cite the deficit as something positive and his base will go Ga-Ga and give a round of claps.

[Jeanne]

While I was at grocery and liquor store, Barr and Mueller made
Presiduncr POS very happy. Not surprised but very very angry.
Appalling and horrifying. They are saying he is not “exonerated” but
how is it anything else? Marie was right when she said they will all skate. Should have bought a LOT more booze.

[Ken Winkes]

"Not with a bang but with a whimper...."

...and the whimper is mine own.

[AuntHattie]

@ Ken Winkes:
A white-wash about which to (loudly) “whimper”, indeed.

The “Cherry Blossom” calling card, upon first sighting by myself and my 16 year-young godson, conjured floral crucifixes bordering a cemetery’s mausoleum.

Here’s hoping.