Despite Trump’s finagling at top of DOJ, the American People Need to Learn the Truth!!!…The only logical reason Trump would pick Whitaker as acting AG of the DOJ is to stop Mueller. Dems in Congress, the media & American people must stay vigilant to see to it that sabotage never happens! Ultimately, we need to know the facts of the Russian probe, so we can all view objectively what the evidence finds, which Mueller must be allowed to finish without interference.
As Americans we can be so thankful the Dems won the House, so if worse comes to worst, a Dem majority coming in January could see to it a Mueller report or indictments are not buried out of sight. Signs are a flood of indictments could soon be unleashed from Mueller, which may well be directed at those closest to the president while also exposing details directly implicating Trump. With dozens of sealed indictments stored away that could be unsealed on any given day, it may be impossible for the corrupt team of Trump, his legal team, Whitaker, congressional cronies, courts & cheerleading echo to hide the facts or stop the damage.
There’s something cooking in the tea leaves. The tension is being felt in DC & is written all over Trump’s face & demeanor. Click on Something-is-going-on-Fox-Wikileaks-have-both-stopped-tweeting-Drudge-deleted-everything. Names like Corsi, Stone & sonny-boy Donnie Jr. have actually said they expect to be indicted soon: stone-associate-says-he-expects-mueller-indictment-in-next-couple-of & also mueller-expected-to-issue-more-indictments-soon-report. Posted here is the entire article from mueller-holding-dozens-sealed-indictments-intel-source, very interesting & informative, which the final paragraph for those of us alarmed by this lawless presidency reveals we may be about to hit pay dirt!:
For every day of his presidency—657 so far, if you’re counting—the issue of Donald J. Trump’s ties to Russia has darkened the Oval Office door. Since May 17, 2017, when former FBI director Robert S. Mueller was appointed Special Counsel to unravel Trump’s secret Kremlin linkages, the president has seethed, his rage seeping into his tweets. From its first day, President Trump has wanted to quash the Mueller investigation, and now he’s making his move. But is it already too late? There’s mounting evidence it is, specifically that Team Mueller is ready to strike imminently with indictments, no matter what the White House does. All the same, the feat was impetuous even for Trump. He could not wait even one day, dropping his bomb on Wednesday afternoon, on the heels of his wild, angry press conference about the midterm elections. Although Tuesday’s midterms were hardly the personal success that Trump presented them as—with the Democratic takeover of the House muted by GOP gains in the Senate—the hotly desired Democratic Blue Wave never quite swelled. The midterms were a setback for the White House, but hardly an unprecedented one. Barack Obama in 2010 and Bill Clinton in 1994 took worse midterm hits and got reelected.
Nevertheless, only 18 hours after polls closed, President Trump cashiered his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the cabinet’s most sincere Trumpian true believer. The move was long overdue; indeed, Sessions’ survival this long seems miraculous (that the attorney general’s strange forced-resignation letter lacked a date was the tell). Sessions committed the unpardonable sin in Trump’s eyes of recusing himself from the Russia probe, an act commonsensical for any attorney. By finally getting rid of the hated Sessions, Trump opened the door to shutting down the Mueller investigation. The president cares nothing for precedent or rules, yet even for Trump what happened on Wednesday was a brazen act which seems destined to force a constitutional crisis. Not content with pushing Sessions aside, Trump shoved Rod Rosenstein, the dutiful deputy attorney general who has overseen the Mueller probe, out of the way too. Rosenstein is still in his job, for now, but he has been removed from any role in the Mueller inquiry. There went the last bureaucratic top-cover for Team Mueller. Trump then outdid himself by appointing as acting attorney general Sessions’ chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker. At the Justice Department, Whitaker is disliked as a Trump crony who is qualified, barely, to be the attorney general, being a former Federal prosecutor in Iowa.
