Russian Bots and Devin Nunes are working overtime to protect the president. We the people just want the truth.

Those Russian bots are going to get their wish. The republicans in Washington decided to release a controversial and classified memo that seeks to make the investigators look bad and muddy the waters in the investigation of Mr. trump. The democrats have a memo as well, but the republican majority on the intel committee made sure that the democratic version was not released.

Don't you just love American democracy?

This all comes on a day when we learned of the ouster of Andrew McCabe from the FBI. The poor man was investigating Mr. trump, and that is a sure way to get removed from your job in Washington. 

From what we know trump really hated this guy, and he wanted him gone at all cost.


"NBC News is reporting that the day after FBI Director James Comey was fired, President Donald Trump called then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe to complain that Comey was able to fly home on a government plane.

And during the call, he decided to take a shot at McCabe after the acting FBI chief said that while he hadn’t been asked to authorize the flight but would have if asked.

The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.
McCabe replied: “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

This NBC News story comes out just hours after it was reported that McCabe would be  stepping down from his post as deputy FBI director. While McCabe was apparently looking at leaving this spring, his departure comes weeks ahead of schedule and during a time when he’s clearly been in the crosshairs of the president."

Nothing pisses off Mr. trump like folks looking into his Russia connections. Whether it's golden showers or money laundering, we are learning more and more that there has to be some fire to go along with all all this smoke coming from Moscow.   

Of course, as is to be expected, the right-wingnuts are doing their best to protect Mr. trump. Devin Nunes is looking more and more like an individual who is doing his best to undermine democracy and the rule of law while he tries to protect Mr. trump. 

Adam Schiff had this to say:

“We have votes today to politicize the intelligence process. To prohibit the FBI and the department of justice from expressing their concerns to our committee and to the house and to selectively release to the public only the majority’s memo without the full facts. A very sad day I think in the history of this committee. As I said to my committee colleagues during this hearing, sadly, we can fully expect that the President of the United States will not put the national interests over his personal interests, but it is a sad day indeed when that is also true of our own committee because today this committee voted to put the president’s personal interests, perhaps their own political interests above the national interests in denying themselves, even the ability to hear from the department and the FBI.”

I suspect that we are now on an inexorable march to a constitutional crisis. 

Grab your popcorn.

*Pic from voanews.com




 

 

Who do you believe?

President trump has now called James Comey a liar, and he has volunteered to testify under oath to refute what James Comey said while he was under oath.

The question now is which one of these two men do you believe.

The president?

"There’s a high bar to accusing someone of committing a “lie,” and we don’t do it lightly.

A lie isn’t just a false statement. It’s a false statement whose speaker knows it’s false. In these instances, the president — or his administration — have clear reason to know otherwise. Reporters are understandably cautious about using the word — some never do, because it requires speculating on what someone is thinking. The cases we call "lies" are ones where we think it's fair to make that call: Trump is saying something that contradicts clear and widely published information that we have reason to think he's seen. This list also includes bullshit: speech that is — in its academic definition — "unconnected to a concern with the truth.

trump's words: "The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence electoral process."

Lie: Trump posted the above tweet just hours after FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers began testifying about Russian interference in the 2016 election in favor of Trump. Comey testified that the FBI came to believe that Russia was using “active measures” to hurt the Clinton campaign and help the Trump campaign.

“They wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her and help him,” Comey said. “Putin hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much.”

Trump's tweet — and the video clip included with it — is a selective portion of the hearing where Nunes was asking Rogers if he had evidence Russia changed vote tallies in specific states.

Trump's words: “We got 306 because people came out and voted like they’ve never seen before so that’s the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” Trump said during a news conference on Feb. 16.

Lie: Trump actually won 304 electoral votes, because two electors refused to cast their vote for him when the Electoral College met.

Several former presidents have also received more electoral votes than Trump. George H. W. Bush won with 426 electoral votes in 1988. Bill Clinton won 370 votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996, and Barack Obama won with 365 votes in 2008.

