US Politics December 2018: ~very legal and very cool~

As with W's people, all but the most abject will be reinstated,

like, this has NOT fucking happened

ha i forgot about the steele dossier?!

Wrt the ongoing shakes/morbs argument itt, I misspoke when I wrote 'a future in the public sector' when what I actually meant was the broader 'a future where they are in any way in the public eye'.

Harriet Meiers WAS the White House Counsel. Kavanaugh was *hired* as an associate BY the White House Counsel (Gonzalez). These are not the same position.
why am I bothering.

xp

and then there was this FBI director who rounded up Muslims

to Old Lunch's post - well I can't argue with that if that's what you meant, since anyone involved with this administration will be notorious and thereby worth eyeballs in the future

xp

Like no one who accepts the CoS poison pill at this point can have any hope of subsequently being a public figure outside of the right-wing fringe-osphere.

right wing fringe-osphere is v lucrative, let's ask John Ashcroft how much his speaking fees are

the only reason I can imagine them sealing off an entire floor of a federal courthouse for grand jury testimony other than Trump would be some sort of high-profile Russian who doesn't want to get killed. something like that. and even then, I can't imagine they wouldn't have found a less conspicuous approach.

the cavalcade of trump criminality coming home to roost makes perfect sense. he has probably been operating in the gray area margins of rich people behavior for so long he doesn't even realize how many crimes he's committed.

Oh yeah, I don't at all mean to suggest that they'll be hurting for having sacrificed their humanity and very soul.

xpost

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/michael-flynn-partisan-warrior/

Things did not go well, nearly from the start.

A DIA officer who regularly attended meetings with Flynn said the top brass welcomed him because “he was a legend to us, coming in as the shake-up artist.”

But soon after Flynn’s arrival, the officer said, “he started doing weird things, like bring his unsecured BlackBerry into the secure space, and he became unabashed about his beliefs. In meetings, he sounded like he was reading Breitbart and Alex Jones and random bloggers, alt-right stuff, and he’d just say, ‘Well, I heard this . . .’ ”

“We saw a serious cognitive erosion,” another agency staffer said, “like he couldn’t inhibit himself from saying things, like the filters were off.”

“He lost control of the building very quickly,” Benjamin said.

Some officials began to call his forays into speculative or conspiratorial thinking “Flynn facts.” When he decided to go to Moscow in 2013 to speak to officers at Russia’s military intelligence agency, some top advisers told their boss the move was naive, even dangerous. Flynn insisted that the battle against Islamist terrorism made it urgent to seek common ground with the Russians.

afaics, the main punishment suffered by high-ranking members of Dubya's administration has been demotion to 'elder statesmen' status, occupying sinecures in think tanks, corporate boards, law firms, or academia, and being sought out occasionally to dispense dubious wisdom by television news organizations. Any one of them could command op-ed space in the NYT at the drop of a hat. This may not be so heady as running the DoD, but it's lucrative and the hours are great.

The main punishment suffered by high-ranking members of Trump's administration (including Trump himself) is full-blown dementia, apparently.

boner pill brain worms

no argument on any of those points lol

I meant to say 'will be' rather than 'is' but...the degradation is pretty much unfolding right before our eyes.

HATCH: "I don’t believe the President broke the law, but one of the core principles of our country is that no one is above the law. That means anyone who does break the law should face appropriate consequences."

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) December 14, 2018

all these old white idiots have been huffing for fox news for the last 20 years and have been driven insane. the new AG nominee is in the same boat.

full statement

Earlier this week, Sen. Hatch shrugged off President Trump being implicated by prosecutors in two crimes committed by Michael Cohen, telling @mkraju, "I don't care, all I can say is he's doing a good job as President." Now he says he regrets the remark. https://t.co/0XNOq4G5zU pic.twitter.com/SVn3zyklgH

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) December 14, 2018

doesn't mean anything on it's own, unless it's the first of many from him and others, but who knows.

wish these guys could find some courage before they retired

re: Hatch. "broke the law" is a very flexible term that applies equally to jaywalking and treason. "appropriate" consequences leaves one hell of a lot of wiggle room.

