6/23/20: The bad news keeps piling up. GNC,
the health and wellness retailer, announces it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and close 800 to 1,200
stores. There are estimates that 25,000 U.S. stores will close this year. The International
Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will contract by 4.9% in 2020. The estimated recover in 2021 is
expected to be weaker than predicted as recently as April. If there’s a major
new outbreak of the coronavirus, the recovery will shrivel to nothing.
____________________
A typical day in Trumpistan. Bend the rule of law. Silence
the critics. Protect the felons.
____________________
Meanwhile, in a speech to a group called “Students for Trump,”
at the packed Dream City megachurch in Phoenix, Arizona, the 3,000 young people
in attendance were clearly counting on God to protect them from the
virus. Masks were conspicuous by their near-total absence. Social distancing
was impossible.
Trump was happy because people were cheering him again. He
told listeners they were the defenders of our culture. He said they would never
“kneel to the radical left.” He warned, without citing proof, that Democrats
wanted to let everyone vote, “even if they’re not citizens.” The way the virus
is spreading lately – with Trump getting a large, well-earned
share of the blame – and the way the polls are
running, the Democrats won’t need help from non-citizen voters, even if they did
want it.
(They
don’t.)
With five months until the election, you never know what will
happen. Still, GOP leaders must be sweating. A poll of Montana voters last
month showed Trump favored over Biden by five points (45%-40%), in a
state he won by 20 four years ago. Even more ominously, if your name is Milksop
Mitch McConnell, former Democratic Governor Steve Bullock had a seven-point
lead in the same poll, over incumbent U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, 46%-39%.
*
AND WHAT DAY in Trumpistan is ever complete without fresh
evidence that there is no rule of law Trump won’t bend to
protect himself and those he loves. Namely: he loves those who protect
him.
Tomorrow, Aaron Zelinsky, one of four prosecutors who quit the
Roger Stone case in protest, will tell the House Judiciary Committee that they
were pressured to give Stone a break because he was a pal of the president. “What I heard –
repeatedly – was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other
defendant because of his relationship to the President,” the former DOJ lawyer
will say in prepared testimony.
“Zelinsky
will appear alongside antitrust prosecutor John Elias, who plans to testify
that Attorney General William Barr personally ordered the Justice Department's
Antitrust Division to launch politically motivated reviews of 10 cannabis
mergers,” Politico reports. Zelinsky’s testimony will be “a stunning –
and stunningly rare – public rebuke of Justice Department leadership by a
sitting official.”
Zelinsky
will also say that prosecutors were prepared in February to hit Stone with a
steep sentencing recommendation. This, they believed, would be merited, due to Stone’s
“long-term lying to impede an investigation of Russian interference in the 2016
election, a grave national security matter.”
Republicans
on the House Judiciary Committee will shrug their shoulders, and Rep. Jim
Jordan will start yelling about Hunter Biden again. (See: 6/24/20.) Because
let’s be honest. They don’t want to know what Stone might really know about the
law-breaking efforts of President Trump.
And Trump
supporters won’t have a hint of a clue – that you don’t really want to have a
president who cuts people who break the law breaks, so long as they help him
break the law too.
*
“Bending the criminal justice system to benefit” the
president.
IT’S
NOT JUST Zelinsky and Elias who are deeply worried and fear Attorney General Barr is up to no good.
Sixty-five law professors and faculty members at George
Washington University Law School, Barr’s alma mater, have issued a statement of
protest. Barr’s actions as attorney
general, they write, “have undermined the rule of law, breached constitutional
norms, and damaged the integrity and traditional independence of his office and
of the Department of Justice.”
Among the Attorney
General’s sins, they note that he
obfuscated and misled the American public about the results of the
Mueller investigation. He wrongfully interfered in the day-to-day activities of
career prosecutors, and continues to do so, bending the criminal justice system
to benefit the President’s friends and target those perceived to be his
enemies.
