TWGB: He is an Obstruction

 

I didn't post anything this weekend because I'm getting over some kind of extremely fatiguing chesty coughing situation, and also, too, when Trump compared himself to Nelson Mandela, my brain just kept frantically hitting the "NOPE" button.  Oh, hell no, we are not talking about how Trump is not Jesus followed by how he is not Madiba. Trump is not the oppressed. Trump is far from a founder of this country--he;s a homewrecker. Then, the House Judiciary Committee posted Trump as the whole mammy-jamming eclipse.  A blockhead who blocks the sun. 

Well done, cult members. You've finally described him correctly. He's a temporary obstruction blocking daylight: but daylight will prevail. 

Yep, one of the constant stories of these TrumpWorld grab-bags is Trump, the obstructer. The delayer. He is only transparent to the effect that he desperately despises transparency. And you can easily see that part--the NDAs, the Byzantine business structure, the Omerta, the stalling subpoenas and other dilatory bids of various kinds, all throughout his business and political career. 

Yesterday's Durham Hearing Was Interesting

 

MAGA wants Durham to be someone he is not and say something he cannot. pic.twitter.com/AJFhrKDf3a

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 22, 2023

There's the rub--at bottom, you can't actually deny the evidence of Russia interfering. What you can do, is ignore the evidence of willingness to accept that interference on behalf of the Trump campaign, but at the risk of seeming out of one's depths--as if it were possible to investigate an investigation and come up knowing nothing about it. Even fash-friendly five-head Matt Gaetz was wondering what Durham had been doing with this time. (ALthough he alleged a "cover-up".)

Or you can make false statements to congress because there are just some things you can't say about Trump and Russia--you know, like it never was a hoax. 

After all, Congressional Republicans just censured Rep. Adam Schiff for just that--telling the truth. And for what it's worth, for all the giddy Republicans who noted that Trump's poll numbers and fundraising could benefit from the indictments against him--how do they think a transparently unfair censure of Rep. Schiff is going to make loyal Democrats react? 

This is where the House GOP is now, Speaker McCarthy barely has a grip on his folks, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were inches from a catfight over the privilege and pleasure of impeaching President Biden for...something. Eating crackers, I guess. (They also want to expunge Trump's impeachment, but we will always remember the "perfect phone call.")

What's that tv quote going around? These are not "serious people".

TWGB: Trump Has Some Explaining To Do

 

Now, it might seem like I'm writing a TrumpWorld Grab-Bag because I can't find a hook for the debt ceiling vote that took place, and you'd be exactly right! I hate writing about debt ceiling brinkmanship because it feels a little like "Hey let's pretend we're about to violate the Constitution and shiv the economy to let people know who the real patriots are." 

That's insane, right? Like undermining the courts or the DOJ, or defunding law enforcement or pretending our elections are rigged, all without real proof, this is kind of seditious, you know? And it doesn't really surprise me that the same MAGA Freedom Caucus who did wild stuff like support not certifying Biden's win and some of whom even asked for pardons from Trump? Are down with hijacking the cockpit and bringing our economy down, Flight 93 style. 

They are ideological terrorists. I don't think you could persuade them that fucking up the US economy is wrong because it hurts their constituents and even has ripples in the entire world economy. They have stockpiled guns and freeze-dried beanie-weinies.  They feel good. They are waiting on some kind of political rapture. Maybe that looks like the Second Coming of Trump. I'm not even a good Christian, and that feels all kinds of blasphemous to me. 

TWGB: Here's the Report

 

The long-anticipated January 6th Committee Final report is out and it's here at this link.  At 800-something pages, it sounds like it would be pretty hefty, but you can blast past the copious footnotes just to get the narrative of the thing--and of course, if you watched the televised hearings, you already know a lot of what it in there. 

The bottom line is: everything comes down to the former president--but we knew that. TrumpWorld knew it too--they protected Trump. Take the odd case of former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson's legal counsel, who definitely was interested in her protecting Trump, not in her best legal interests. As in, that's point blank what he said:

“We just want to focus on protecting the president,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House lawyer who represented her during her early interactions with the committee, telling her.

There's probably a lot of that going around. It's been likened to mob lawyers and I don't see a problem with the analogy. 

I'm seeing some complaints from people who've blogged or reported on the events surrounding the 1/6 insurrection who are concerned about what the report doesn't show, but I think there has to be a limit to how many rabbit holes one wants to jump in and the committee had to pick and choose between things that could actually be usefully examined and addressed. How do you solve a problem like, for example Ginni Thomas? 

I'm not sure there was a good recommendation, there. Same with trying to tease out what can be revealed from all those folks who plead the fifth or thought that contempt was the better part of valor. 

To me, the most interesting parts are left for the end of the report, the sections labeled Appendix Three, The Big Rip-Off: Follow the Money and Appendix Four, Malign Foreign Influence. This is because the two recurring themes I come back to over and over again is that Trump is a confidence trickster, and that Putin's government wants the US owned by a confidence trickster. Trump encouraged his faithful little marks to give their money to a scheme to undermine this country. Trump gets to use that money for his legal expenses, they, for their part, get to participate in sedition. 