When a reporter at the news conference called Trump out for spreading false information, the president said, "Well, I was just given that information. I don’t know. I was just given…We had a very big margin."

Trump's words: Trump tweeted on Sunday, "While on FAKE NEWS @CNN, Bernie Sanders was cut off for using the term fake news to describe the network. They said technical difficulties!"

Senator Sanders was on CNN's Erin Burnett Out Front on Feb. 10, discussing Trump's travel ban and controversy surrounding National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, among other topics.

Lie: During the interview, Burnett showed Sanders a clip of Trump responding to a reporter's question following news that Flynn called the Russian ambassador to the US before the inauguration to discuss previously-imposed sanctions. In the clip, Trump says he has "not seen the report."

Burnett then asked Sanders if it's a problem that the president did not know about the report, in which Sanders criticized Trump for dismissing negative news as "fake news."

CNN PR tweeted a transcript of the interview, which reads:

Burnett: "He says he knows nothing about it, hasn't seen any of these reports. Is that a problem?"

Sanders: "Well, I don't know, maybe he was watching CNN fake news, what do you think?"

Burnett: "You don't buy it?"

Sanders: "That was a joke."

Burnett: "I know it was a joke. I'm saying, you don't buy what he said, obviously?"

Right after Burnett acknowledged that Sanders was joking when he called CNN "fake news," the audio cut out and CNN went to a commercial break. When the show returned, Burnett picked up her interview where they left off and Sanders went on to say it's "not a joke" when "you have a president who attacks people in the media who make critical remarks of him — which is what their jobs is — as providing 'fake news.'"

rump's words: Trump again claimed there was widespread voter fraud during the November election, this time telling senators “thousands” of people were bussed in from Massachusetts to vote in New Hampshire.

Trump made the unsubstantiated claims in a closed-door meeting with 10 senators Thursday to discuss his Supreme Court nomination, Neil Gorsuch, Politico reported.

Trump blamed “thousands” of people who were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to vote illegally in New Hampshire during the meeting, which was also reported by the Associated Press.

Lie: Officials at New Hampshire’s secretary of state office, US Attorney’s Office, and Massachusetts’ attorney general’s office told BuzzFeed News there was no evidence to support the president’s claim.

“We have not seen any evidence of busloads of out-of-state voters coming across the border to vote in New Hampshire elections,” David Scanlan, deputy secretary of state for New Hampshire, said. Read more here.

rump's words: Trump tweeted at 6:57 a.m., "Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie), now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?"

At 8:17 a.m., Trump added, "Chris Cuomo, in this interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave 'service' in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!"

Blumenthal was interviewed on CNN Thursday morning, following his statement from the previous day, in which he said the president's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Gorsuch, said Trump's recent attacks on the judiciary are "disheartening" and "demoralizing."

Lie: Cuomo asked that exact question. His question to Blumenthal was, "What is your response to the president of the United States, who says you should not be believed because you misrepresented your military record in the past?" [Source]

There is lots more where that came from, but I think you get the picture.

James Comey?

James Brien Comey Jr. (born December 14, 1960) is an American lawyer who served as the seventh Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from September 2013 until May 2017.^[2] Comey has been a registered Republican for most of his life, but is now independent.

Comey was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from January 2002 to December 2003, and subsequently the United States Deputy Attorney General from December 2003 to August 2005 in the administration of President George W. Bush. Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to be the Special Counsel to head the grand jury investigation into the Plame affair after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself.

In August 2005, Comey left the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and became general counsel and senior vice president of Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Maryland.^[3] In 2010, he became general counsel at Bridgewater Associates, based in Westport, Connecticut. In early 2013, he left Bridgewater to become a Senior Research Scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security Law at Columbia Law School. He served on the Board of Directors of HSBC Holdings until July 2013.^[4]

In September 2013, Comey was appointed Director of the FBI by President Barack Obama.^[5] In that capacity, he was responsible for overseeing the FBI's investigation of the Hillary Clinton email controversy. His role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, particularly with regard to his public communications, was highly controversial.^[6] His decisions have been regarded by a number of analysts, including Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, to have likely cost Clinton the election.... [Source]

 

I think we have read enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The circus comes to Washington.

The American media has got themselves all up in bunches over the anticipated testimony of former FBI director, James Comey. Over at CNN they have a countdown clock for crying out loud. They are salivating all over themselves in anticipation of the big day.  

I for one believe that this might be one big nothing burger. I mean sure,  he will probably testify to statements trump made to him which could be construed as obstruction of justice, but I don't think that there will be any bombshell Of my God!, moments. There is nothing that anyone can say about this president at this point that could shock the conscience.  We are talking about a guy who bragged about sexually assaulting women and  yet he still got elected president. Let that sink in for a moment.

Thursday should be an interesting day. If Donald is nervous he is not really showing it. He is tweeting now more than ever, and we all are terrified. Even news outlets friendly to him have tried to tell him to cut it out.

Just over the past few days he has lied about what the Mayor of London said after a terrorist attack on his country, he has gone after a key ally in the fight against Isis by siding with the Saudis in a fight with Qatar. A country, by the way, where we have a key US air base which we rely on to fight the war on terror. (Who is going to keep this man off twitter?) It's gotten so bad that even republican lawmakers are now telling him to stay away from the 140 characters way of communicating to the American people.

I hear that trump might be live- tweeting the Comey testimony. He is probably not too nervous about it, because it's his word against Comey's at this point. And he knows that at least 38% of the country will side with him. In that 38% there are enough people to fill gymnasiums for a rally.

 Sadly, that is all our sick egomaniac of a president cares about.

*Pic from nbcnews.com 

  

The obsructor in chief?

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” 
~  Edward R. Murrow ~

I wouldn't say that all of us in the nation are sheep, but there is certainly a large segment of the population that is willing to make the wolves in government have their way.

Everyone is wondering when the republican lawmakers will speak out against trump. (Don't hold your collective breaths.)

I know it's hard to keep up, but once again today there was more bombshell news about the actions of this president.

"The New York Times is reporting that fired FBI Director James Comey claimed in a memo that President Donald Trump directly told him to close an investigation into Trump’s former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.

'I hope you can let this go,” Comey said Trump told him. The President reportedly added, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”' [Source]

Hmmm, let's see now.

~The crime of obstruction of justice, in United States jurisdictions, refers to the crime of obstructing prosecutors or other (usually government) officials. Common law jurisdictions other than the United States tend to use the wider offense of perverting the course of justice.~

So there you have it. If what James Comey is alleging is true, our president might have some explaining to do.

We have yet to see a tweet from the president about these latest stunning revelations. But stay tuned, it's early.

"Trump fatigue" has already set in.

 “Our long national nightmare is over"

With all due respect to Gerald Ford, I honestly believe that our "national nightmare" has just began.

In case you have not been paying attention, the president confirmed today, in an interview with Lester Holt, that all of his minions were either being lied to by him, or just flat out lying to us. Either way it's not good, and the stench is just getting stronger.

Mr. trump declared that he alone decided to fire James Comey, even though all of his spokespeople were busy telling us that some Deputy AG  in the Attorney General's office was the one who pushed for, and was ultimately responsible for Comey getting the boot.  For the record, the fall guy is not pleased, and he apparently does not like the fact that he was used by trump and his people to try and play us.

The bookies in South Philly are already taking bets on the over and under for the amount of days trump will last in office before being impeached (I think that he will limp to the end of his term), and the under is raking in the most bucks right now, but we will see.

Among other things I learned today that Mr. trump asked the man charged with investigating him and his administration- on three different occasions- if he was under investigation. Imagine that for a minute. Remember how upset republicans got when Bill Clinton met Loretta Lynch on that airplane in Phoenix? I do. Regardless of what was said, they moaned, it was not a good look.  And I agree with them, it was not a good look.  But if true, this is far worse, and you won't hear a peep out of right-wingnuts about it.

Over in Washington, the republicans have circled the wagons, and at least publicly, they are standing by trump and his team. Not one republican has had the decency to come forward and tell the emperor that he has no clothes. Outside of the beltway we are all dying of trump fatigue after just over a hundred days. 