However, Whitaker is also a critic of the Mueller inquiry, indeed a vehement one, who has advocated limiting and even shuttering any investigation into the president’s ties to Moscow. By any normal legal standards, Whitaker should immediately recuse himself from anything touching the Special Counsel’s office, but these are not normal times in our nation’s capital. Whitaker was chosen by the White House to fix the president’s Mueller problem by any means necessary. Whitaker’s own highly partisan and less-than-ethical past indicates that, for once, President Trump may have chosen the right man for the job. Democrats are howling gigantic curses, as expected, but plenty of Republicans are also troubled by the Whitaker appointment. Many are challenging the legality of placing Whitaker in the position, even temporarily, to interfere with Mueller. Embarrassingly for the White House, George Conway, a top Washington legal eagle who is married to Kellyanne Conway, the president’s top consigliera, publicly denounced the Sessions defenestration, adding that replacing him with “nobody” Whitaker is “unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.” Conservative legal celebrity John Yoo weighed in just as harshly. Reviled on the Left for his fierce defense of President George W. Bush during the bumpiest years of his administration, Yoo flatly denounced as “unconstitutional” the current White House effort to let Whitaker kill the Mueller inquiry as acting attorney general. If Trump wants Whitaker to do that, the nominee will need to pass Senate approval. That’s a high-stakes gamble, and if the White House has any sense it will back off quickly before they have created a bona fide constitutional crisis there’s no way out of. That said, Trump may want a major crisis to buy time before Team Mueller drops indictments on the president, his relatives, and his retinue.
To abide by Justice Department rules, Mueller went silent for almost two months before the midterms, to avoid any appearance of election interference, but the Special Counsel’s office is now renewing the public side of their investigation. Team Mueller is reported to be working on the final draft of their report on the president and his Russian ties in 2016. Whatever that report says, it’s not likely to be flattering to Team Trump. Worse for the White House, Mueller’s prosecutors are widely believed to be closing in on two people close to the president, Roger Stone and Donald Trump, Jr. Stone, the self-proclaimed Republican “ratf*cker,” has spoken openly of his fears of impending indictment over his links to WikiLeaks in 2016. Don Jr. is reported to be concerned as well, since he appears to have lied to Federal investigators about the fateful June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian intelligence officials. Indictments of Stone, a friend of the president since the 1970s, or worse Trump’s son and namesake, seem certain to push the White House into greater paroxysms of rage. What might happen then is anybody’s guess. Trump’s desperation to shut down the Mueller inquiry before it cuts very close to home is therefore understandable.
It’s also a fool’s errand. In truth, it’s far too late to shut the Special Counsel down altogether. Mueller and his staff, veterans of Beltway wars, were not surprised by this week’s events. They were prepared. Any efforts by Acting AG Whitaker to block indictments will go public quickly and throw Washington into deep crisis. For Trump, there are no exits or off-ramps left. When Mueller informs the public of more indictments is an open question. That they are coming, however, is not. And there are lots of them. The Special Counsel has been at work for almost 18 months now. An Intelligence Community official who assisted the Special Counsel’s investigation told me this week that Team Mueller is holding “dozens of sealed indictments” of people associated with the president, his 2015-16 campaign, and his administration. “Nobody who’s close to the Russians is getting out of this,” said the IC official. When will those indictments start being unsealed? Watch this space.
Take the Whitaker Threat Seriously!
I believe we can contain this threat if the American people pay attention to what’s going on! The more we call out Trump & his stooge like Whitaker, the less likely they’ll get away with their shenanigans. Spread the word, since Americans need to be fully aware beyond a shadow of doubt why Trump inserted an unqualified political hack as acting head of the DOJ, seen in this entire article posted from acting-attorney-general-matt-whitaker-claimed-there-was-no-evidence-russia-interfered-in-the-2016-election:
As soon as President Donald Trump installed Matt Whitaker as acting attorney general, media outlets began mining his appearances as a radio and television pundit and discovered he had repeatedly denigrated the Mueller investigation, which he now will be overseeing, and claimed there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mother Jones reported that Whitaker had gone so far as to claim that Trump, as president, had the power to kill the Mueller probe—or any slice of it—for any reason and was immune to any charge of obstruction of justice. All of this has led to critics questioning whether Whitaker ought to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation—which he has declined to do—and speculation that Whitaker would accept a Trump order to crush the Mueller investigation. Well, there’s more. On one of his 2017 pundit outings, Whittaker even denied that Moscow had attacked the 2016 campaign. During a May 30, 2017, radio show appearance, he declared, “A foreign power attempting to interfere in elections is obviously a very salacious claim, but you know again I have not seen a single fact that would suggest that anything like that has happened. But this doesn’t prevent folks from going on CNN and other media outlets and saying that it happened.”
Note the date. Whitaker said this five months after the US intelligence community had publicly released an assessment that concluded that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.” The report, issued on January 6, 2017, noted, “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The document said the secret Kremlin scheme blended “covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls.’” In other words, Moscow attacked the United States with information warfare in part to help Trump win the presidency. What was Whitaker thinking when he said there was no evidence to back up the assertion that Russia assaulted the election?
Here is a clue. In an interview a week earlier, Whitaker pushed the conspiracy theory that talk of Russia intervention was nothing but a hoax cooked up by the media and Trump’s political enemies: “You have a media that does not like this president or this administration. And it’s trying to—I think it’s successfully now hamstrung him and made him pretty ineffective at least in the near term with a special counsel being appointed to investigate the situation with Russia. I can’t see a single shred of evidence to suggest that anything happened. And so I think you have a media together with a minority party in the Democrats that you know don’t want to see Donald Trump’s vision for America implemented.” Got that? Nothing had happened. It was all a media fabrication concocted to lead to a special counsel investigation that would damage Trump’s presidency.
Whitaker seemed to be ignorant of a basic fact: the Trump-Russia investigation was initiated by the FBI a year earlier in complete secrecy, due to information the bureau had received. Mueller was only appointed to lead the existing inquiry after Trump in May 2017 fired James Comey as FBI director. The media and Trump’s Democratic foes had nothing to do with the origins of the investigation. As the acting head of the Justice Department, Whitaker now has the responsibility of overseeing the department’s and the FBI’s counterintelligence activities—that is, their actions aimed at thwarting Russian spying against the United States and Moscow’s covert actions aimed at America. That would include any further Kremlin attacks against US democracy. Yet even though the US intelligence community, which includes the FBI, plainly stated Russia had tried to subvert the 2016 election, Whitaker still denied that had happened, which raises questions about his ability to oversee the ongoing Russia investigation. Either Whitaker had not bothered to read the 25-page report or he had discarded its findings in favor of partisan hackery. Whatever the reason, this certainly must be encouraging news for Moscow.
Whitaker leading the DOJ is a complete Joke!
Plenty of articles are below about Trump putting this acting AG in charge, so with our quota on the number of outbound links, you can look up the articles you’d like to read. My brief comments are in front of the bolded news source & link title. Included here is the report a Maryland court case is challenging Whitaker’s appointment, which could wind up being ruled illegal!:
Despite a corrupt acting AG, the American people need to see Mueller’s final complete report: washingtonpost/congress-made-starr-report-public-it-shouldnt-hide-muellers
The exact wrong pick & at exactly the wrong time: washingtonpost/rules-are-clear-whitaker-cant-supervise-muellers-investigation
Just a partisan hit man: theguardian/donald-trump-matt-whitaker-chuck-grassley-republicans
Motives are clear, Whitaker assigned to kill the investigation: msn/eric-swalwell-says-matt-whitaker-is-an-assassin-hired-to-kill-russia-investigation
Consulting with DOJ ethics lawyers more for show: usatoday/acting-ag-whitaker-consult-justice-ethics-lawyers-recusal
5 conflicts of interest that normally would demand recusal: usatoday/matthew-whitaker-not-attorney-general-material-our-view
Violates appointment clause & lawsuit could succeed since Whitaker has never been appointed by the Senate for any position: npr/maryland-says-matthew-whitaker-appointment-as-acting-attorney-general-is-unlawful
San Fran also chimes in: salon/san-francisco-takes-on-trumps-new-acting-attorney-general-matt-whitaker
Should be unconstitutional: theatlantic/whitaker-cant-take-officeand-that-helps-mueller
This first paragraph from a WaPo editorial states Whitaker is unfit for the job, which the rest of the op-ed inside there-is-no-way-this-man-should-be-running-the-justice-department goes onto explain why:
IS MATTHEW G. WHITAKER the legitimate acting attorney general? From approximately the second President Trump ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions and tapped Mr. Whitaker to temporarily exercise the office’s vast authority, legal experts have sparred over whether Mr. Trump can unilaterally elevate someone from a role that does not require Senate confirmation to one that does. But regardless of whether the promotion is legal, it is very clear that it is unwise. Mr. Whitaker is unfit for the job.
Partisan Hack should never head the DOJ
Since Whitaker has no business being in the AG position to begin with, it’s very possible his time will be cut short: trumps-new-attorney-general-questions-appointment. Bret Stephens opens up his op-ed with this paragraph below insideopinion/trump-whitaker-attorney-general-appointment, which from there offers up explanations under the following categories…unqualified, shady, a hack, a crackpot, barely legal & dangerous. Those of us familiar with this guy wholeheartedly agree!:
Of all the ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency has made America worse, nothing epitomizes it quite so fully as the elevation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States. Intellectually honest conservatives — the six or seven who remain, at any rate — need to say this, loudly. His appointment represents an unprecedented assault on the integrity and reputation of the Justice Department, the advice and consent function of the Senate, and the rule of law in the United States.
Since a Blatantly Foolish Appointment, it’s Time to Fight Back!
His main qualifications are rabid partisanship & total unfitness for the job: matthew-whitakers-unqualified. Excellent perspectives are presented here over Whitaker’s legitimacy in excepts inside mueller-matthew-whitaker-and-russia-probes-future:
Who Mueller reports to is of major consequence. Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, had recused himself from oversight of the federal Russia investigation, so Mueller reported to his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. Now that Trump has fired Sessions, those oversight responsibilities fall to his replacement, Whitaker, who has previously expressed skepticism about the scope of Mueller’s probe. And in that role, as Dreeben explained in court, Whitaker has significant power: While Mueller’s team is “independent on a day-to-day basis,” if the acting attorney general found anything to be “inappropriate” or “unwarranted,” he could intervene. Indeed, the special-counsel guidelines allow the acting attorney general to overrule any “investigative or procedural step” proposed by Mueller if the move is deemed “inappropriate or unwarranted under established department practices.” It’s unknown whether Whitaker would shut down Mueller’s investigation if the president asked. But Dreeben’s explanation suggests that Whitaker need not fire Mueller in order to stymie his work. Whitaker wrote last year that the Mueller inquiry had “gone too far” and opined on CNN about the ability of a potential Sessions replacement to grind the investigation almost to a halt. He could opt for a death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach instead of risking the inevitable political blowback from firing Mueller directly. And he could try to hinder Mueller from revealing his findings without having to justify his decision to Congress until after the probe is over. “According to the regulations, should the attorney general determine that an action is so inappropriate that it must not be pursued, he or she has to report that to Congress along with the justification,” several national-security–law experts wrote in Lawfare earlier this week. “Such a report, however, is not required until the ‘conclusion of the Special Counsel’s investigation,’ so this oversight protection is unlikely to be helpful in the short term. “Put simply,” they continued, “if someone in Whitaker’s new role wants to create big problems for Mueller, he has ample tools to do so.”
The D.C. circuit court is now examining what influence, if any, Sessions’s ouster and Whitaker’s appointment could have on the Miller case. It is possible that the court will decide that Rosenstein, not Whitaker, is Mueller’s rightful boss, according to Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama. Short of that conclusion, however, Mueller may have some recourse in the event that Whitaker maintains control over the investigation and attempts to either suppress it or shut it down. Several legal experts have argued that Trump’s appointment of Whitaker may have been unconstitutional. At issue is the same question of who qualifies as a principal officer. Because Whitaker reports directly to the president, he is a principal officer, these experts say, and would have required Senate confirmation. “That has a very significant consequence today,” Katyal and the conservative lawyer George Conway wrote in The New York Times on Thursday, citing Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in National Labor Relations Board v. SW General, Inc. “It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker … is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.”
Questions over Whitaker’s legitimacy could work to Mueller’s advantage, according to Jens David Ohlin, a professor at Cornell Law School who specializes in criminal law. Ohlin explained that Mueller could challenge Whitaker’s appointment in federal court on both statutory and constitutional grounds, the latter of which is “most likely to succeed.” “In order to get either of these issues before a federal court, someone needs standing to bring the claim, which means they’ve been specifically harmed,” Ohlin told me. “If Mueller is fired, which is Whitaker’s ‘nuclear option,’ Mueller certainly has standing to object to Whitaker’s appointment.” He added that Trump’s decision to appoint a “constitutional nobody” to head the Justice Department “is so far from mainstream practice” that a federal court would likely “scrutinize this carefully and would be skeptical that this is consistent with the [Constitution’s] Appointments Clause,” which outlines how appointments are to be made. Before he went to work at the Justice Department under Sessions, Whitaker served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa from 2004 to 2009, then worked in private practice and appeared as a cable-news pundit throughout 2017. Marty Lederman, who served as the deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under Obama, is less sure, writing Thursday that the constitutionality of Whitaker’s appointment is “technically an open question.” But he tentatively assumed that “anyone who suffers an ‘injury in fact’ by virtue of something Whitaker does would have … standing to challenge his appointment in court.”
