1/31/19: Well, that didn’t take long. Earlier this week, Fox News reported. You decided. The president tweeted. The State of Texas was absolutely crawling with illegal voters and democracy was on the run! (See: 1/28/19.)
Um…maybe not.
David Whitley, Texas Secretary of State, has gone silent on his claim that 95,000 illegals were registered to vote, and 58,000 had done so, and we needed a giant wall to protect voting booths.
When a coalition of 13 civil rights groups challenged
Whitley’s numbers he had to retreat. He said he’d get back to them “within the
next week.”
Meanwhile, officials in all 254 Texas counties went to work checking the lists of naughty voters and nice. Within days, Dallas County found that 1,715 people on the Whitley list were in fact citizens. Harris County quickly knocked 18,000 of 30,000 “illegals” off its list. That gave the State of Texas an error rate of at least 60%; and county officials weren’t close to done.
As the Dallas News reported, “Williamson County’s Chris Davis, president of the Association of Texas Elections Administrators, said more than half of the 2,033 voters on his county’s list were being removed after the state’s revision.”
Travis County officials told reporters they had knocked 634 names off their list and had barely started. Bruce Elfant, registrar for the county, probably spoke for registrars in all 254 counties when he told reporters he had been removing a lot of names, which had been tedious. “It would have been nice if they would have vetted this more carefully [emphasis added] before they sent it out to election administrators.”
In fact, what President Trump had originally said was “the tip of the iceberg,” was starting to look like another GOP ice cube, in a country club cocktail of disinformation, served by an undocumented worker. It was another in a series of wild claims meant to scare the ill-informed base.
Save us from shipments of undocumented cucumbers.
Now that this threat from illegal immigration was blunted, we could focus on how the case for the Great Wall of Trump was progressing.
Democrats don’t seem interested in paying for all the bricks Trump needs for his wall. But Customs and Border Protection proves once again that we really need a wall 20, or 30 or 1,000 feet high. Thursday, CBP announces the biggest drug bust involving fentanyl ever, proving we need…
What!
It turns out this shipment, 254 pounds of fentanyl, and just under 400
pounds of meth, worth $4.6 million, came right through the Port of Nogales,
Arizona, hidden in a truckload of cucumbers.
 |
| Hide the drugs in the vegetables. |
*
DID SOMEONE MENTION criminals? New court filings in the case of Roger Stone show that federal prosecutors have a trove of information seized in the raid on his home, office, and found on computers and other electronic devices.
Stone won’t be going to trial anytime soon, and the Mueller investigation is far from over. First, prosecutors will have to produce copies of any legally pertinent information they find and hand them over to Stone’s defense team, a process known as “discovery.” Second, a team of lawyers will have to examine the material that turns up and exclude “privileged” information such as client-attorney communications.
Finally, Mueller and his team will have to build their case against Mr. Stone, and potentially others, as may be revealed:
This discovery is both voluminous and complex. It is composed of multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information consisting of, among other things, FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives). The communications contained in the iCloud accounts, email accounts, and physical devices span several years. The government also intends to produce to the defense the contents of physical devices recently seized from his home, apartment, and office.
Those devices are currently
undergoing a filter review by the FBI for potentially privileged
communications.
To keep this development in perspective, a single terabyte is
equivalent to 75 million pages like the one you are (hopefully) reading.
*
IF WE GO BACK to November 2018, we already knew that an unusually high number of sealed indictments (as many as 36), had been filed with the federal courts in Washington D.C. It was inadvertently revealed that one of those 36 listed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Several legal analysists have suggested that Robert Mueller’s team, knowing the president might move to interfere with their work after the midterm election, filed the necessary papers in advance. In other words, the “winning” names would be revealed only when investigators finished their work, or whenever Trump and his minions moved to shut the show down.
Sealed indictments could not be revoked.
We know now that one of the 36 was filed in Stone’s name. We
can be confident another was aimed at Jerome Corsi, or so Corsi believed. Corsi
has since been cooperating with investigators. (See: 1/25/19.)
Axios also has an excellent story out this week, highlighting the granular detail revealed in previous court filings. For example, on July 27, 2016, we know Candidate Trump issued his famous call, “Russia, if you’re listening…” It was then he expressed the hope the Russians would find Hillary Clinton’s emails. The very next day, as revealed in an indictment of 12 Russian hackers, Mueller’s team knows the Russians set to work. As revealed in court documents, “the Conspirators…attempted after hours to spear-phish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office.”
“That,” says Axios, “shows Mueller has access to much more intelligence than is publicly known. Remember, these are Russian government employees. So Mueller has remarkable and thus far unexplained visibility.”
Mueller has also hinted he has far more information than those outside the investigation imagine. In a court filing aimed at members of a Russian troll factory, his team reported that three employees of the Internet Research Agency, the troll factory, traveled to the U.S. in 2014. Two have since been indicted.
Not the third.
Mueller has indicated in court filings, “that he knows the
precise IRA official to whom this unnamed [third] male traveler filed his
Atlanta expenses after the trip.” As Axios
adds, “The information could have come from U.S. intelligence or another country.
But Mueller leaves the impression he may have a cooperator inside the troll factory.”
*
IN A POLL RELEASED TODAY, 62 percent of Americans believe the president knew that his associates, Cohen, Manafort, Stone, Don Jr. and others, were purposely misleading investigators and Congress.
Only 32 percent think he didn’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment