The Trump 2024 thread...

[Chuck Naill]

I read the Trump team was hopeful that Cannon would have been the judge.

[724Seney]

I read the Trump team was hopeful that Cannon would have been the judge.

So what?
It's not a matter of who the Trump team may have wanted to be the judge, it's a matter of who was the judge!

[Chuck Naill]

Regarding classified documents abstracted from HRC today,

"On January 18, Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob wrote to the acting director of NARA that “a small number of documents bearing classified markings…were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former Vice President at the end of the last Administration. Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence…and stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”

The letter says that, after hearing about the discovery of documents marked classified in Biden’s possession, Pence, “out of an abundance of caution,” hired lawyers with experience in handling classified documents to look through records stored in his home. When they turned up such documents, they locked them up “pending further direction on proper handling from the National Archives.”

The letter ended: “Vice President Pence has directed his representatives to work with the National Archives to ensure their prompt and secure return. Vice President Pence appreciates the good work of the staff at the National Archives and trusts they will provide proper counsel in response to this letter.”

"Law professor and legal commentator Ryan Goodman tweeted: “This is how you keep your client out of jail.” He added: “Like the known facts in Biden case, the strong contrast with Trump's conduct shows why Trump is in so much legal jeopardy and stands to be indicted.”

[TSherbs]

Regarding classified documents abstracted from HRC today,

"On January 18, Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob wrote to the acting director of NARA that “a small number of documents bearing classified markings…were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former Vice President at the end of the last Administration. Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence…and stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”

The letter says that, after hearing about the discovery of documents marked classified in Biden’s possession, Pence, “out of an abundance of caution,” hired lawyers with experience in handling classified documents to look through records stored in his home. When they turned up such documents, they locked them up “pending further direction on proper handling from the National Archives.”

The letter ended: “Vice President Pence has directed his representatives to work with the National Archives to ensure their prompt and secure return. Vice President Pence appreciates the good work of the staff at the National Archives and trusts they will provide proper counsel in response to this letter.”

"Law professor and legal commentator Ryan Goodman tweeted: “This is how you keep your client out of jail.” He added: “Like the known facts in Biden case, the strong contrast with Trump's conduct shows why Trump is in so much legal jeopardy and stands to be indicted.”

Anyone considering a run for president who has had access to classified documents needs to hire a lawyer to conduct a records search and hand over anything found. Easy as that. Pence did the right thing. Assuming that he has found everything, all should be okay.

We have learned, basically, that these folks have been sloppy with classified documents for years (decades?). The Trump problem was how long he delayed responding to requests (or incompletely responded). He was stonewalling, for some reason. Finally, there comes additional penalties for delays when delay becomes a form of refusal. Pence is making sure that he does not end up in that position, which is the right way to handle it.

[TSherbs]

No surprise here:

MTG angling to be Trump's VP pick

https://news.yahoo.com/marjorie-tayl...160036029.html

[Chuck Naill]

Almost every day I read Trump's appeal for Republicans is shrinking. So, what does MTG have to lose? Nothing. What she gains is attention.

Also, Ted, HCR's post today discusses the Trump/Russia investigation and Barr's actions. Of course, we always knew the connection, but many were made to believe otherwise. If he gets close again, I would expect the same sort of relationships to develop.

And:

"In a powerful Twitter thread today, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder noted that authorities, as well as the American people, have not taken the threat of Russian influence in our politics seriously enough. He pointed out that in 2016, McCarthy himself i said he thought Putin was paying Trump, and now, just after the McGonigal story broke, McCarthy threw Adam Schiff—who was key in chasing down Trump’s machinations over Ukraine—off the House intelligence committee. “Schiff is [an] expert on Russian influence operations,” Snyder wrote. “It exhibits carelessness about national security to exclude him. It is downright suspicious to exclude him now.”

Meanwhile, newly elected House Republican Cory Mills of Florida, endorsed by Trump, handed out defused grenades today on the floor of the House. Mills is an election denier who boasted on his website that he sold tear gas used on Black Lives Matter protesters. Mills accompanied the grenades with a note suggesting he was sending them because McCarthy has put him on the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees."

HCR

I have Snyder's "On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century." I highly recommend.

[Chip]

Here's an excerpt from a rather long piece, on Trump's Russia connections and the various investigations, with a gift link so there shouldn't be a paywall.

How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled

The review by John Durham at one point veered into a criminal investigation related to Donald Trump himself, even as it failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.

By Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner
Jan. 26, 2023

WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office. But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and Ms. Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.

A year into the Durham inquiry, Mr. Barr declared that the attempt “to get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016 “cannot be, and it will not be, a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower the standards just to achieve a result.” But Robert Luskin, a criminal defense lawyer and former Justice Department prosecutor who represented two witnesses Mr. Durham interviewed, said that he had a hard time squaring Mr. Durham’s prior reputation as an independent-minded straight shooter with his end-of-career conduct as Mr. Barr’s special counsel.

“This stuff has my head spinning,” Mr. Luskin said. “When did these guys drink the Kool-Aid, and who served it to them?”

An Odd Couple

A month after Mr. Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election. Mr. Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.

That spring, Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation. “A lot of the answers have been inadequate, and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he added. While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.

In some ways, they were an odd match. Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. Administrations of both parties had assigned him to investigate potential official wrongdoing, like allegations of corrupt ties between mafia informants and F.B.I. agents, and the C.I.A.’s torture of terrorism detainees and destruction of evidence.

By contrast, the vocal and domineering Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.

But the two shared a worldview: They are both Catholic conservatives and Republicans, born two months apart in 1950. As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.

‘The Thinnest of Suspicions’

At the time Mr. Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority. In May 2019, soon after giving Mr. Durham his assignment, Mr. Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul M. Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Mr. Barr demanded that the N.S.A. cooperate with the Durham inquiry.

Referring to the C.I.A. and British spies, Mr. Barr also said he suspected that the N.S.A.’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said. And repeating a sexual vulgarity, he warned that if the N.S.A. wronged him by not doing all it could to help Mr. Durham, Mr. Barr would do the same to the agency. Mr. Barr’s insistence about what he had surmised bewildered intelligence officials. But Mr. Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign.

Mr. Durham’s team spent long hours combing the C.I.A.’s files but found no way to support the allegation. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.

Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation. The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light. (Mr. Durham’s team later negotiated a guilty plea by that lawyer.)

But the broader findings contradicted Mr. Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Mr. Durham’s inquiry. Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.

Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, found no evidence that the F.B.I.’s actions in opening the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were politically motivated. The week before Mr. Horowitz released the report, he and aides came to Mr. Durham’s offices — nondescript suites on two floors of a building in northeast Washington — to go over it.

Mr. Durham lobbied Mr. Horowitz to drop his finding that the diplomat’s tip had been sufficient for the F.B.I. to open its “full” counterintelligence investigation, arguing that it was enough at most for a “preliminary” inquiry, according to officials. But Mr. Horowitz did not change his mind.

That weekend, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided to weigh in publicly to shape the narrative on their terms. Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Mr. Barr issued a statement contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the F.B.I. opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.” He would later tell Fox News that the investigation began “without any basis,” as if the diplomat’s tip never happened.

Mr. Trump also weighed in, telling reporters that the details of the inspector general’s report were “far worse than anything I would have even imagined,” adding: “I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. It’s got its own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus.”

And the Justice Department sent reporters a statement from Mr. Durham that clashed with both Justice Department principles about not discussing ongoing investigations and his personal reputation as particularly tight-lipped. He said he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions about the Russia investigation’s origins, citing his own access to more information and “evidence collected to date.” But as Mr. Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which F.B.I. officials opened the investigation.

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all.

(Continued at link)



https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/u...e=articleShare

[Chip]

Another interesting bit: the FBI agent who supervised investigations into Russian connections got arrested for hiding his own Russian links.

From 2016 before the election:



Reaction:




Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, January 23, 2023

Former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI New York Counterintelligence Division Charged with Violating U.S. Sanctions on Russia

A Russian Court and Government Interpreter Also Charged with Violating U.S. Sanctions on Russia

A former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI New York Counterintelligence Division and a former Soviet and Russian diplomat were arrested Saturday on criminal charges related to their alleged violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.

According to court documents, Charles F. McGonigal, 54, of New York City, and Sergey Shestakov, 69, of Morris, Connecticut, are charged in a five-count indictment unsealed today in the Southern District of New York with violating and conspiring to violate the IEEPA, and with conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.

