As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
As we await Trump consigliere Barr's redacted Mueller report (now expected Thursday morning), following an aggressive spin campaign by defenders of Putin's puppet, Lawfare's Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes offer nine suggestions for the media on "how not to screw up" their reporting like most did when Barr released his coverup 4- page letter. Here are a just few selected points:
... the press should be careful not to confuse prosecutorial judgment with facts. This was a huge problem at the time of the original Barr letter. A decision not to prosecute someone provides important information about whether a prosecutor believes that a federal offense has been committed and the admissible evidence of that offense is “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction,” as our colleague Paul Rosenzweig has detailed. A 400-page report will contain plenty of other information beyond the top-line conclusion, however. That additional material does not erase the overarching prosecutorial judgment, but neither does the prosecutorial judgment erase whatever additional material the report sets out. The press, in other words, would do well to keep as separate as possible the task of explaining Mueller’s prosecutorial judgment from the task of analyzing and describing the factual record he found. [snip]
... the decision not to prosecute a person for some alleged conduct is not a historical judgment that the conduct didn’t happen. The absence of a conspiracy indictment may mean there was “no collusion,” but it may not mean that. It may mean, rather, that the specific form of “collusion” (whatever that means) doesn’t happen to violate the law or that the evidence of misconduct, while compelling, is insufficient for a criminal case. And even if it does mean “no collusion,” it doesn’t erase the factual record that we already know to exist. The Trump Tower meeting still happened, after all; and the Trump Tower Moscow effort still went on, and Michael Cohen still lied about it. [snip]
... keep in mind that the decision not to prosecute someone based on the factual record does not end the analysis of that record. It just ends the prosecutorial analysis. Mueller’s job as a prosecutor was to investigate and reach decisions about whether or not to bring cases based on that evidence (which is exactly why his apparent decision to hold back on reaching a conclusion as to evidence of obstruction has caused many former prosecutors to scratch their heads). But indictability is not the only legitimate standard of evaluation. It may be perfectly appropriate for Mueller to decline a case and yet for observers to conclude that the conduct at issue merits the opprobrium of all decent people. [snip]
... keep in mind that the declination of criminal charges does not answer counterintelligence questions that the same fact patterns may raise. Repeated contacts between a foreign government and its cutouts and people associated with a political campaign may involve no violation of any law, while at the same time raising serious counterintelligence concerns.It's a good cautionary guide for the media and the public as well.
This would explain a lot about the actions of Trump ass- kisser Sen. Lindsey "Huckleberry" Graham (R-Trump's colon):
An investigation has been ongoing into Republican Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham’s connections to Russia by a number of transparency groups, including money he has used in his political campaigns that would amount to possible felony campaign finance violations.
The Democratic Coalition, one such group led by activist Scott Dworkin, has been elaborating on analysis done in the Dallas Morning News that detailed $800,000 that Graham’s political action committee took from Len Blavatnik, a dual citizen of the US and UK who emigrated from the USSR in the 1970s with his family and returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The report out from the Dem Coalition cites Blavatnik at the outset, and the millions he made from the sale of a private Russian oil company to the state-owned Rosneft. In fact, the Dworkin Report cites many of the key players whose names keep surfacing as the Congressional probes continue: Blavatnik, Viktor Vekselberg, Oleg Deripaska, and the many businesses and shell companies those people have maintained — and contributed to GOP candidates from. (our emphasis)Hmmm, no wonder Huckleberry's so anxious to distract attention from the Mueller report and Trump's Russia connections. What else do the Russians have on him? (Found via blogging brother Tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors.)
Hannah Levintova talks about another constituency being hit by Billy Big Rigger Trump and his Republican wealthfare tax cut? Long- haul truckers:
Trucking is a popular vocation, employing about 3.5 million drivers nationwide, making it, by some counts, the most common job in 29 states. While all but three of those states went to Donald Trump in 2016, the tax overhaul enacted by the president and the GOP Congress in 2017 hit American truck drivers hard by stripping a key exemption for dining and living expenses while on the road. Millions of long-haul drivers employed by trucking companies are finding themselves slapped with massive and unexpected tax bills, according to accountants, professional trucking associations, and drivers.
Virginia Heffernan reminds us why Julian Assange, the not- a-hero, not- a- journalist Russian intelligence cutout, found himself in Ecuador's London embassy in the first place:
Though a prodigy programmer who has worked as a hacker for three decades, Assange, through his lawyers, now maintains that when he collaborated with Manning he was nothing but a journalist working a source, presumably one entitled to constitutional protections.
It should not be lost in the inevitable portrayal of Assange as a 1st Amendment martyr that he originally sought asylum from Ecuador not because of computer meddling but because of allegations that he had committed rape in Stockholm. Sweden, stymied by the protection offered him in the embassy, stopped pursuing the investigation in 2017; on Friday, the chief prosecutor said the case could be reopened.
Assange never claimed with any consistency that the sex-crime charges were trumped up by the global enemies of freedom. Instead, he affected irritation. He denied being a rapist but he admitted in his autobiography to being a “male chauvinist pig.” His Swedish accusers were bitter, he said, because he had spurned them. His ideology seems to include overman privilege with women as a sacred civil liberty.