William Yeomans, a former deputy assistant attorney general who spent 26 years at the Justice Department, had similar reservations. “I think the constitutional argument is more complicated than many are suggesting and I am undecided,” he told me. Yeomans noted, however, that if Whitaker’s appointment was unlawful, Mueller “theoretically could refuse to carry out his instructions and could contest, for example, his firing.” Whether Mueller would actually take such a dramatic step is another question. Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior counsel on the Whitewater investigation in the 1990s, doubted that Mueller would challenge Whitaker’s appointment, “both because it is no slam dunk legally and because he is bound” as a Justice Department employee by the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded in 2003 that “a Senate-confirmed position may be temporarily filled on an acting basis” by any “officer or employee” who “has served in the agency for at least 90 days in the preceding 365 days”—regardless of whether they are confirmed by the Senate. “It is also strategically incautious,” Rosenzweig said. Still, if Mueller were to challenge Whitaker, one “solid way” to do it would be to defy him, Rosenzweig said, setting up a “live case” in which the court would have to address Whitaker’s legitimacy directly. Mueller is not known for disobedience or public spectacles. In the 18 months since he was appointed, he has not said a single word about the Russia investigation, and his spokesman is best known for declining to comment in response to press inquiries. With his final report already in the works, however, and various elements of the investigation farmed out to prosecutors in New York and Washington, D.C., it is unlikely that Mueller’s findings—as they relate to a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia—will never see the light of day. If Whitaker were to refuse to release Mueller’s final report, for example, Mueller and the grand jury could make their evidence available to Congress through a report transmitted by the court, as the former Watergate prosecutors Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton recently noted. And “with the fox now guarding the henhouse,” they wrote, “there is sufficient precedent” for them to do so.
Scam Artist
And this is what our nation’s top law enforcement officer was recently up to? Plus the bureau he presides over is actually investigating him! Click on whitaker-led-group-may-violated & see excerpts below from a report inside fbi-probes-florida-company-linked-to-acting-ag-whitaker-wsj:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting a criminal investigation of a Florida company accused of scamming millions from customers during the period that Matthew Whitaker, the acting U.S. attorney general, served as a paid advisory-board member, the WSJ reported. World Patent Marketing shut down last year after being accused by the Federal Trade Commission of scamming customers out of $26 million, the newspaper reported, citing interviews with an alleged victim who was contacted by the FBI and other people familiar with the matter. Whitaker was appointed to his new role on Wednesday by President Trump after Jeff Session was ousted. He oversees the FBI. The investigation was being handled by the Miami FBI office and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, according to an email sent to the alleged victim last year by an FBI victim specialist. A recording on a phone line set up by the Justice Department to help victims said Friday the case remains active, the WSJ said.
Other Articles to Search
More on the scams Whitaker was involved with are in this list of articles, which you could look up on the search engines since our blog has a limit on the number of outbound links. Same format with my comment in front of the article to be searched (in bold):
Scamming veterans out of their life savings: theguardian/matthew-whitaker-acting-attorney-general-wpm-scam
Partisan hack who advanced echo conspiracies: nymag/matthew-whitaker-ran-a-chop-shop-of-fake-ethics-complaints
Being investigated for fraud over his involvement with a Miami patent company: washingtonpost/federal-investigators-scrutinized-whitakers-role-in-patent-company-accused-of-fraud-according-to-people-with-knowledge-of-case
Advocated using DOJ/FBI powers to attack Trump’s political opposition, including dredging up crazy theories for fueling witch hunts against Hillary: vox/matthew-whitaker-trump-hillary-clinton-sessions-attorney-general
More on the Options & Strategies the Dems are Weighing
They want to hear from the DOJ ethics office about this guy Whitaker: dem-leaders-request-formal-update-from-doj-watchdog-on-whether-whitaker, plus more of what the Dems are saying are seen in these excerpts from matthew-whitaker-russia-mueller-democrats:
Top congressional Democrats demanded on Sunday that President Trump’s acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, recuse himself from overseeing the special counsel investigation, and vowed to use their newfound powers as the incoming House majority to block him from interfering with it. The incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, vowed to make Mr. Whitaker the panel’s first witness when the new Congress convenes in January — and subpoena him if necessary. The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, said Democrats would investigate Mr. Whitaker, a Trump loyalist who has repeatedly and explicitly criticized the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race. “The questions we will ask him will be about his expressed hostility to the investigation, and how he can possibly supervise it when he’s expressed, when he’s come out and said the investigation is invalid,” Mr. Nadler said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” And Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, warned that if Mr. Whitaker did not step aside, Democrats would attach legislation protecting the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to a must-pass spending bill. But Mr. Schumer stopped short of saying that Democrats would shut down the government if such legislation did not pass.
