Top Republican official admits that they could not have won in Wisconsin without voter ID laws keeping thousands of eligible people from voting.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:

Election officials and Democrats in Wisconsin have repeatedly argued that the state’s strict voter ID law allowed Donald Trump to win the state in 2016 by keeping thousands of voters—predominantly in Democratic-leaning areas—from the polls. Now a top Republican official in the state is saying the same thing. 

“We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November ’16 election,” Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who defended the law in court, told conservative radio host Vicki McKenna on April 12. “How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. [Ron] Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?” 

The law, which went into effect in 2016, required specific forms of government-issued photo identification to vote. In a cover story last year, Mother Jones reported that the law kept tens of thousands of eligible voters from the polls and likely tipped the state to Trump. A federal court found in 2014 that 9 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin did not possess the identification necessary to vote. In a University of Wisconsin study published in September 2017, 1 in 10 registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County who did not cast a ballot in 2016 cited the voter ID law as a reason why. That meant that up to 23,000 voters in the two heavily Democratic counties—and as many as 45,000 voters statewide—didn’t vote because of the voter ID law. Trump won the state by 22,000 votes.

Just another reminder that without cheating, unnecessary voter ID laws, gerrymandering, Russian meddling, Republicans cannot actually win.

For me it is not so much the winning, but rather the good that you can do once you win.

I guess that is why I'm a Democrat.

The Jeff Sessions Justice Department looking for way to take authority away from Federal Courts.

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

Last April, when a federal judge in Hawaii blocked the Trump administration’s effort to ban entry to people from six Muslim-majority nations, Attorney General Jeff Sessions took to conservative talk radio to vent his frustration. “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” he told host Mark Levin. 

Residents of Hawaii pointed out that it was every bit as much a state as the other 49, but Sessions was making a broader legal point, one that the Supreme Court will now consider. The Justice Department wants to permanently remove the ability of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions—orders that stop a policy from taking effect until the court has officially ruled on its legality. Instead, a Hawaiian judge overseeing a travel ban case brought by the state of Hawaii would be able to block the ban only in that state. The implications, if the Supreme Court agrees with the Justice Department, will be enormous for the future of judicial review and the federal government’s balance of power. 

Federal courts have repeatedly blocked the administration’s efforts to implement a hardline immigration agenda. More than a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, attempts to crack down on sanctuary cities, end Obama-era deportation protections for Dreamers, and block nationals from Muslim-majority countries have been stopped by federal judges enacting nationwide injunctions.

Okay this might actually be the MOST troubling thing we have learned about this administration.

The Founders wanted there to be three co-equal branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial.

And the Judicial is the one that is tasked with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens.

If the Trump Administration were actually successful in pulling this off, that would mean that each state's court system would determine what was a constitutionally protected right in their jurisdiction ONLY.

That means that some states could block gay marriage, women's rights, civil rights, equal pay, essentially EVERYTHING.

That would overwhelm the Supreme Court almost overnight, and if Trump gets one more judge on the panel they would be loathe to do anything to challenge a state's right to remain in the dark ages.

The California prosecutor who is running against Devon Nunes in 2018, has a new campaign ad out using his ridiculous "secret memo" against him.

With your help I'm going to beat Devin Nunes in November. Unless Mueller gets to him first. #removenunes pic.twitter.com/RL1h2S8Wxf

— Andrew Janz (@JanzforCongress) February 2, 2018

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

The California Republican, who chairs the House intelligence committee, released a controversial memo on Friday alleging that the FBI abused its surveillance powers as the bureau investigated the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. In the weeks leading up to the release, Trump’s Department of Justice warned that making the memo public would be “extraordinarily reckless.” The FBI, now under the leadership of Trump appointee Christopher Wray, said it had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Nunes’ hometown newspaper blasted his behavior in an editorial, referring to the congressman as “Trump’s stooge.” And Democrats on the intel. committee claimed the memo deliberately distorted classified information in an effort to discredit the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. (It took my colleague David Corn all of a few minutes Friday to find the first error in the memo.) 

And now Andrew Janz, a prosecutor who is running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Nunes in November, is turning the memo into a campaign issue. On Thursday, Janz released a brutal new ad targeting Nunes’ involvement in the matter.

The memo also helped Janz in another way.

Some news: Devin Nunes’ Democratic opponent, @JanzforCongress, raised over $100,000 today alone with news of the memo release, per a senior campaign aide.

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) February 2, 2018

I think that Nunes is in real trouble here, and that his credibility is essentially in shreds right now.

Even his own home town newspaper slammed Nunes for doing Trump's "dirty work" concerning the Russian investigations.

Personally I would not be at all surprised if Nunes turned out to be yet another Republican who suddenly decides to make a career change.

Donald Trump's favorite bank has identified some "suspicious transactions" concerning Jared Kushner, and is going to hand that information over to the Mueller investigation.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

A German business magazine is reporting that Deutsche Bank, the German financial giant which is a major lender to both President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, identified “suspicious transactions” related to Kushner family accounts, and has reported them to German banking regulators. The bank is reportedly willing to provide the information to special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s team of investigators. 

Manager Magazin, a respected German business magazine, reported in its latest print edition, which hit German newsstands on Friday, that Paul Achleitner, chairman of Deutsche Bank’s board, had the bank conduct an internal investigation and the results were troubling. Those results have been turned over to the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority—Germany’s bank regulatory agency, which is commonly known as BaFin. 

“Achleitner’s internal detectives were embarrassed to deliver their interim report regarding real estate tycoon [Jared] Kushner to the financial regulator BaFin,” the Manager Magazin article, translated from German, reports. “Their finding: There are indications that Donald Trump’s son-in-law or persons or companies close to him could have channeled suspicious monies through Deutsche Bank as part of their business dealings.”

The magazine did not provide additional details about the “suspicious monies”, but Manager Magazin reports that Deutsche Bank’s leadership is worried about the public relations hit the bank might take when—not if—the results of the investigation are turned over to Mueller. “But what BaFin will do about [the bank’s findings] is not the bank’s greatest concern,” the article states. “Rather, it’s the noise that US special counsel Robert Mueller (73) will make in his pursuit of Trump. For he will likely obtain this information—a giant risk to [the bank’s] reputation.”

You know perhaps Donald Trump does not fully appreciate what is happening, but international banks are well aware that when a Special Counsel turns their attention your way it is time to throw up your hands and just give them every single thing they are asking for, even if you know it ain't going to make you look too good.

And keep in mind that if Deutsche Bank is dropping a dime on Kushner, they have already shared all of Trump's financial records with Robert Mueller's team of prosecutors.

Tick Tock.

Stormy Daniels once revealed that during her affair with Trump she spanked him with a copy of Forbes magazine on the cover of which featured him with his family.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:

In early 2009, Daniels announced that she was considering challenging Sen. David Vitter, the Louisiana Republican who two years earlier had been snared in a sex scandal. Vitter’s phone number was discovered in the records of the so-called D.C. Madam, who ran a prostitution ring in the nation’s capital. Vitter, who now is a lobbyist, was a prominent social conservative who opposed abortion and gay marriage. Daniels, who grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told reporters she wanted to highlight his hypocrisy. She offered up a potential campaign slogan: “Stormy Daniels: Screwing people honestly.” 

Daniels was serious enough about running that she embarked on a May 2009 “listening tour” of the state and held discussions with local political consultants. Those conversations included coming up with possible campaign contributors. According to a May 8, 2009, email written by an operative advising Daniels, who asked not to be identified, Daniels at one point scrolled through her cellphone contacts to provide her consultants with a list of names. The email noted that the potential donors included Steve Hirsch, the founder of an adult entertainment company; Theresa Flynt, the daughter of Hustler’s Larry Flynt; Frazier Boyd, the owner of a strip club chain; and Jenna Jameson, the so-called “Queen of Porn.” Also on the list: Donald Trump. 

This email was sent to Andrea Dubé, a Democratic political consultant based in New Orleans. In response, Dubé expressed surprise that Daniels was friendly with Trump. “Donald Trump?” she wrote. “In her cell phone?” 

“Yep,” the other consultant replied. “She says one time he made her sit with him for three hours watching ‘shark week.’ Another time he had her spank him with a Forbes magazine.” 

Dubé and the other consultant confirmed to Mother Jones they exchanged these emails. 

The campaign consultant who wrote the email to Dubé tells Mother Jones that Daniels said the spanking came during a series of sexual and romantic encounters with Trump and that it involved a copy of Forbes with Trump on the cover.

Gee after we finally scrubbed the fact that Trump told Daniels that she reminded him of his daughter before banging her, now we have this to contend with.

There is not enough brain bleach in the world.

We also learned yesterday that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen used an LLC to transfer money to Daniels in order to keep her quiet:

As the Wall Street Journal reported, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen created Essential Consultants, LLC. on October 17, 2016, and “then used a bank account linked to the entity to send the payment to the client-trust account of a lawyer representing” Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford. 