Nearly every one of these always-Trumpers (there are, I'm sure, at least another 2-3 Cohens in the bunch) is going to stick to their guns and hope a death bed conversion is enough to stave off eternal damnation (Narrator: It won't be.)

wish Hatch would just die tbh

Calling it now: by the time his hair has gone stark white, Miller will have a Trump tat between his shoulderblades.

Another day...

NEW: Trump’s inauguration paid Trump’s company -- with Ivanka in the middle. And internal concerns were raised that Trump hotel was over-charging for event space.

The inaugural is now reportedly under criminal investigation. https://t.co/7tTvQuXxtt

w/ @ilyamarritz

— Justin Elliott (@JustinElliott) December 14, 2018

The amazing thing about all this new information is that it's difficult to figure out what the sketchiest part is!

For example, here's Rick Gates suggesting that vendors just take their fees directly from the donors because the inaugural didn't want to report its full revenue! pic.twitter.com/bsU68tQvng

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) December 14, 2018

this is the kind of honest graft i can comprehend

nowwww what happened?

a lawyer close to the inaugural committee told the Journal, “We are not aware of any evidence the investigation the Journal is reporting actually exists.”

translation: we thought we got rid of all the evidence.

so we're back to the heady days of Harding and Grant.

As with W's people, all but the most abject will be reinstated, probably to manage climate-change refugee camps. Wait and see.

I initially misread this as referring to Cheney and Rumsfeld's reinstatement by W. You guys are clobbering Morbs for a bad example but the precedent exists. Is it that much of a stretch to imagine these scumbags (or the ones who don't get indicted) in a Tom Cotton administration in 2028? Seems more likely than not....

uh W's people are all on MSNBC, beginning at 4 p.m. this afternoon.

yeoman's work

NEW: Prosecutors have filed a reply re: Michael Flynn's sentencing and attached notes and redacted docs related to the Jan. 2017 interview where Flynn admitted lying to the FBI. The govt says Flynn was lying before he talked to the FBI https://t.co/nKtpzQ4Zlq pic.twitter.com/wd10Ohv1Ou

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) December 14, 2018

"The seriousness of the defendant’s offense cannot be called into question, and the Court should reject his attempt to minimize it." pic.twitter.com/agdfV15qCK

— Andrew deGrandpre (@adegrandpre) December 14, 2018

every time I read "very legal, very cool" I get "Love It If We Made It" stuck in my head again

xxxxpost yeah that's why this argument is so weird to me. Does anyone think Condoleeza Rice wouldn't be welcomed back into public office by the establishment press? Obama even kept on some of the Bush detritus like Gates and Petraeus.

y'all you are NOT going to believe this.....Trump....is becoming increasingly isolated!!!!

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-isolation-investigations-20181213-story.html

Rice hasn't been on MSNBC because she's back in Stanford instead of in irons.

A challenger emerges.

It is true. I will be running for Congress in 2020, and I will win. Stay tuned.

— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) December 14, 2018

Webster must be so proud.

I think if you are taken seriously as a pundit, that poisons the dialogue as much as many guvmint posts

LOL

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inauguration_of_Donald_Trump&action=history

Mick Mulvaney named acting WH chief of staff.

Kelly's eager to get gone.

He has a nine days to finish his Xmas shopping.

https://i.imgur.com/WDYOvpY.jpg

The good thing about Mulvaney's appointment is that I have a late friend named John Kelly, who was a good guy, and I hated seeing his name in that context every day.

Condi Rice is being rumored to become an NFL coach? ... Is there any stronger indicator of being in the ruling class?

btw I suspect if he's still rich when he dies, Trump's Tomb will be built across Riverside Drive from Grant's Tomb.