https://thehill.com/homenews/administra ... cum-remark
This woman seems to have sold every scrap of decency to support everything Trump does. I hope he pays her well for this. Though actually we're the ones paying her salary, which is fairly appalling.
Quote: White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday that President Trump does not regret calling “Never Trump” Republicans “human scum” and said they “deserve strong language like that.”
“The people who are against him, and who have been against him and working against him since the day they took office are just that,” Grisham said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning.
“It is horrible that people are working against a president who’s delivering results for this country and has been since day one.”...
A pretty good summary of the situation IMO:
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house ... lf-dealing
Quote: Whistleblower exposed much more than Trump's self-dealing
By Kris Kolesnik, opinion contributor
Kris Kolesnik is a 34-year veteran of federal government oversight. He spent 19 years as senior counselor and director of investigations for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Kolesnik then became executive director of the National Whistleblower Center. Finally, he spent 10 years working with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General as the associate inspector general for external affairs.
Quote: A perfect storm of bad news is crushing President Donald Trump and his defenders. Whistleblower#1’s complaint to Congress has exposed Trump’s self-dealing with the Ukrainian president. But that’s not all. It has also exposed a network of shady, sneaky agents advancing Trump’s schemes, against the national interest.....
What Trump is up against is something he never had a clue existed and could therefore never be prepared for: the structured phalanx of professional, disciplined, honest civil servants in the intelligence and diplomatic communities who will never let him get away with self-dealing if it subverts global democracy.
Trump knew there would be some in government wise to his antics and who would speak out. That’s why he adopted the bogeyman “Deep State” to dismiss them as “angry Democrats” who disagree with his politics, so they launched a “witch hunt.”
Trump comes from a world in which self-dealing was in the DNA...In his business and then his campaign for president, Trump was always surrounded by yes men. If you didn’t facilitate his dealings, you were gone. He’d find someone else who would.
He’s using that approach in the White House. The tsunami of staff turnover in his administration, White House included, is ample evidence....
During and after two years of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Trump and his defenders bullied, denied, obfuscated, and hoodwinked Congress and the public into a stalemate. The scheme has worked so far, thanks to some deceit by Attorney General William Barr in misinterpreting Mueller’s findings, and the profound incompetence of the House Democrats as a worthy opponent.
Now, it’s a different story.
The whistleblower complaint has turned the tables, giving the House the upper hand. That’s because Trump, Barr, et al, neither control the information nor who comes through the revolving door of witnesses. As each witness comes forward, we’re learning who the shady characters are and what their schemes were. Team Trump has ordered witnesses not to cooperate. He’s already lost that battle. The dam has broken...
So far, we have the president caught red-handed. He has no plausible deniability. Also caught red-handed are the shady operators conspiring with equally shady pro-Russian Ukrainians. Many of them, like Giuliani, have neither security clearances nor any recently sworn oaths to the Constitution...
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4672 ... ms-control
Quote: The admiral nominated to lead the U.S. military command in charge of nuclear weapons sidestepped questions Thursday on whether the United States should stay in a pair of treaties arms control advocates fear are on President Trump’s chopping block.
Vice Adm. Charles Richard, the nominee to be commander of U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee he would give the president his “best military advice” on the New START and Open Skies treaties, and listed several pros and cons with each.
But he would not definitively say whether he supports staying in the treaties or withdrawing despite several senators’ attempts to get him to do so...
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/467 ... erican-bar
Quote: The Senate confirmed a President Trump district court pick on Thursday who was labeled "not qualified" by the American Bar Association (ABA).
Justin Walker was confirmed as a judge for the Western District of Kentucky in a 50-41 party-line vote.
The ABA noted in a recent memo to senators that the “Standing Committee believes that Mr. Walker does not presently have the requisite trial or litigation experience or its equivalent.” The committee gave Walker a "not qualified" rating....
Why did the Secret Service investigate a rap group for song lyrics?
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/i ... hreatening
I don't listen to rap, partly because the repetitive rhythm makes me want to smash something - preferably the sound system playing it - but even I know how nasty some of the lyrics can be. These "threatening" lyrics, and even the ones mentioned later about Ivanka, strike me as pretty mild in comparison. Unless they had more than song lyrics to worry about, this is Soviet style suppression/ intimidation. Even if they "declined to refer the case to a federal prosecutor" after the interview.
Quote: The Secret Service interviewed eminem over "threatening" lyrics against President Trump, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. The interview with the rapper stemmed from the Secret Service being alerted to a 2017 ITK story detailing lyrics included on Eminem's album "Revival."
