And another piece falls into place.

.@StevenTDennis-Kislyak says they are pushing trump to release Russian mobsters @PreetBharara convicted #trumprussiahttps://t.co/aBJ7Ej9CYz

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 12, 2017

Yep, just a giant coincidence that Preet Bharara was one of the federal prosecutors to suddenly lose his job the other day.

Bharara aslo hinted on Twitter that a possible reason he was fired was because he was investigating Trump himself.

By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like.

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) March 12, 2017

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

The Moreland Commission was established in July of 2013 by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and charged with rooting out corruption in the state government. However, the group was disbanded by the governor within a year because, Reuters said, it was coming too close to exposing Cuomo’s own shady dealings. 

“Wow,” tweeted David Corn of Mother Jones. “Moreland Commission was created by Cuomo to probe NYS corruption & then disbanded by him. Is Bharara implying he was probing Trump?”

It seems to me that there were a number of reasons that Trump and his Russian puppet masters would have wanted Bharara removed from office.

And what better way to hide the fact that he was the target but to fire ALL of the federal prosecutors appointed by President Obama at the same time?

Justice Department to stop using private prisons.

Courtesy of Time: 

The U.S. Justice Department will stop using private prisons after concluding that they do not have the same level of safety or quality as penitentiaries run by the Bureau of Prisons. 

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates sent a memo on Thursday that said officials must not renew — or at least must significantly scale back — their contracts with private prisons. The move would cut back the country’s reliance on privately run prisons until they are out of service, the Washington Post reports. 

Yates’ announcement follows on the heels of last week’s report from the department’s Inspector General that private prisons score far worse than public facilities in areas of safety and quality of life. 

“[Private prisons] simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” wrote Yates in the Thursday memo.

There are currently 195,000 inmates in private prisons, down from 220,000 in 2013, according to Yates’ memo. Yates detailed how the Bureau of Prisons turned down renewing a private contract of 1,200 prison beds three weeks ago, and today reduced a pending contract from 10,800 beds to a maximum of 3,600 beds. Those reductions will lead to three private prisons closing during the next year, to cut the total number of private prisoners in 2013 by more than 50% by May 2017.

Well this is great news.

Prions for profit was never a good idea and it encouraged at least some judges to provide stricter sentences in return for kickbacks.

Hopefully with prisons no longer seen as profit centers there will be fewer incarcerations and a focus on rehabilitation instead of simply warehousing these people until their sentence is over or they die.

Gee I am so glad I don't own any stock in private prisons.

So the Republicans tried to delay the release of Americans held in Iran until it was in their best interests politically? Really?

Courtesy of Tasnim News Agency: 

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani said a recent prisoner exchange between Iran and the US went ahead as planned despite calls by Republicans for a delay until US presidential elections. 

“In the course of the talks for exchanging prisoners, the Republican rivals of the current US administration who claim to be humanitarians and advocates of human rights sent a message telling us not to release these people (American prisoners) and continue this process (of talks) until the eve of US presidential elections,” Shamkhani said Thursday in an address to a rally held in the central city of Yazd to mark the 37th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution’s victory. 

“However” he said “we acted upon our independent resolve and moved the process forward.”

Now of course the Republicans are going to dismiss this as mere propaganda, and usually that would be a reasonable charge to make.

If in fact this was not standard operating procedure for the GOP.

Courtesy of Truthout:  

Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran's radical faction - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini - to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. 

This was nothing short of treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini - the so-called "October Surprise" - sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of this year, they most certainly "tipped the results of the [1980] election in Reagan's favor." 

Not surprisingly, Iran released the hostages on January 20, 1981, at the exact moment Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.

So do I think that at the same time the Republicans were criticizing President Obama for not getting the prisoners released BEFORE he signed the nuclear deal with Iran, they were also working behind the scenes to keep those men in prison even longer until it could help them politically?

Oh hell yeah!