To “further mask the identities of the people involved in the agreement,” the payment from Essential Consultants to a “Peggy Peterson,” who the Journal‘s sources say is Clifford/Daniels. 

Delaware, the report noted, is known for housing limited liability companies because the state “doesn’t require companies to publicly disclose the names of their managers.” That October 2016 alone, “Delaware officials recorded 10,574 new limited liability companies.”

And keep in mind that according to Michael Wolff's book, Daniels is just one of hundreds whose silence Trump bought and paid for before the election.

If Russia even knows about a handful there is the kompromat that Christopher Steele wrote about in that infamous dossier.

Rep. Adam Schiff expresses concern that the Republicans will soon shut down the House Intelligence investigation as a precursor to firing Robert Mueller.

I’m increasingly worried Republicans will shut down the House Intelligence Committee investigation at the end of the month.

Here’s why:

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) December 15, 2017

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

Republicans on the House intelligence committee appear intent on shutting down the panel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as soon as next Friday, according to the committee’s top Democrat. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) warned in a series of tweets that the move could presage an all-out GOP attack on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible Trump campaign coordination with Russia. Schiff said House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) could be pressuring the panel to prematurely wrap up its work and would have “responsibility” for any effort to curtail the probe. 

Schiff noted that Republicans have scheduled no witness interviews after Friday, December 22. That’s despite “dozens of outstanding witnesses on key aspects of our investigation that they refuse to contact” and unexecuted document requests. Committee Republicans did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Rep. Schiff is by no means alone in his concern, and many Washington Democrats, journalists, and  every day people on Twitter are also putting two and two together and recognizing that the groundwork is being laid out for the removal of Robert Mueller.

And in fact we have talked about it here several times.

The attacks on the credulity of Mueller's investigation seem to be coming from a variety of directions, and from a variety of conservative politicians.

Courtesy of Business Insider:

Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, suggested in a Friday interview that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will be forced out at the top law enforcement agency as soon as next week. 

Gowdy argued that newly released FBI records reveal political bias against President Donald Trump — and in favor of Hillary Clinton — at the highest levels of the FBI. Gowdy said that McCabe will likely be pushed out of the agency as a result of the perceived bias. 

"I'll be a little bit surprised if he's still an employee of the FBI this time next week," Gowdy told Fox News of McCabe, adding that he would be "shocked" if McCabe testifies before the House next week. 

Apparently this McCabe guy was supposed to have been breaking into the phones of his agents and spying on what they were texting to their girlfriends.

There was also this from the sitting Florida Attorney General.

On Fox's 'Hannity,' @AGPamBondi calls Robert Mueller 'corrupt' probe 'worse than Watergate' https://t.co/7ZJBzIn235 via @MitchEPerry #FlaPol pic.twitter.com/sCncWBfBqy

— Peter Schorsch (@PeterSchorschFL) December 14, 2017

Can you believe that shit?

And there is certainly reason for the Trump White House and the Republicans to be very worried.

Courtesy of The Independent: 

The investigation into links between Trump campaign officials and Russia has requested documents from a data firm which worked on both the 2016 presidential election and Brexit, said US media. 

Robert Mueller, who is leading the federal probe, asked Cambridge Analytica to hand over the emails of any employee who worked to support Donald Trump’s 2016 election win, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

The special counsel’s request, which the firm reportedly voluntarily complied with in the autumn, suggests the investigation is now probing the Trump campaign’s data operations.

You know that has some sphincters in the White House puckering up. 

The threat of Mueller being fired has now become such a concern that the former director of the US Office of Government Ethics issued this directive:

“Make a plan folks. Be ready to take to the streets. This is an attack on our Republic.”

This weekend I’m stocking up on portable phone chargers, warm clothes, & gear needed for when we take the streets. I’m concerned the assault on the rule of law is coming over the holidays when we’re distracted. It‘ll be a defining moment for the Republic. https://t.co/Ewn5tdx8e6

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) December 15, 2017

This is typically the point where I say something like "The shit just got real."

Well actually I think this shit has been real for sometime, and it may now be about time for all of us to start shoveling. 

Hillary Clinton "goes there."

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

A year after her defeat by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton says “there are lots of questions about its legitimacy” due to Russian interference and widespread voter suppression efforts. 

In an interview with Mother Jones in downtown Manhattan, Clinton said Russian meddling in the election “was one of the major contributors to the outcome.” The Russians used “weaponized false information,” she said, in “a very successful disinformation campaign” that “wasn’t just influencing voters—it was determining the outcome.” 