Personally, I am already tired of the guy. And I wish that he would just go away, play golf, and drive around in his gold plated golf cart all day. He would be doing all of us a huge favor.

Not all of us can handle nightmares.

Tuesday Afternoon Massacre.

 "Life Comeys at you fast".

OK, that was kind of corny, I saw it on twitter, and I thought I would share it nevertheless.

So Mr. Orange Hair fired James Comey, the man who Hillary Clinton believes cost her the election, and the one who is possibly holding some pretty explosive stuff on the White House.

Now let's put this Archibald Cox moment into perspective: Donald trump just fired the man who is over the agency that is charged with investigating him and his Russian pals. You can't make this stuff up, folks; it is happening in real time.

Now, to be clear, I am no fan of James Comey, but if trump believes for a moment that this firing ---and the timing of it--- does not stink to high heaven, he has another thing coming. Why wasn't Comey fired after trump took office? Why wait until now? Trump himself said earlier that he had confidence in Comey. So what changed?  

We all know where this is heading of course. Donald trump will now put his political appointees who owe him their jobs (Think Chris Christie or Rudy) to investigate him, and it will be a joke.

The question is now, of course, will republicans get on board and call for an independent investigation and a special counsel to look into this mess? Or will they circle the wagons and play politics to protect their guy like they have been doing for the past 100 days.

Still, I tried to warn you folks, this will not end well for Mr. Orange Hair and you trumpbots. And I believe that as the fire gets hotter, and as we get closer and closer to the truth; we will see more desperation from team trump.

"Dear Director Comey,

I have received the attached letters from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General of the United States recommending your dismissal as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.

It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.

I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Donald J. Trump"

Dear President trump:

I sincerely wish that you would fire yourself.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that it is long overdue. 



*Pic from huffingtonpost.com








 

The fix was in.

  Poor Hillary was doomed from the start. Not that she was the best candidate to begin with, but she would have been a far better president than Herr trump.

Now it looks like the entire James Comey thing was a set up. The old white men in the FBI did not want to be led by a woman. Shades of the infamous  cross dresser himself who formally led that organization. He waged war against the "Negroes", Comey and his boys waged war against Hillary.

"The FBI warrant that shook Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in its final two weeks has been unsealed, and the lawyer who requested it says it offers "nothing at all" to merit the agency's actions leading up to the Nov. 8 election.

The warrant was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Los Angeles lawyer Randy Schoenberg, who wants to determine what probable cause the agency provided to suspect material on disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer might be incriminating to Clinton. Weiner is the estranged husband of Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin. Under the Fourth Amendment, search and seizure can only be granted when proof of probable cause of criminal findings has been documented.

The letter confirms news reports in late October that the FBI had detected “non-content header information” suggesting correspondence with accounts involved in its already-completed investigation of Clinton's private email server. The FBI request concludes there is “probable cause to believe” that the laptop contained “evidence, contraband, fruits and/or items illegally possessed,” without providing specifics.

"I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between" Clinton and Abedin, Schoenberg said in an email to USA TODAY. It remains unknown "why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant," he said. "I am appalled." The FBI's Manhattan office did not immediately return a call seeking comment." [Source]

Nothing to see here, folks, move along. The men in suits got the "law and order" president they wanted. Now they will be cracking down on all those black lives matter agitators and enforcing the law from sea to shining sea. Stocks in private prisons have shot up, as those in the prison business see things looking up under the old white man in charge.

The white woman would have been too soft on crime, and they just couldn't have that.

Now, under Herr trump, stop and frisk will be implemented nationally (or so he thinks),  and  due process will be a thing of the past.

"Standing before a vastly white crowd in Ohio on Monday evening, Donald Trump made a passionate pitch to African American and Hispanic voters, whom he described as living in poverty in neighborhoods that are more dangerous than war zones.

"What do you have to lose?" Trump asked again and again."

I have a simple answer for that question: Our lives.  

*Pic from rawstory.com