This is fascinating. Six days into Bill Barr taking over the Justice Department we have an announcement that the end of the Mueller investigation will be announced as early as next week with a “summary” of Mueller’s report released to Congress at some unspecified point in the future. Barr has made clear that he does not believe the DOJ can release negative information about people who have not been charged with a crime.
Trump makes it official, announces Rod Rosenstein’s replacement, Jeffrey A. Rosen … Read More
In response to my question below, TPM Reader JM writes:
Curious what criminal defense lawyer readers have to say about this: When a federal judge issues a show cause order that raises the possibility of revoking your client’s conditions of pre-trial release, do you prepare them for the chance they won’t come home after the show cause hearing?
Editor of small-town Alabama daily (The Democrat-Reporter of Linden, Alabama) calls for “the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again” against “Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats … plotting to raise taxes in Alabama.”
“If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we’d all been better off,” wrote Goodloe Sutton.
Asked what he meant by ‘clean out’, Sutton said he meant lynching.
In key testimony, Lisa Britt admits that she took absentee ballots and voted them Republican on races the actually voters had left blank. Video here.
We’re still working nailing down precisely what was said. But there were some pretty dramatic developments this morning in the probe into the absentee ballot tampering scandal in North Carolina.
One of the key people accused, Lisa Britt, appears to have turned completely on McCrae Dowless, the ringleader. She basically told investigators how he instructed her and others to assist his cover-up. “As long as we all stick together we’ll all be fine, because they don’t have anything on us,” she said Dowless told her and her coworkers after the initial probe. Last week he told her to take the 5th and even gave her a letter telling her how to testify falsely. She brought in a copy of that letter. So his goose appears to be quite cooked. More coming on this. So stay tuned.
Revisionist Zionist/Holocaust Denial alliance seems to have hit another speed bump.
I’ll have more to say about this later. For some of the background see this post from the weekend.
You may have seen Andrew McCabe’s 60 Minutes interview last night. We’ll be bringing you various nuggets from that interview and the rest of the press tour he’s doing today. But there are a number of points that come up his accounts that aren’t news in themselves but shed important light on the nature of how the federal government, perhaps all governments, work. After more than 20 years in this business and particularly after everything that occurred in the aftermath of 9/11 and Iraq War, I became very interested in how President’s – or rather than Presidency – bends the government to its will.
Let’s take the false claims that Saddam Hussein had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, a key premise for the Iraq War. To rehearse the basic facts, it was commonly believed in the US intelligence world – wrongly – that Iraq had at least some chemical weapons programs. That wasn’t a big leap. They’d had them before. And even used them. But that wasn’t enough. The administration took the elastic term ‘WMD’, pushed every hint of possible biological or nuclear programs, lied, cajoled, exaggerated until we got the phony hysteria that helped grease the skids for war. We know this story. Read More
As Bill Barr settles into his new job as Attorney General, let’s not forget that he already got caught doing just the kind of thing people are now worried about his doing on behalf of President Trump. Back when he was AG the first time, in late 1992, he put his hand on the scale to try to gin up a phony scandal against then-candidate Bill Clinton. I discussed it here in this – yikes! – 17 year old article in Salon.