Republican efforts to make it harder to vote—through measures such as voter ID laws, shortened early voting periods, and new obstacles to registration—likewise “contributed to the outcome,” Clinton said. These moves received far less attention than Russian interference but arguably had a more demonstrable impact on the election result. According to an MIT study, more than 1 million people did not vote in 2016 because they encountered problems registering or at the polls. Clinton lost the election by a total of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

“In a couple of places, most notably Wisconsin, I think it had a dramatic impact on the outcome,” Clinton said of voter suppression.

Exactly!

It is almost impossible at this point to suggest that the outcome of the 2016 election was completely legitimate. And the more we learn, the more that is reinforced. 

I had to laugh out loud when somebody suggested that Donna Brazile's book was going to reveal the truth about Russia's attack on our democracy.

If you really want to know what happened, and how it affected the outcome, the book you need to read is Hillary's.

She was on the front line, and she was the one sifting through every bit of evidence presented during the campaign, and since the election.

In my opinion that was the most fascinating, and informative part of her book.

By the way this interview seems to have really pissed off Putin's puppet.

Crooked Hillary Clinton is the worst (and biggest) loser of all time. She just can’t stop, which is so good for the Republican Party. Hillary, get on with your life and give it another try in three years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2017

Keep talking shitgibbon, keep talking.

Russia threatens American media outlets because the Justice Department is forcing RT to register as a foreign agent.

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

Russian lawmakers vowed Friday to adopt legislation targeting American media outlets in response to the US Justice Department forcing RT, the English-language Russia television channel, to register as a foreign agent. 

Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s State Duma, said Russian legislators will amend a law related to foreign agents to include foreign media. Volodin, a former Putin aide, said the Duma could adopt the new legislation as soon as next week, according to news reports. “Since such decisions are being made in the United States in relation to our television companies, it is right for us to respond to these actions,” Volodin said, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

The measure would initially target CNN, Voice of America, and Radio Liberty,” said Senator Alexei Pushkov, who chairs the upper house of parliament’s media policy committee. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, indicated the law could also target Moscow-based correspondents from newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

RT, formerly Russia Today, said Thursday in a statement posted on its website that the DOJ threatened to freeze its bank accounts and arrest its top US executive if it fails to register by Monday under Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law that requires representatives of foreign governments to disclose information, such as employees’ contacts with government officials and political donations, in publicly available filings to the department.

Gee what is Russia going to do, start having their highly placed double agent start publicly referring to reporting by American news outlets as "fake news?" 

Oh, wait.

Donald Trump has tweeted about Hillary Clinton more than 70 times since the election. Fixated much?

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

He just can’t quit her. 

It’s been 365 days since Donald Trump won the presidency and Crooked Hillary is still one of his favorite Twitter targets. To be fair, Trump did give former opponent Hillary Clinton a break for a few weeks after November 8, 2016—perhaps he too was in mourning?—but that doesn’t mean he gave up picking on her. To see just how much the president is not over the election, we’ve gathered the 70-plus times he’s trolled Clinton, at least by name (or nickname), since beating her a year ago.

Mother Jones then offers a list that seems to include all of them.

Here is but a sample:

Why isn't the House Intelligence Committee looking into the Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Russia, Russian speech....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017

Did Hillary Clinton ever apologize for receiving the answers to the debate? Just asking!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 3, 2017

Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, 'bleached' emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017

Why aren't the same standards placed on the Democrats. Look what Hillary Clinton may have gotten away with. Disgraceful!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2017

I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service. He came to the campaign during my run against Crooked Hillary Clinton - it was great! Thanks S

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017

Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn't looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

Damn that is some stalkerish shit right there.

Trump is NEVER going to get over the fact that Hillary beat him in the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. And that seems to literally drive him out of what is left of his pea sized mind. 

The Russians hacked the Trump Organization computers four years ago and we are just learning about it now.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

Four years ago, the Trump Organization experienced a major cyber breach that could have allowed the perpetrator (or perpetrators) to mount malware attacks from the company’s web domains and may have enabled the intruders to gain access to the company’s computer network. Up until this week, this penetration had gone undetected by President Donald Trump’s company, according to several internet security researchers. 

In 2013, a hacker (or hackers) apparently obtained access to the Trump Organization’s domain registration account and created at least 250 website subdomains that cybersecurity experts refer to as “shadow” subdomains. Each one of these shadow Trump subdomains pointed to a Russian IP address, meaning that they were hosted at these Russian addresses. (Every website domain is associated with one or more IP addresses. These addresses allow the internet to find the server that hosts the website. Authentic Trump Organization domains point to IP addresses that are hosted in the United States or countries where the company operates.) The creation of these shadow subdomains within the Trump Organization network was visible in the publicly available records of the company’s domains.