“The appointment of Mr. Whitaker should concern every American,” Mr. Schumer said on “State of the Union,” adding that if Mr. Whitaker continues to oversee the inquiry, “he will create a constitutional crisis by inhibiting Mueller or firing Mueller.” “So,” Mr. Schumer added, “Congress has to act.” As they prepare to take control of the House, Democrats are trying to strike a delicate balance between pressing ahead with their legislative agenda and investigating an administration that has operated for two years without any real oversight from Congress. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader who hopes to become speaker, insisted on Sunday that Democrats do not intend to play politics with their investigatory powers. Mr. Whitaker’s appointment went outside the usual Justice Department plan of succession. Ordinarily, Rod J. Rosenstein, who had protected the Russia inquiry as deputy attorney general, would have ascended to the top job. Unlike Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff, lacks Senate confirmation. Democrats say the appointment is unconstitutional. If he doesn’t recuse himself, if he has any involvement whatsoever in this Russia probe, we are going to find out,” Mr. Schiff warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding, “Mr. Whitaker needs to understand that he will be called to answer, and any role that he plays will be exposed to the public.” Mr. Schumer said he and Ms. Pelosi, along with other Democrats, were sending a letter to the top ethics officer at the Justice Department, asking whether he had advised Mr. Whitaker to withdraw. The department’s ethics official had advised Mr. Sessions to withdraw from overseeing the investigation shortly after he took office last year, given his role in the Trump campaign, and Mr. Trump never forgave Mr. Sessions for stepping aside.
Jerry Nadler
When the Dems take over the House, Nadler is correct in wanting to interview Whitaker as his first witness, since the top priority is protecting the Mueller investigation! Dems can put him & other witnesses under oath using their subpoena power, something a weak & compromised GOP majority on the judiciary & intel committees refused to do. Plus Nadler is sounding the right tone over potential impeachment, as seen in excerpts from inside nadler-whitaker-will-be-first-witness-summoned-by-the-judiciary-committee:
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who is poised to take control of the House Judiciary Committee in January, said Sunday that he plans to call acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker as his first witness. The hearing would focus on Whitaker’s “expressed hostility” to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, which Nadler called “a real threat to the integrity of that investigation.” The Democrat said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he is prepared to subpoena Whitaker if necessary. Whitaker, who was named acting attorney general after Jeff Sessions stepped down last week, has been a controversial pick because of his vocal and written criticism of the Mueller probe. In his new role, Whitaker will supervise the investigation, absorbing the responsibility from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who was overseeing it only because Sessions had recused himself. Nadler said he saw “lots of potential” for impeaching Trump but that any move in that direction would be premature until the special counsel finished his investigation. Moreover, Nadler said, he wouldn’t move forward until there was enough evidence that, when presented to the American people, “a large fraction of people who voted for the president will grudgingly acknowledge to themselves and others that there was no choice but to impeach the president.”
Yes, House Dems will be Investigating
With this compulsively corrupt administration, there’s a lot to look at, so do a search on any of these articles that might interest you…
Don’t be fooled by the denials, Whitaker was picked for AG of DOJ to sabotage Mueller: salon/trump-mueller-and-matt-whitaker-whats-next-in-d-c-s-high-stakes-chess-match
He does need to be monitored very closely: washingtonpost/adam-schiff-matthew-whitaker-were-watching-you
Check with DOJ ethics since this guy violates any & all statutes: washingtonpost/top-hill-democrats-demand-to-know-whether-doj-ethics-chief-told-whitaker-to-step-aside-on-russia
We need to find out the extent of Trump’s lawlessness: washingtonpost/accountability-is-finally-coming-to-the-trump-administration-its-members-should-be-terrified
Rubin makes 4 points: washingtonpost/four-guidelines-for-democrats-oversight
And here are 12 targets: washingtonpost/readers-guide-trump-administration-targets-house-democrats-are-preparing-investigate
In January the Dems take charge: washingtonpost/the-other-shoe-has-never-dropped-on-trump-january-could-change-that
Money Laundering? Don’t be surprised: motherjones/house-democrats-may-investigate-alleged-trump-ties-to-russian-money-laundering
A ridiculous claim, as there’s no connection whatsoever: businessinsider/trump-stock-market-dow-jones-democrats-investigating
And below are excerpts from this article: washingtonpost/what-house-democrats-need-to-do
This is not about Democrats going “hard left,” a phrase we’ll hear a lot on Fox News. What unites the staunch progressives and their less overtly ideological brethren who won many of last week’s contests is a desire to demonstrate that government, used intelligently, can make life better for the vast majority. Finding common ground across the center-left, one of the political imperatives of the new majority, does not mean least-common-denominator politics. It means agreeing on steps in the right direction: more people with health care, higher wages and family leave; more with an unimpeded right to vote; more feeling safer from violence; more with confidence that our system is not a cesspool. Democrats are also being counseled against becoming the all-investigations-all-the-time party. But these admonitions assume that the party’s leaders are, well, idiots. It won’t be difficult to use the normal course of House business to hold hearings that expose both the policy failures of the Trump presidency and the corruption he has fostered. Committee chairmen should carefully time the inquiries so that scandals don’t push each other aside and thereby fail to penetrate the public consciousness.
