Congressional Investigations
House Judiciary Committee sent requests to 81 individuals and entities close to Trump requesting documents that may shed light on obstruction of justice, the Russia election interference, and corruption.
Wheeler breaks down and categorizes all the targets for requests based on who was involved in various Russia investigation matters, hush payments, corruption, obstruction, pardons.
Cohen produced two hush money checks with Trump’s signature in his hearing last week, and this week his lawyer provided six more to the New York Times. He wrote them on a near monthly basis from the White House in 2017. The quote from the article drew attention: “Indeed, some people close to Mr. Trump have privately predicted that he will ultimately choose to seek a second term in part because of his legal exposure if he is not president.”
Michelle Goldberg thinks the hearings could lead to a chance in public opinion: “so far, neither Democrats nor prosecutors have woven the various threads of presidential wrongdoing into a coherent picture, showing how Trump’s shady business practices, opaque finances, vulnerability to blackmail, abuses of power and subservience to foreign autocrats all intersect….Given the polarization in our politics, there’s no reason to expect the coming hearings to change many minds. What they can do, potentially, is put the question of Trump’s criminality at the center of political life, just as the Watergate hearings did with Nixon.”
For the record, Douthat laid down a marker for what it will take to trigger Trump’s removal from office, which he believes is unlikely to be what we learn actually happened, reinforced for him by the Cohen hearing: “If the D.N.C. hack took place with Trump’s cooperation as part of a longstanding exchange of favors, then he would be guiltier than Nixon, having participated in a Watergate with a foreign power as the burglar.”
Spurred in part by the Cohen testimony, there is a sense that journalists and media people trying to get their head and their explanatory power around the scope of Trump’s corruption, which is beginning to feel like it is everywhere and so all pervasive that it is hard to define. We are like the fish that doesn’t know it is swimming through water. Marcy Wheeler wrote a blog post about this: “It’s partly because of the boiling frog effect: we’ve had piecemeal disclosures over two years, and few journalists have taken stock along the way to see what the actual court evidentiary record amounts to. And even there, we often forget to add in the truly breathtaking corruption of Administration aides like Scott Pruitt or Ryan Zinke, or of current Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross”
She recommends this approach: “It seems that we need to start trying to quantify this not in terms of names or actions but instead in terms of harm to the nation…. Whatever crimes (or not) Trump committed, because he and his flunkies refuse to put the interest of the country first, it has consequences for Americans, including the constituents of members of Congress who want to ignore all this corruption.We’ve been boiling frogs for several years here. But it’s time to take stock on the bottom line effect that Trump’s corruption has had on the country, and holding Republican enablers accountable for that damage.”
The White House is refusing to turn over any documents about security clearances to House investigators.
Russia Investigation
Manafort was sentenced in his first of two trials on Thursday. He was given a four year sentence, much lower than the 19 years in the sentencing guidelines.
Here is Ken White on the complicated mix of reasons Manafort was sentenced below the guidelines: “Ellis announced that he was sentencing Manafort below the recommended guideline range because that range was far above what defendants received in similar cases. That is, in fact, a factor that he’s required by law to consider. Manafort’s case was arguably much more serious than others, but there’s no question that his sentencing range was atypically high for a white-collar defendant. This is how the system’s discrepancies become self-justifying and self-perpetuating: Judges give white-collar criminals lower sentences because white-collar criminals typically get lower sentences.”
James Comey wrote an op-ed in which he laid out DOJ precedent for transparency in cases even when no one is charged with a crime. He writes, “Republicans are wrong now, when they claim Justice Department rules forbid transparency about the completed work of the special counsel. It is difficult to imagine a case of greater public interest than one focused on the efforts of a foreign adversary to damage our democracy, and in which the president of the United States is a subject. I don’t know all the considerations that will go into deciding precisely what to say about the completion of the special counsel’s work and when to say it. It’s always important to consider guidelines and routines. But don’t listen to those who tell you transparency is impossible. Every American should want a Justice Department guided first and always by the public interest. Sometimes transparency is not a hard call.”
On Barr and the Mueller investigation, this came from the DOJ this week: “Following Attorney General Barr’s confirmation, senior career ethics officials advised that Attorney General Barr should not recuse himself from the Special Counsel’s investigation. Consistent with that advice, Attorney General Barr has decided not to recuse”
In Other New
Mother Jones reports that a Chinese massage parlor madame in Florida–one parlor was recently busted in a sex traffic ring–“runs an investment business that has offered to sell Chinese clients access to Trump and his family.”
“On a page displaying a photo of Mar-a-Lago, Yang’s company says its “activities for clients” have included providing them “the opportunity to interact with the president, the [American] Minister of Commerce and other political figures.” The company boasts it has “arranged taking photos with the President” and suggests it can set up a “White House and Capitol Hill Dinner.” (The same day the Herald story about Yang broke, the website stopped functioning.)”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.8%