The subdomains and their associated Russian IP addresses have repeatedly been linked to possible malware campaigns, having been flagged in well-known research databases as potentially associated with malware. The vast majority of the shadow subdomains remained active until this week, indicating that the Trump Organization had taken no steps to disable them. This suggests that the company for the past four years was unaware of the breach. Had the infiltration been caught by the Trump Organization, the firm should have immediately decommissioned the shadow subdomains, according to cybersecurity experts contacted by Mother Jones.

Now this is both interesting and troubling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that using hacked information to blackmail people is a tried and true Russian tactic, which could help to explain why Donald Trump is so clearly Putin's little bitch.

The other troubling part is that if these remained active until this week that means they were fully functional during these first months of the Trump presidency, and there is no telling how much data they could have mined during that time. And if the Trump Organization and White House have not performed a huge cyber security sweep they could STILL be gathering information.

Keep in mind that Trump once bragged that the reason the DNC had been hacked and the RNC had not, which is a lie by the way, is because the Republicans had better cyber security.

I would suggest that this new information drives a stake right through that argument.

From the article:

This week, a researcher named C. Shawn Eib wrote a blog post highlighting the existence of the shadow subdomains, which had been referenced in a Twitter thread several weeks ago. Eib noted that “more than 250 subdomains of domains registered to the Trump Organization redirect traffic to computers in St. Petersburg, Russia.” 

Another computer security expert, who also asked not to be named, notes that this network of shadow subdomains may have been established by a criminal enterprise looking to use the Trump Organization’s computer system as the launching pad for various cyberattacks on other individuals or entities. But, he adds, this breach also could be exploited by state or nonstate actors attempting to infiltrate the Trump Organization. “At the least,” he remarks, “it shows the Trump Organization has been badly run.” 

In his blog post, Eib notes, “With an organization of this size, and with the added security concerns and scrutiny that a presidential campaign and victory would entail, it would be inexcusable for this to not have been discovered by their IT department. Any basic security audit would show the existence of these subdomains, and what servers they’re leading to. This is sloppy at best, and potentially criminally negligent at worst, depending on the traffic that is being run through these servers.”

Mother Jones reached out to the Trump Organization for comment, and they essentially denied the accuracy of this reporting.

Of course they did.

By the way also keep in mind that just this summer Donald Trump floated the idea of creating a joint cyber security unit with the Kremlin.

Here is Barack Obama back doing Donald Trump's job for him.

Today’s the day! You can go to https://t.co/p8DQwo89C7 and sign up for health coverage. Need a pep talk first? @BarackObama has you covered. pic.twitter.com/78DAFgUV77

— Get America Covered (@GetUSCovered) November 1, 2017

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

The former president released a short video Wednesday encouraging people to sign up for insurance on the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act. In the absence of a major life event such as losing a job or getting married, people who don’t get insurance from their employer or the government only get one shot each year to sign up on these exchanges. “It only takes a few minutes,” Obama says in the video, “and the vast majority of people qualify for financial assistance. In fact, eight in 10 people this year can find plans for $75 a month or less. That’s cheaper than a lot of cell phone plans.”

In order for the markets to work correctly, a wide mix of people need to sign up for insurance. If only sick people do so, premiums will shoot up and become unaffordable. But Trump has been doing everything in his power to sabotage Obamacare and depress the number of people who sign up for coverage during open enrollment. The president cut the enrollment period in half, from 12 weeks to just six, and sharply reduced funding for groups that help people sign up for coverage.

On the same day that Obama's tweet was published, Cheeto Fuhrer tweeted this:

Wouldn't it be great to Repeal the very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate in ObamaCare and use those savings for further Tax Cuts.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

Okay first off that does not even make any sense, and secondly...shut the fuck up.

Just hearing Barack Obama's voice again makes me feel hopeful, but then I am forced to remember that the grownup as left the building leaving only the toddler in charge.

I think we can stop pinning our hopes on the Senate Judiciary Committee to get to the truth about the Trump/Russian collusion.

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have broken up over Russia. 

The committee’s once bipartisan investigation into whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice or his campaign colluded with Russia has hit a partisan wall, with Republicans and Democrats saying they will now conduct their own probes. “We made the decision to go and carry it out ourselves,” Feinstein told Mother Jones on Tuesday. “They can go ahead and do whatever it is they wanted to do.” A Grassley spokesman also said the chairman had decided to proceed with a Republican-only investigation. 

