May 16, 2018: It's Not a Witch Hunt - and Don Jr. Has Been Casting Spells

 

5/16/18: This is an awful day for the Big Orange Buffoon. First, he’s required to file paperwork and admit he paid Michael Cohen back in 2017, after his personal lawyer gave $130,000 to Stormy Daniels. 

This means, that regarding the Stormy Daniels story: 

A)    Cohen has been lying for months. 

B)     Trump has been lying for almost as long. 

C)    Team Trump is replete with liars of various colors, shapes and sizes. 

D)   The president knew members of his team were liars and didn’t correct them because… 

E)     Birds of a feather. 

 

The American people might not care about a consensual sexual relationship between Citizen Trump and a porn star in 2006. When the President of the United States lies about it, and does so aboard Air Force One, that’s a serious matter. 

____________________ 

“I understand you have some information for us...What have you got on Hillary?” 

Donald Trump Jr.

____________________ 

 

First, the good news on that topic – if you’re the president. Rudy tells reporters Robert Mueller has agreed that under Department of Justice guidelines a sitting president cannot be indicted. A president might bludgeon his wife. He might traffic in child porn. He might conspire with Russian agents. He could not be indicted. He might be guilty; but he’d have to be impeached. 

Then the bad news – for the president. F.B.I. Director Wray speaks before Congress. He says the Russian investigation is not a witch hunt. 

You may remember he said the same last July, when Trump appointed him to head the Bureau. 

In testimony today, Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Wray if he stood by his past statement, that the investigation was not a witch hunt. 

“Yes,” Wray responded. He did not elaborate. It’s not a witch hunt, according to Trump’s own pick to head the F.B.I.

 

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee releases thousands of pages of testimony related to the secret June 2016 meeting, with Don Jr. and Trump campaign officials and agents of the Russian government. In transcripts revealed today, Don Jr., who was not under oath, is shown to have spun a spurious tale. First, a participant in the meeting remembers the president’s son starting off by saying, “I understand you have some information for us.” 

When conversation veered off topic, Don Jr. was quick to refocus everyone. “What have you got on Hillary,” he wanted to know. 

Members of the Senate Judicial Committee wanted to know why Don Jr. took a meeting with the Russians and never contacted U.S. intelligence agencies to warn them about a foreign power’s attempt to interfere in our election. Well, Trump Jr. explained, the campaign had not received the hoped-for dirt on Hillary. So why contact anyone? No harm in meeting with a few Russians – hoping to get dirt on an opponent – not if it didn’t lead to real dirt. 

In fact, asked in July 2016, if there was any truth to the claim, coming from the Clinton team, that Russians were trying to help his father, Don Jr. replied with indignation. “Well, just goes to show you their exact moral compass [emphasis added, here and below],” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “They’ll say anything to be able to win this. This is time and time again, lie after lie…It’s disgusting; it’s so phony.” 

Yeah…so many lies.

 

In other highlights from his testimony, Don Jr. said he couldn’t remember who he called and spoke with for eleven minutes, just before the secret meeting. The call was to a blocked number. It might have been his father. It might have been his mistress. No, scratch that last. Don Jr. lied about that, too, but not to Congress. 

It might have been Pope Francis. Don Jr. responded repeatedly to such questions, “I don’t recall.” 

After the meeting ended, Don Jr. made a second call to a blocked number. Who did he call? He couldn’t remember. 

What about a purposely misleading statement issued in July 2017, a year later, after the free press got wind of the initial meeting? That was the statement which said the meeting was primarily about adoption. Did Don Jr. talk to his father about the statement? He could not recall. Did his father help craft it, which would indicate a desire to cover up the truth about working with Russians? 

Don Jr. could not recall. 

 

“Helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.” 

Is that it, finally? No. Not yet. The Senate Intelligence Committee announces its bipartisan conclusions. The Russians clearly interfered in the 2016 election with the intention of harming Clinton and advancing the prospects of Donald J. Trump. Vice Chairman Mark Warner puts it succinctly: “The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.” 

And there’s more! 

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells a Senate panel that Cambridge Analytica targeted certain groups of voters through social media. Sophisticated voter suppression tactics were employed to convince voters not to show up at the polls or undercut support for candidates. Wylie suggested that the professor at the center of the Facebook data breach scandal might have allowed the Russians to get hold of the personal information he had gathered on millions of Americans. That professor, Aleksandr Kogan, made numerous trips to – Russia – possibly for legitimate reasons – since he sometimes worked at St. Petersburg University. 

Still, you begin to wonder how many connections to Russia, tangential and essential, there are in this tale. 

Former C.I.A. Director John Brennan makes his feelings clear. He calls the Trump team’s efforts to denigrate law enforcement agencies and investigators “despicable.” On Nicole Wallace’s program on MSNBC, he says the president suffers from “a disease of dishonesty that afflicts him and metastasizes in so many ways. It’s a cancer that he’s spread…hurting this country.”

 

* 

“Alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts.” 

IN OTHER NEWS, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks to graduating students at Virginia Military Academy. 

See if you can guess who he’s talking about. 

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth,” he tells graduates, “or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.” 

He continues: 

It is also that foundational commitment to truth and facts that binds us to other democratic, like-minded nations, that we Americans will always deal with them from the same set of truths and facts, and it is truth that says to our adversaries, “we say what we mean and we mean what we say.” 

 

When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth, even on what may seem the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: This statement will seem prophetic when, in December 2020, despite more than fifty losses in court, challenging the result of the presidential election, neither the president nor his closest confidants will admit the obvious. 

He lost to Joe Biden.