According to court documents, on April 6, 2018, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Oleg Deripaska as a Specially Designated National (SDN) in connection with its finding that the actions of the Government of the Russian Federation with respect to Ukraine constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. According to the U.S. Treasury, Deripaska was sanctioned for having acted or purported to act on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation and for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.

McGonigal is a former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York who retired in 2018. While working at the FBI, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. Sergey Shestakov is a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who later became a U.S. citizen and a Russian interpreter for courts and government offices.

In 2021, McGonigal and Shestakov conspired to provide services to Deripaska, in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed on Deripaska in 2018. Specifically, following their negotiations with an agent of Deripaska, McGonigal and Shestakov agreed to and did investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments from Deripaska. As part of their negotiations with Deripaska’s agent, McGonigal, Shestakov and the agent attempted to conceal Deripaska’s involvement by, among other means, not directly naming Deripaska in electronic communications, using shell companies as counterparties in the contract that outlined the services to be performed, using a forged signature on that contract and using the same shell companies to send and receive payment from Deripaska.

McGonigal and Shestakov were aware that their actions violated U.S. sanctions because, among other reasons, while serving as SAC, McGonigal received then-classified information that Deripaska would be added to a list of oligarchs considered for sanctions as part of the process that led to the imposition of sanctions against Deripaska. In addition, in 2019, McGonigal and Shestakov worked on behalf of Deripaska in an unsuccessful effort to have the sanctions against Deripaska lifted. In November 2021, when FBI agents questioned Shestakov about the nature of his and McGonigal’s relationship with Deripaska’s agent, Shestakov made false statements in a recorded interview.

McGonigal and Shestakov are charged in the Southern District of New York with one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the IEEPA, one count of violating IEEPA, one count of conspiring to commit money laundering and one count of money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Shestakov is also charged with one count of making false statements, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Shestakov and McGonigal were arrested in New York on Saturday and will make their initial court appearances this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave in Manhattan federal court.

The FBI is investigating the case, with valuable assistance provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection as well as the New York City Police Department.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/forme...d-violating-us

[Chuck Naill]

Those of us paying attention already knew.

[TSherbs]

Office of Public Affairs[/SIZE][/B]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, January 23, 2023

Former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI New York Counterintelligence Division Charged with Violating U.S. Sanctions on Russia

A Russian Court and Government Interpreter Also Charged with Violating U.S. Sanctions on Russia

A former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI New York Counterintelligence Division and a former Soviet and Russian diplomat were arrested Saturday on criminal charges related to their alleged violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.

According to court documents, Charles F. McGonigal, 54, of New York City, and Sergey Shestakov, 69, of Morris, Connecticut, are charged in a five-count indictment unsealed today in the Southern District of New York with violating and conspiring to violate the IEEPA, and with conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.

According to court documents, on April 6, 2018, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Oleg Deripaska as a Specially Designated National (SDN) in connection with its finding that the actions of the Government of the Russian Federation with respect to Ukraine constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. According to the U.S. Treasury, Deripaska was sanctioned for having acted or purported to act on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation and for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.

McGonigal is a former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York who retired in 2018. While working at the FBI, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. Sergey Shestakov is a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who later became a U.S. citizen and a Russian interpreter for courts and government offices.

In 2021, McGonigal and Shestakov conspired to provide services to Deripaska, in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed on Deripaska in 2018. Specifically, following their negotiations with an agent of Deripaska, McGonigal and Shestakov agreed to and did investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments from Deripaska. As part of their negotiations with Deripaska’s agent, McGonigal, Shestakov and the agent attempted to conceal Deripaska’s involvement by, among other means, not directly naming Deripaska in electronic communications, using shell companies as counterparties in the contract that outlined the services to be performed, using a forged signature on that contract and using the same shell companies to send and receive payment from Deripaska.

McGonigal and Shestakov were aware that their actions violated U.S. sanctions because, among other reasons, while serving as SAC, McGonigal received then-classified information that Deripaska would be added to a list of oligarchs considered for sanctions as part of the process that led to the imposition of sanctions against Deripaska. In addition, in 2019, McGonigal and Shestakov worked on behalf of Deripaska in an unsuccessful effort to have the sanctions against Deripaska lifted. In November 2021, when FBI agents questioned Shestakov about the nature of his and McGonigal’s relationship with Deripaska’s agent, Shestakov made false statements in a recorded interview.

McGonigal and Shestakov are charged in the Southern District of New York with one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the IEEPA, one count of violating IEEPA, one count of conspiring to commit money laundering and one count of money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Shestakov is also charged with one count of making false statements, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Shestakov and McGonigal were arrested in New York on Saturday and will make their initial court appearances this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave in Manhattan federal court.

The FBI is investigating the case, with valuable assistance provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection as well as the New York City Police Department.[/FONT]

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/forme...d-violating-us

How much money are we talking about here?

[Chip]

How much money are we talking about here?

A minimum of $225,000 USD. His bail was set at $500,000.

Trump is trying to spin it to smear the FBI as being responsible for his Russian links.

I think McGonigal also had ties to Paul Manafort.

It's a giant rabbit hole, for sure.

[TSherbs]

The two sold their expertise to some oligarch, then tried to hide the payments they received.

Allegedly.

[Chip]

Trump sure has a way with words:

“We need a president who’s ready to hit the ground running on day one and boy, am I hitting the ground,” he told the New Hampshire state Republican party’s annual meeting.

[Chuck Naill]

Trump sure has a way with words:

“We need a president who’s ready to hit the ground running on day one and boy, am I hitting the ground,” he told the New Hampshire state Republican party’s annual meeting.

During my pharma days, a frequent question was, "can you hit the road running on Monday". I found it a bit silly since even if you had the skills, knowing where to run would have been more useful information.

[TSherbs]

How ill prepared Trump was on Day 1, 2017, is legendary.

[Chuck Naill]

How ill prepared Trump was on Day 1, 2017, is legendary.

Anyone who had studied his past would have known he wasn't going to be prepared, and lacked the experience and skills which would have allowed him to be prepared. Team leadership is now more horizontal, where the mission is not about the leader, and where the skills of getting the right people on the bus is essential.

If you begin with a lie about Mexican immigrants, think nothing of disparaging a Gold Star Family, then lie about the size of the crowd that shows up to see you take oath, it's hard to improve from that point.

Next time we have an election, Americans need to study the people for whom they choose to vote. We don't need a perfect person, of course, but competency and clarity of vision rather than resentments should be considered.

[Chuck Naill]

I'll put this here because of its relevance to considering the candidate's qualifications in choosing to get the right people on the bus. Don't hire another Bill Barr.

"One of the other casualties of this deceitful crusade was the deliberate damage it did to the reputations of the F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and officials in Mr. Barr’s own department. All of these agencies have had many problematic episodes in their pasts, but there is no evidence in this case that they willfully tried to smear Mr. Trump and his campaign with false allegations of collusion. They were trying to do their jobs, on which the nation’s security depends, but because they got in Mr. Trump’s way, Mr. Barr aided in degrading their image through a deep-state conspiracy theory before an entire generation of Trump supporters. Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt for proof that these same government offices were “weaponized” against conservatives, an expedition that is likely to be no more effective than Mr. Durham’s and Mr. Barr’s.

But weakening the country’s institutions and safeguards for political benefit is how Mr. Barr did business in the nearly two years he served as the nation’s top law enforcement official under Mr. Trump. He has a long history of making the Justice Department an instrument of his ideology and politics; when he was attorney general in 1992 during the Bush administration, the Times columnist William Safire accused him of leading a “Criminal Cover-up Division” in refusing to appoint an independent counsel to investigate whether the Bush administration had knowingly provided aid to Saddam Hussein that was used to finance the military before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Under Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr did the opposite, demanding that an unnecessary special counsel do the bidding of the White House and trying to steer the investigation to Mr. Trump’s advantage. His efforts came to naught, and so will his campaign to be remembered as a defender of the Constitution."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/o...am-report.html

[Chuck Naill]

I am reading new news about Stormy Daniels. She is the age of a child. That is a 37 year age difference. Who the hell does this sort of stuff? I know! What a crying shame.

[Chuck Naill]

Given the new Cold War with China, the next president needs to be a person with vision which would allow free nations to compete and succeed. Trump has never exemplified the skill set necessary to be the sort of person required to meet this challenge.

[dneal]

Chuck - have you heard of (or heard) Vivek Ramaswamy?