Judiciary’s Russia investigation is the latest congressional probe to stall out over GOP efforts to pursue matters Democrats see as gambits to distract or provide cover for the Trump administration. The partisan sparring within the committees looking into various aspects of the Russia scandal has caused concern among Democrats and other observers that Republicans will fail to complete rigorous probes but will still declare their investigations did not find significant collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

While I have virtually NO confidence in Congress's ability, or desire, to  get to the truth. I kind of thought that the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees might have a fair shot at it.

After all they were saying all the right things, and Senate does not seem nearly as partisan as the House.

However apparently that faith has been misplaced.

And now we see why having the Robert Mueller investigation working independently is so damn important.

If Trump finds away to sabotage that, then this whole thing will simply disappear forever and we will NEVER learn the truth.

The Washington Post reveals that a Clinton attorney and the DNC helped to fund some of the research that went into that Russian dossier. And that's a good thing.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said. 

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research. 

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary. 

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day. 

Okay so first off this is not really news.

In fact I wrote a post before election day that linked to a Mother Jones story which said the following: 

This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project's financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) "It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit." 

At the time David Corn, the author of the Mother Jones piece, did not identify Christopher Steel by name, nor did he seem to know who the "client allied with the Democrats" was for sure, but I think most of us probably assumed they would be connected to the Clinton campaign or some big DNC donor.

The important point of the article was that people were finally reporting on what was in the dossier after the original Republican operatives stopped paying the bills, and the information was almost lost for all time.

Yesterday some troll in the comments section attempted to make the case that this muddies the waters, and that it proves the Democrats were also engaged in the same sort of shady dealings to undermine the Republican candidate that the Trump campaign was using in their attempt to undermine the Clinton campaign.

But of course that is ridiculous as this is NOT a case of a campaign working hand in hand with an adversarial foreign government which hacked one party's computers, and paid millions of dollars to spread misinformation, to help that campaign's candidate get elected.

The Democrats were actually working to reveal information which has now proven critical in understanding just how compromised Donald Trump and his campaign staff were by the Russians during the 2016 campaign cycle.

Ultimately if Trump gets impeached this Russian dossier may prove to be the key to making that happen, and at the very least it allowed us to be vigilant when it came to how Trump defers to Vladimir Putin, and focused our attention on the fact that he seems extremely reluctant to support the Russian sanctions voted into place by the majority of the Republicans in the House and Senate.

Here is how Josh Marshall of TPM summed this up yesterday: 

The country owes the Democrats a debt of gratitude for keeping Steele’s research going. The FBI had apparently missed a lot of what he found. 

I’ve heard some suggest that the Clinton campaign had denied that it helped fund Steele’s work. Or maybe that Elias had. I don’t know if that’s the case or not. It’s possible that the Clinton camp or the DNC didn’t know they had. The Post piece suggests they didn’t know that Fusion GPS was involved. 

If someone lied, then by all means identify that person as lying. Even call them a liar. But in the big picture, who cares? Even in the small picture who cares. It was a service to the country. Donald Trump and his campaign knowingly accepted assistance from a foreign adversary power. There’s good reason to believe, though as yet no hard proof, that they agreed to help Russia in exchange for assistance subverting the 2016 campaign. The President is still actively covering up for the Russian effort, as of this week. 

Whether the execs at top of the Clinton campaign knew about it, Marc Elias may have helped save his country by making the decision to fund this critical research. Thank you, Marc Elias! I know that sounds a bit hyperbolic but it’s really not.

Yes, and I agree completely with that.

We are suffering a national crisis right now in this country.

Marc Elias and the DNC attempted to keep that from happening, and failing that they may have been instrumental in providing the tools needed to eventually stop it.

In my book that makes them heroes.

27 mental health professionals write book assessing Donald Trump's mental health. Spoiler alert: It's not good.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:

There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics: “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit? 

As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing public figures whom they have not personally examined. At the same time, as explained by Dr. Bandy X Lee, who teaches law and psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, the rule does not have a countervailing rule that directs what to do when the risk of harm from remaining silent outweighs the damage that could result from speaking about a public figure—”which in this case, could even be the greatest possible harm.” It is an old and difficult moral issue that requires a great exertion of conscience. Their decision: “We respect the rule, we deem it subordinate to the single most important principle that guides our professional conduct: that we hold our responsibility to human life and well-being as paramount.” 

Hence, this profound, illuminating and discomforting book undertaken as “a duty to warn.”

Their next undertaking should be to assess the mental health of the people who voted for, and still support, Donald Trump.

THAT could be a very enlightening book as well.