The RNC, and many GOP elected, had only been too happy to go along with a swindle that they had to know was not true. Trump himself knew he had lost and admitted as much. Fox News, one of the biggest spreaders of the voter fraud fertilizer and now facing a defamation lawsuit, has had their on-air personalities admit they knew better.  I don't for a minute think that the Republican congress people (not even Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, etc.) cared what was true. 

But at what cost to national security? Because you can't support a divisive fraud and not weaken us a country. One of my major premises has been that if you accept that Putin supports Trump (and vice versa) you also have to accept that you are no longer putting America first, because there simply is no reason to believe that Putin gives one shit about the best interests of the US. It's far more likely he is against them. 

This is why I have likened the GOP in the TWGB series to sunshine patriots that talk boldly of their love of country but run like Josh Hawley when asked to do one actual tough thing to defend it--or rather, a thing that wouldn't even be so tough, only scrupulous. It's also why I grit my teeth at the claim that no Republicans "of good standing" were on the committee, when apparently the price of that good standing was fealty to a bloody-minded fraud. 

Durham Didn't Deliver

 

Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann is acquitted of lying to the FBI in the first trial of special counsel John Durham's investigation https://t.co/ddFPzN2GgS

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) May 31, 2022

Every now and then I just stop myself in the middle of whatever I'm doing and ponder that there is a subset of people in this country who genuinely are like: "Why would there be an investigation into the Trump campaign possibly coordinating with Russian intelligence like that was a bad thing or something?" as if, and no, I don't know how this happened, they do not understand that yes, this would be a bad thing.

While the forewoman of the jury has a point that the charges were a waste of time, I guess we did find out one new thing--the Alfa Bank traffic thing is still kind of a puzzle. But what kind of investigation goes on for three years and at best serves up something that feels like "it should be a crime to do opposition research on Trump, for reasons." Like, the real crime here is noticing that something looks bad. And then for fuck's sake talking about it. 

The hilarity I feel is that this is a standard that doesn't seem to exist with anyone else. I keep saying, "it looks bad because it is bad" because Trump defenders seem to have come to the belief that any criticism or claim against Trump (and associates) is automatically partisan or illegitimate. And yet, from George Papadopoulos to Paul Manafort to Mike Flynn, to OMG Don Jr.'s bizarre sit-down at Trump Tower, from Michael Cohen's Trump Tower Moscow dealings to Jeff Sessions' denial of Russian contacts when he had net with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, to Trump's very public "Russia if you're listening..." shenanigans, etc. something was very obviously up with them. 

Screw the Steele dossier (which plays a part in a future Durham production number); in retrospect the worst things we've learned about the Trump crew came from their very own words and actions. What Durham's doing is a distraction to point fingers at the Clinton campaign or the FBI, but it boils down to something that isn't really criminal, just sad:

No fair peeking at Mr. Trump. No fair telling on him! 

The investigation just has the flavor of a burnt offering to satisfy the palate of the toddler Trump, who insists that everything is rigged against him, and everyone is being so unfair, and he deserves a do-over because of all the big meanies who expected him to not be corrupt and stuff and to be held accountable. 

So, of course Trump's defenders now claim the trial was rigged. The jury was predisposed to be against the Trump campaign. So unfair. Because they still don't get it. The Clinton campaign had every right to be critical (it was a political campaign they were trying to win, for crying out loud) of what turned out to be true: it looked bad.

It was.  Nothing changes that. 

An Obstructed Trumpworld Grab-Bag

I'm not one of those folks who would begrudge people claiming their Constitutional rights, nor am a person who confuses allegations with confirmations of wrongdoing. (I agree with Frances Langum--it's totally within Mike Flynn's rights to refuse to comply with a request if he thinks it will potentially hold himself liable.  I will add that if he wants to cite "escalating public frenzy" as his reason for non-compliance, it seems pretty weird because he used other people's non-compliance and allegations of wrong-doing as just enough predicate to incite others to "frenzy", so--there's that working against his logic. )

But this is only tangentially about General Flynn. It's mainly about what President Trump did when people started looking into Gen. Flynn, which is interesting because as we all know, Trump fired Comey, who was looking into Flynn's connections with Russia, and he tried to tell him not to investigate that anymore.  But then, it turns out, he tried to get the heads of other intelligence agencies to do what they could to stop the inquiry. That adds to the idea that there was obstruction, because now we have the start of a pattern of obstruction.

On Flynn's part, he is doing his thing--not talking. It kind of makes me wonder if Trump's message to Flynn, "Stay strong", was code for "Sta' zitto".  If so, message received! But it looks like Flynn has always had an instinct for when to stay silent. And that's another part of the problem, if Manafort and Stone are giving up what they have...

(I dunno where Carter Page went--anyone else?) Well--what does it mean when people who talk a lot start to play mum? What has Trump and Flynn said? Nothing good.

Lessons of scandals past advise us that the devil isn't even always the scandal, but the cover-up. And I think it's starting to look too much like there's a cover-up. But these guys are insanely private.  Aren't they?  Everything starts to look like a red flag.