There should be a heavy emphasis on how Trump has betrayed his core promises — to stand up for forgotten Americans to whom he has delivered nothing but hateful demagoguery, most recently his evanescent interest in “caravans”; and to drain a swamp he is in fact polluting even more. All this would be easier if the rule of law did not face such a dire threat from Trump. His almost certainly illegal appointment of the swampy Matthew G. Whitaker as acting attorney general represents just such a peril. Given the Senate’s sycophancy toward Trump, it falls to the House, the media and lower-court judges to protect us from autocracy. (We’ll learn whether the Supreme Court can live up to its constitutional responsibilities.) It is dangerously false to argue that Democrats must choose between legislating and holding Trump accountable. History gives them no choice but to do all they can to stop Trump from wrecking special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry, destroying evidence and politicizing law enforcement. If the president says the price of a decent infrastructure bill is Democratic acquiescence to law-breaking, let Trump pay the cost of breaking one of his signature pledges. It’s in his interest to build those roads and bridges.
Watergate Comparisons & Will Some in GOP Step Up?
Important lessons we can draw from Watergate are seen inside protecting-mueller-investigation-trump-constitutional-crisis.
And here are excerpts taken from Bloomberg’s Republican Tolerance for Despotism Keeps Rising:
It’s now Trump’s Republican Party, mean-spirited, bigoted and ethically challenged. We know Trump’s character, so the focus should be on the enablers in the party, such as: Paul Ryan, The right-wing House Freedom Caucus, Senator Ted Cruz, and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. One staunch conservative Republican who refused to act as a Trump lackey and who paid the price is Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina. He thinks the Trump dominance will prove ephemeral. “We’ve seen this (nationalism/populism) before and it doesn’t last,” said Sanford, who was beaten in the GOP primary. “The Trump effect won’t be long term.” This can happen only if some Republicans find their spines and souls. The day after the election, Trump gave them an opening to do this when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions (or, more precisely, the ever cowardly president had his chief of staff do the deed), replacing him with a loyalist hack who now will oversee the special counsel. There was only one reason to get rid of Sessions: to sabotage Mueller and protect Trump, who clearly has something to hide. (If only the president knew any history, a role model would be the New Jersey political boss, Frank “I am the law” Hague.)
There is a simple way Republicans can show some mettle: if five senators — starting with Maine’s Susan Collins, who complains it’s unacceptable to impede Mueller but does little about it — say they won’t vote for anther federal judge until legislation is enacted guaranteeing the independence of the special counsel. The model is the 1973 set of conditions laid down by Republicans for a special counsel investigating Richard Nixon. That would require Republicans who have built reputations for integrity, decency and principled values, like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Ohio’s Rob Portman, to decide they no longer, under the phony pretense of party loyalty, can continue to acquiesce in a despotic regime. History will determine whether they are a source of pride or embarrassment to their grandchildren. For now, we need to vigorously hold these Republican feet to the fire.
Trump always distances himself from those mired in controversy
He never has anyone’s back! When the controversy swirled immediately upon the appointment of Whitaker, Trump distanced himself from his pick by lying about knowing him, seen in this post from trump-denies-knowing-whitaker-who-he-met-a-dozen-times:
Two days after he hired a transparent political hack to run the Justice Department, President Trump has failed to come up with a remotely plausible cover story. “I didn’t speak to Matt Whitaker about” the Russia investigation, Trump told reporters this morning, “I don’t know Matt Whitaker. Matt Whitaker has a great reputation and that’s what I wanted.” None of those things are true. Whitaker does not have a “great reputation.” He lost a race to be the Iowa Republican Senate nominee in 2014, and spent the next few years working for a scam patent company that was shut down as a fraud while getting Trump’s attention by engaging in low-rent pro-Trump punditry that he leveraged into a chief of staff job. Trump does know Whitaker, and has spoken about the Russia investigation with him. “As Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker met with the president in the Oval Office more than a dozen times, normally accompanying the attorney general, according to a senior administration official,” the Washington Post reported yesterday. “When Trump complained about the Mueller investigation, Whitaker often smiled knowingly and nodded in assent, the official said.” Last month, Trump told Fox News, “I know Matt Whitaker.” At the same appearance this morning, CNN reporter Abby Phillip asked Trump if he wants Whitaker to rein in Robert Mueller. Given that Trump publicly demanded his last attorney general stop Mueller, and that Whitaker has publicly called for Mueller’s last supervisor to reign him in, this seems like a fair question. Trump responded by calling the question stupid and attacking Phillip.