It looks as if we will finally get a look at the Mar a Lago visitor logs.

The Trump Administration Will Finally Release Its Mar-a-Lago Visitor Logs https://t.co/ykM8MxLvKW via @MotherJones

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) July 17, 2017

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

The Department of Homeland Security will release the visitor logs from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, thanks to an ongoing lawsuit filed by the government watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington—a group that has been fiercely critical of the Trump administration’s lack of transparency and its potential conflicts of interest. 

“The public deserves to know who is coming to meet with the president and his staff,” CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement Monday. “We are glad that as a result of this case, this information will become public for meetings at his his personal residences—but it needs to be public for meetings at the White House as well.” 

The group said that it will receive the records by September 8—though there has been some ambiguity over what logs exist in the first place—and then make them available for public review. A federal judge ruled the administration must release certain visitor logs on Friday.

Good news, but I am fairly confident there will be numerous redactions. 

Mother Jones points out that those Donald Trump Jr. emails seem to confirm claims from the Russian dossier.

Ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

One interesting element of the Donald Trump Jr. emails now in the news is that they track with parts of the Steele memos. 

In that first memo, dated June 20, Steele wrote that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” The Trump Jr. email chain began on June 3, 2016. This was shortly after Trump had secured the Republican presidential nomination. It was that day that Rob Goldstone, a talent manager for middling pop-star named Emin Agaralov, contacted Trump Jr. and said that Emin’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Putin-friendly billionaire developer, had met with the “crown prosecutor of Russia” who offered to provide the Trump campaign with negative information on Clinton. The Agalarovs and Goldstone had a close relationship to the Trumps, because they all had worked together in 2013 to bring the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, to Moscow. (Part of the deal was that Emin would get to perform two songs.) Following that event, both Trumps worked with both Agalarovs to develop a major project in Moscow. (It never happened.) 

This email from Goldstone to Trump Jr. led to a meeting six days later, where a Kremlin-connected Russian attorney spoke to Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort about negative information on Clinton. In a statement, Trump Jr. says that what she offered was vague and meaningless, suggesting there was nothing to it. (But Trump Jr. has dissembled repeatedly about this meeting.) 

That is an excellent point.

We know what the meeting was supposed to be about from the emails that were released, but we only have Junior and the Russian attorney's word that no actual information was presented.

Knowing what we do about how the Trumps play fast and loose with the truth, that should certainly not be taken as factual.

Here's more to chew on from the Christopher Steele memo:

'Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years…This was confirmed by Source D, a close associate of TRUMP who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow, and who reported, also in June 2016, that this Russian intelligence had been “very helpful”.'

The memo also reported that there was anti-Clinton information that Putin was sitting on: 

'A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian intelligence services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on PUTIN’s orders. However it has not as yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.'

There has been no confirmation that Putin steadily fed information to Trump’s camp or that a Kremlin-controlled anti-Clinton dossier existed. But one of Steele’s overarching points in this memo was that Putin’s regime was funneling derogatory Clinton material to Trump. The Trump Jr. emails suggest that the Russian government was aiming to do that and that the Trump campaign was willing and eager to receive assistance from Putin. So Donald Trump Jr. has done what Steele could not: produce evidence that the Trump campaign was—or wanted to be—in cahoots with a foreign adversary to win the White House.

I am somewhat skeptical that Putin actually had anything other than the DNC and Podesta email hacks to use against Hillary, as we would surely have seen anything else he had by now, and as we know essentially all of the most potentially damaging of those WERE dumped on the internet.

However we have no way of knowing, for sure, whether or not there was anything else gathered by the Russians that made its way to Trump campaign and was deemed too weak to use, or whose origins were to hard to explain.

But at the very least these emails from Trump Junior certainly confirms that, as the Steele dossier stated, Vladimir Putin wanted to help the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign aggressively sought that help.

And that is no small confirmation. 

Jared Kushner has a new defender on Twitter, Julian Assange. Wait, what?

Kushner correct to create channels with everyone. CIA has no authority over leadership and is financially motivated to increase conflict.

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) May 28, 2017

Okay so to be clear Kushner is now getting support from the guy who has been named by American intelligence agencies as the guy utilized by the Russians to spread hacked data and propaganda to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election.

Anybody else find this highly suspicious?

After all why would Assange give two shits about freaking Jared Kushner?

Well perhaps because they were both on the front line of disseminating that hacked information to undermine the Clinton campaign.