On one of the tracks, the 47-year-old performer, born Marshall Mathers, rapped of the commander in chief: “Time to bury him, so tell him to prepare to get impeached.”
The Secret Service, in the documents obtained by BuzzFeed, said the song was "exhibiting inappropriate behavior" and "threatens" their protectee...
It also makes you wonder what other artists and musicians they've been visiting.
This amused me:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4673 ... mpeachment
Quote: Fox News analyst: Republicans are protesting their own impeachment inquiry rules
More news:
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-envir ... aries-near
Quote: A new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule proposal would shrink enforcement responsibilities for farmers by narrowing the areas they must restrict human contact during pesticide applications, a move the agency is labelling easier management.
The rule announced Thursday shrinks enforcement of the boundaries established under the Application Exclusion Zone to just within farm owner property. The previous statute extended the exclusion zone to areas outside the farm, where workers and others might come into close proximity to the process and equipment used to spread pesticides...
It also no longer requires family members to leave the farm during pesticide applications, though that part of the rollback doesn't bother me. If they don't want to leave, that's their own business - they can do whatever they chose to do before 2017, when the new rules went into effect. But the new rules to protect people outside the farm from pesticide drift looked like a very good thing.
And this is mind-boggling. Barr refused to investigate the whistleblower complaint, which is now revealing clear evidence of corruption, with long tendrils in the government that seem to implicate several Trump appointees, including him. Instead, he's now opening a criminal investigation into his own department based on the conspiracy theories Trump promoted (about the events that eventually led to the Mueller investigation). I reserved judgement, to some extent, when I heard that Trump told Ukraine's president to coordinate things with Giuliani and Barr. No more. It looks to me like we have a corrupt president and a crooked attorney general, which is far worse than Trump alone.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administra ... own-russia
Original story in the New York Times:
Quote: The Justice Department has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into its own Russia probe The New York Times reports.
The newspaper reports that after former special counsel Robert Mueller closed the official investigation months ago, a new criminal inquiry will proceed to find out how the investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election and Trump's alleged collusion with Russia "all began."
Attorney General William Barr has closely reviewed how the department handled the Russia investigation. But shifting the administrative review to a criminal inquiry would allow the prosecutor presiding over the inquiry, John H. Durham, to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, people familiar with the matter told the Times...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/p ... ation.html
Quote: Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation. In May, Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that the F.B.I. officials who opened the case — a counterintelligence investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow’s election sabotage — had committed treason.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is all just an attempt to persuade the conservatives appalled by the Ukraine scandal, Turkey/ Kurds, etc. that they should just continue to support Trump and some deep conspiracy 3 years ago, which will magically vindicate all his actions, will be revealed. I'm sure Trump and his minions are getting very worried about the increasing support for impeachment in recent polls. And if Trump manages to get re-elected, then surprise, surprise, the investigation quietly closes after finding no wrong-doing, but oops, too late... Barr's investigation into the DOJ may also give congressional Republicans an excuse not to remove Trump when he's impeached, which seems increasingly likely to happen. Trump doesn't seem at all intelligent, but that doesn't mean he didn't learn a lot of dirty tricks from Roy Cohn.
Quote: Mr. Barr is closely managing the Durham investigation, even traveling to Italy to seek help from officials there to run down an unfounded conspiracy that is at the heart of conservatives’ attacks on the Russia investigation — that the Italian government helped set up the Trump campaign adviser who was told in 2016 that the Russians had damaging information that could hurt Clinton’s campaign.
But Italy’s intelligence services told Mr. Barr that they played no such role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said in a news conference on Wednesday. Mr. Barr has also contacted government officials in Britain and Australia about their roles in the early stages of the Russia investigation.
Revelations so far about Mr. Durham’s investigation have shown that he has focused in his first months on the accusations that Mr. Trump’s conservative allies have made about the origins of the Russia inquiry in their efforts to undermine it. Mr. Durham’s efforts have prompted criticism that he and Mr. Barr are trying to deliver the president a political victory, though investigators would typically run down all aspects of a case to complete a review of it...
Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation...
btw, they're investigating what happened before the Mueller investigation. So none of this seems to implicate his investigation in any way, though I'm sure Trump and his supporters will try to throw dirt in that direction.
Which reminds me - we haven't heard anything more lately about Barr's attempt to criminally prosecute McCabe on Trump's behalf. If I remember right, the judge told them to drop the bullshit and either file a case or drop the whole thing within a certain number of days. I think I can guess which happened.