Mueller investigation

President Trump isn’t supposed to be watching television at 9:30 am tomorrow. The White House has scheduled him to attend events that are supposed to make him look above the fray. But that’s also when Attorney General William P. Barr will take a breather from targeting asylum seekers and hold a press conference on Thursday morning to discuss the release of the Mueller report.If his previous performances are anything to go by, Barr’s comments will be directed directly at Trump in another bid to curry favor with him. Meanwhile, Trump himself is saying that he may conduct his own press conference: ‘Maybe I’ll do one after that, we’ll see.

Poor Donald Trump. Even Mar-a-Lago may not provide much of a refuge from his cares now that it has been exposed as a nest of Chinese spies. Trump, who campaigned against Hillary Clinton for jeopardizing national security with her private email server, makes her look like a piker when it comes to keep state secrets. Come one, come all. Mar-a-Lago is open to the highest bidder with access to the president as the highest prize. And to think that Americans were once scandalized that Bill Clinton was renting out the Lincoln bedroom for campaign contributions. Trump’s pocketing the proceeds personally. For him it’s always and only about the bottom line.

I am a big critic of President Donald Trump. Really, a big one. I think Trump has done more to divide America than any president in my lifetime. His Twitter feed is a constant stream of invective against his enemies, real and imagined. He seems to find fissure points within our culture and seize upon them in order to polarize the country for political gain. His rhetoric against illegal Hispanic immigrants is toxic, if not sometimes outright racist. He has attempted to undermine our institutions, most clearly with his attacks on the press as the enemy of the people. He seems more happy rhetorically kicking our allies in Canada and Germany than our adversaries in North Korea and China. He is quite obviously a pathological liar.

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller concluded his investigation by exonerating President Trump of collusion with Russian forces during the 2016 election. Investigating that supposed collusion is the reason he was appointed and his final report declared that he and his team could find no evidence to support the allegation. But for more than two years, the nation has been torn apart by the claims made Democrats and their operatives in the media. They were sure – sure! – that President Trump would be forced from office in disgrace. The conspiracy theorists seethed with fundamentalist conviction, confident that Robert Mueller would lead them to the promised land. Nonetheless, many are sticking to their story. There may be no evidence, but they just know it in their bones!

According to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller investigation: Russia did try to interfere in the election, hacked the Democrats’ emails, and released materials through WikiLeaks No coordination or collusion between Trump campaign and Russians Mueller offers no conclusion about obstruction of justice Barr concludes that no charges of obstruction are warranted under DOJ rules because there was no underlying crime to obstruct Full transparency of Mueller report conflicts with rules of rules of federal criminal procedure, which make Grand Jury proceedings secret Here are the essential quotes from Barr’s letter.

Well, I am going to miss the full-bore SWAT-team raids at dawn against aging political factota like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. It was really very courteous of CNN to have been parked outside the homes of those hapless victims so that television audiences all across the country could all be edified by these exhibitions of the coercive arm of state power in action. Mr Mueller could just have had one of his 17 Obama-and-Hillary supporting prosecutors ring up the latest mark and ask him to pop down to headquarters. But that would not have been as dramatic, as expensive, or as cruel. All good things come to an end, however, and yesterday, after 674 days, the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S.

After aeons trapped in a Beckettian nightmare, Robert Mueller’s report is finally on the Attorney General’s desk. Intriguingly, he waited for the markets to close before doing so, like a true capitalist. So, Cockburn off by a mere two weeks. But what of the indictments? As Bloomberg’s report indicates: ‘Mueller’s decision to issue a final report indicates that he chose not to indict other major figures in his investigation, including members of Trump’s family and the president. However, if he secured any indictments under seal, they could be handed off to other elements of the Justice Department.

Nixon said: ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ President Trump’s version of this is that he can pardon himself and he can’t be accused of obstructing justice in a federal investigation because he’s the head of the federal government and that would be to obstruct himself. His lawyer and spokesman, Rudy Giuliani, argues that a president can’t be indicted in the ordinary criminal courts. Giuliani also says that the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, agrees with this. But could a president be indicted, that is charged, or accused, in the courts? And would Mueller want to? The answer may not be as simple as Giuliani makes it seem.

What does desperation smell like? It smells like House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, who is reprising his ‘Impeach Trump!’ act from 2017, this time with a gavel in his hand. No one knows when Robert Mueller will deliver his report to Attorney General William Barr, and no one knows what portions, if any, General Barr will make public. But the hissing sound you have heard over the last several weeks is the air going out of Mueller’s Get Trump probe as story after story has been crafted to manage expectations down regarding ‘Individual 1,’ aka Donald J. Trump.

Is Donald Trump spacing out? Yesterday he signed Space Policy Directive-4, which orders the Pentagon to establish a Space Force within the US Air Force. Not quite the separate, sixth branch of the military that he touted back in June 2018, but whatever. Trump is riding high, so to speak. He may riding even higher if the Mueller inquiry turns out to be a bust, at least when it comes to proving that Trump was actively colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign. To be sure, there are no indications that Trump is feeling secure.

It’s Friday evening and the sun set over three hours ago, which can only mean one thing: the time has arrived for another development in the Robert Mueller probe. This time around, the revelation is the Special Counsel’s recommendation of up to 24-and-a-half years in prison for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort is going down for the crimes of tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to file a foreign bank account report. The filing says that Manafort ‘acted for more than a decade as if he were above the law, and deprived the federal government of millions of dollars.’ The sentencing recommendation comes after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Manafort had lied to prosecutors on three different topics, breaching his plea deal.

Now that he has been indicted and arrested on seven counts by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Roger Stone’s biggest concern today may be what suit to wear to his arraignment at a federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale at 11 a.m. Double-breasted? Single-breasted with peak or notch lapel? Unlike his former partner Paul Manafort, who veered into some rather outré fashion choices, Stone is a fastidious dresser who has maintained a menswear blog for years and over a decade of service in the field as the men’s style correspondent for the Daily Caller.

Is Rudy Giuliani becoming a bigger problem for Donald Trump than Nancy Pelosi? Pelosi is bad enough: she is tying Trump in knots with her refusal to budge on the shutdown, which Trump had assumed she should assist him in shutting down weeks ago. Now she’s dissed him with her acidic letter explaining that it would be best to defer the State of the Union speech, which Trump had counted on using to bludgeon the Democrats, until safety issues related to the shutdown have been resolved.But on Wednesday night, Giuliani may have delivered an even bigger hammer blow. He explained to CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he ‘never said there was no collusion’ between President Trump and Russia.