Courtesy of a Mother Jones article from September 2016:

On Tuesday, the Observer published a piece maintaining that the DCCC had coordinated—presumably improperly—with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2015. The story, written by a freelance contributor named Michael Sainato, cited "an internal DCCC memo" leaked to the Observer from Guccifer 2.0—the handle of the hacker or hackers who have successfully targeted these Democratic committees. The Observer is owned by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been a top adviser to the Republican presidential nominee.

The New York Observer is of course Jared Kushner's newspaper, and it was certainly more than peripherally involved with spreading the material hacked by the Russians.

You know it is almost as if these people don't even care anymore if folks figure out that all of this was a coordinated effort, or who it was that coordinated it.

Are we still pretending that there is no evidence of collusion?

According the CBO score instead of inflicting Trumpcare on the American people it might be more humane to simply line the sick up and shoot them.

The above is a chart from Mother Jones.

 And here is a tweet to drive the point home a little more.

CBO estimates that in states requesting AHCA waivers, premiums for low-income elderly enrollees would go up 800 percent. That is not a typo. pic.twitter.com/W7QC4z9UUS

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) May 24, 2017

800 percent, well that's enough to give you a preexisting condition right there.

In fact the bill is so bad that it literally brought a Republican Congressman to tears:

Courtesy of IJR:  

Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), — who played a pivotal role in including state waiver options in AHCA — hadn't read the full report yet, but initially said he saw it as “good news.” 

When reporters pointed out the portion of the CBO report saying individuals with preexisting conditions in waiver states would be charged higher premiums and could even be priced out of the insurance market — destabilizing markets in those states — under AHCA, Meadows seemed surprised. 

“Well, that’s not what I read,” Meadows said, putting on his reading glasses and peering at the paragraph on the phone of a nearby reporter.

............

After reading the paragraph, Meadows told reporters he would go through the CBO analysis more thoroughly and run the numbers, adding he would work to make sure the high-risk pools are properly funded. 

Meadows, suddenly emotional, choked back tears and said, "Listen, I lost my sister to breast cancer. I lost my dad to lung cancer. If anybody is sensitive to preexisting conditions, it’s me. I’m not going to make a political decision today that affects somebody’s sister or father because I wouldn’t do it to myself.”

I would predict that this bill is dead in the water.

And it might even die a little faster if some of this idiot Republicans would bother to read the damn thing before signing on. 

Donald Trump has a special red button on his desk to summon an emergency Coca Cola.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

A man accustomed to wealth and its trappings, Trump has embraced life in the Executive Mansion, often regaling guests with trivia about the historic decor. With the push of a red button placed on the Resolute Desk that presidents have used for decades, a White House butler soon arrived with a Coke for the president.

You know some president's had an emergency hotline to other world leaders.

But this idiot has a button specially designed for emergency thirst quenching.

Oddly enough Trump has had a rather long love/hate relationship with Coke.

Actually he should have stopped.

Do you remember back when we had a president who did not have to spread bear grease on his ass in order to slide into his pants?

Now Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz is suggesting that he might not even finish out his term. But remember, there is nothing suspicious here.

Courtesy of Fox 13: 

The day after making a jaw-dropping announcement that he won't seek re-election, Congressman Jason Chaffetz told FOX 13 he may not even finish his term in office. 

“When I contemplate another 200 nights away from home, it is just too much,” Chaffetz told FOX 13 news anchor Bob Evans. 

Hours later, Chaffetz released a statement, adding: "My future plans are not yet finalized but I haven't ruled out the possibility of leaving early. In the meantime, I still have a job to do and have no plans to take my foot off the gas." 

The announcement led to more speculation and some suspicion about the 3rd District congressman's reasons for leaving. The powerful chairman of the House Oversight Committee has repeatedly cited turning 50, growing weary of sleeping on his office cot, and his family being back in Utah.

The first thing that everybody needs to keep in mind is that when a politician says they are quitting to spend more time with their family, that it is ALWAYS bullshit.

And as Mother Jones points out Chaffetz has been almost brutally aggressive with his ambitions:

Jason Chaffetz is so ambitious that his last name is a verb. 

In the political world, to Chaffetz means to throw a former mentor under the bus in order to get ahead, and various prominent Republicans, from former Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr. to House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, have experienced what it's like to get Chaffetzed. 

MJ goes on however to suggest that this might be some carefully laid out plan by Chaffetz to make distance between himself and Donald Trump while he plots his return to politics.

However I am still of a mind that there is something seriously scandalous that Chaffetz is attempting to head off or stay well clear of, and that the only thing he is doing is covering his own ass.

Keep in mind the lesson of Sarah Palin.

Once you quit partway through your term the road back is virtually nonexistent.