Finally,
they add, “We include members of both major political parties, and of none. We
have different legal specialties and represent a broad spectrum of approaches
to the law.”
And in
this blogger’s words: They smell a skunk, who works for a bigger skunk. In the
White House.
The New York City Bar
Association chimed in in a letter sent to House and Senate leaders, stating
emphatically that Barr is unfit for the “high position he occupies in our
federal government” and should step aside.
*
LAST, BUT NOT LEAST,
we learn again that Donald J. Dictator has no idea how the First Amendment
works. In an interview with Brian Kilmeade, on Fox News (free press working),
he calls John Bolton a “stupid guy,” and a guy “with no heart (still the free
press working).
“I fired him. And I didn’t think it was a big deal. And I
wasn’t around him very much,” the president said.
Kilmeade does not bother to ask, “He was your National
Security Advisor. Do you mean you didn’t spend any time with the man?”
(Kilmeade is the free press not working.)
“But what he did do is he took classified information, and
he published it during a presidency,” Trump insisted, adding: “I believe that he’s a
criminal, and I believe, frankly, he should go to jail for that.”
(Note
to Trump fans: Your president really wants to see a lot of critics go to jail.)
Later, he vented his spleen in another unhinged tweet. “Washed up Creepster
John Bolton is a lowlife who should be in jail,” the President of the United
States insisted, “money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly
Classified information.” (Free press dying – if Trump has his
way.)
Practitioners of the
free press in this country have every reason to defend themselves and the whole
“freedom” concept.
So it didn’t help when
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo backed Trump in his call to jail a critic.
Pompeo
said he had seen “young soldiers” prosecuted for the release of classified
information “at a much lower level, who were much more junior” than Bolton. “This
is something that has real criminal risk associated with it,” he told conservative
radio host Hugh Hewitt. “And for the life of me, I can’t figure out how it’s
the case that this can be permitted to stand without a real response.”
Oddly enough, during
a State Department briefing highlighting the
importance of the free press, held via Zoom today,
the spokesperson for State takes offense to a reporter’s question about
Bolton’s book.
“AT&T, we can mute that line,” the spokesperson says.
And they did.
Later, the spokesperson defended her decision, calling the
reporter’s question about the book “offensive.”
You know. Free press
(the reporter) asking about Bolton’s book (more free press involved).
Shaun
Tandon, the president of the State Department Correspondents’ Association, described
the muting of the reporter as “richly ironic” considering the subject matter of
the briefing itself.
“We
obviously do not draw any comparison between the conduct on this call and the
tactics of the People’s Republic of China,” Tandon wrote in a letter of protest
to the spokesperson. “But we believe that muting a reporter’s phone line, and
describing a question as ‘offensive’ at the end of a briefing, run counter to
the spirit of press freedom and to the professional atmosphere that we have
both sought at the Department of State.”
Yeah.
Not in Trumpistan. Sorry. Silence the critics.
Protect
the felons.
BLOGGER’S
NOTE (7/16/21) I missed this story at the time, but on June 23, 2020, top White
House aide Larry Kudlow makes it clear, as for the virus, we have nothing to
fear but wearing masks.
“There is no second wave coming.”
He
says he’s not worried about a surge of COVID-19 cases. We shouldn’t be
either. “There is no second wave coming. It’s just hot spots.
They send in CDC teams, we’ve got the testing procedures, we’ve got the
diagnostics, we’ve got the PPE. And so I really think it’s a pretty good
situation,” he says.
“There are some hot spots,” he adds. “We’re
on it. We know how to deal with this stuff now, we’ve come a long way from last
winter.”
As we now know, this was a truly terrible
prediction.
BLOGGER’S
NOTE #2: The Department of Justice opens a case against Bolton, but in the seven
months remaining before Joe Biden takes over, no evidence is ever produced that Bolton revealed classified
information in his book. In fact, a review found just the opposite. (See: 9/23/20.)
The
criminal investigation against Bolton is finally closed in June 2021, with no
charges lodged against him.