Plenty of Evidence for Crimes Committed!
The Mueller probe stretches on, partly due to Trump continuing to commit crimes, adding to the case special counsel has against him for obstruction of justice: matthew-whitaker-russia-investigation-donald-trump-robert-mueller. We have also seen solid evidence of felonious campaign finance violations with Trump directly involved in hush money payments to his mistresses, plus circumstantial evidence of collusion with the Russians, but there are serious concerns about Whitaker wanting to bury these various reports of criminal activities implicating the prez: feds-now-have-evidence-trump-broke-the-law-to-become-president-will-whitaker-bury-it.
Late word has it Trump’s legal team is finally turning in answers to Mueller from those written questions. As we wait on Mueller’s report & a series of indictments to be handed down, here is the strongest proof so far inside these links of Trump committing a criminal felony:
https://www.salon.com/2018/11/10/report-trump-was-directly-involved-in-cohen-hush-money_partner/
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/donald-trump-stormy-daniels-hush-money#~o
With Trump’s direct involvement in criminal campaign finance violations by coordinating payoffs to his mistresses, since he kept lying about knowing anything about it, that indicates it’s also quite likely he’s lying about knowing anything about the collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign. Such points are brought out in this post taken from did-trumps-deal-ami-break-campaign-finance-laws:
It is a strange turn of events when a president famous for denouncing “fake news” is discovered to have entered into an agreement with a media organization to finance the concealment of very real but politically unfavorable newsworthy information. The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump entered into an explicit agreement with the chairman of American Media (AMI), David Pecker, to help his campaign by buying off women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. AMI came through: It paid Karen McDougal $150,000 to “catch and kill” her account of an affair with Trump. She did not know at the time that the background agreement between AMI and Trump existed, but was instead told that in addition to compensation for the exclusive rights to her story and an option for columns on fitness and health, she would be the featured model on two magazine covers. The deal that Trump reached and executed with AMI violates federal campaign-finance laws. AMI made an illegal corporate in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign, and the campaign and Trump share in the liability by accepting this illegal support. As open-and-shut cases go, this one is high on the list. But this is only part of what makes this a remarkable episode in the history of presidential-campaign lawbreaking. For a candidate to break corporate-spending rules in a matter like this, involving friendly media organizations and embarrassing details about his personal life, is no mean feat. The relevant law is generally favorable to the candidate. Trump still managed to violate it.
The AMI episode has some bearing in one other respect on what we might understand about Trump’s personal complicity in yet another legal problem for the president: the Russian electoral intervention in 2016. In that case, as in the McDougal and Daniels matters, he denied any involvement in legally questionable activity. He specifically disclaimed any knowledge of the Russian government’s offer of help for his campaign that culminated in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. He denied knowing of or approving in advance the meeting, or being briefed afterward about the outcome. It was never credible that the candidate who ran the personal fiefdom called the Trump Organization as a one-man-show would be uninformed and uninvolved in a strategically sensitive matter so important to his campaign. The Journalreporting on Trump’s active, detailed engagement in the McDougal and Daniels payoffs confirms that this is not how he operates. It gives powerful additional reason to disbelieve his outright denial of participation in the Russian contacts. In the meantime, this president, self-appointed scourge of the press, must face the legal consequences of his political deals with at least one—perhaps two—media organization. He might not normally worry too much about causing trouble for the media, except that he has also caused serious legal trouble for himself.
Is Manafort trying to pull a fast one?
It appears that way when reading paul-manafort-stalling-cooperation-with-mueller-trump-russia-matthew-whitaker. We’re also left to wonder to what extent Manafort’s legal team coordinated with Trump’s legal team in strategizing the suppression of some of the most critical evidence.
International Dangers
Russians continue to exploit our differences, sowing division & influencing our nation with misinformation: russian-trolls-putin-trump-twitter-hamilton.
Remember when Trump signed that vague looking paper with Jong Un in Singapore, then upon returning home claimed North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat? Well, as expected, that whole circus facade was a clown-show charade. We now have satellite images proving North Korea has been building several missile bases. For details, do a search for these articles:
thehill/think-tank-identifies-13-undeclared-missile-bases-in-north-korea
vox/north-korea-missile-report-trump-csis-base-seoul
time/north-korea-secret-missile-sites
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