"As soon as I get to the bottom of this, I'll get the next plane." "Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals." Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten promoting 1949's The Third Man. Carol Reed was really on a roll, see also Odd Man Out + Fallen Idol. pic.twitter.com/ISrI7inGQa
— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) February 13, 2024
Great movie.
My Part 2 post was entitled "Mueller's Obstruction of Justice". The thesis was:
The Mueller Team Obstructs Justice & Deceptive Congressional Testimony
The Mueller Team deliberately obstructed a full investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election
The Mueller Team lied about whether it had investigated the Steele Dossier
In March of last year, Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The report, a redacted version of which was released to Congress and the public the next month, concluded that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russians to influence the election, but said investigators could not reach a conclusion on whether President Trump committed obstruction of justice.Facing the Justice Department’s frustration that he left the question of obstruction open in his final report, Mueller said in May of last year that charging Trump with a crime was “not an option” since, per guidance issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a sitting president cannot be indicted.
There is an error in the article. As AG William Barr noted at the time, although the DOJ guidance was that a sitting president cannot be indicted, he was expecting a finding and recommendation from Mueller, since such an indictment could be filed after the presidency ended.
My speculation is that there were three reasons for leaving the obstruction issue ambiguous in the report (in 2019 I wrote this post summarizing the obstruction section of the Mueller report). The first was to give the otherwise disappointed Democratic party activists and its allied media something to chew on to keep the whole phony Russia collusion story alive.
The second was despite Trump's occasional rantings about the unfairness of the investigation, the White House had given unprecedented cooperation to Mueller, turning over more than one million documents and allowing White House Counsel to be interviewed, all without raising Executive Privilege arguments. I think that happened because Trump believed the allegations to be wrong (and he was correct) and the matter would be quickly resolved. Given that Durham concluded that none of the Steele Dossier allegations had ever been corroborated, Trump's occasional outbursts were understandable as those of an innocent man dragged through an outrageously rigged process. Even a DC jury might have acquitted Trump of obstruction charges!
The third reason was the Mueller team knew about how false the allegations were and further legal proceedings might expose their whole effort.
I also think that when Mueller accepted the assignment as Special Counsel in May 2017 he thought there was very likely something to the allegations regarding Trump. Though a long-time "moderate" Republican, I've no doubt he was appalled by Trump and voted for Clinton. More importantly, Mueller's association with the FBI goes back to his Boston days in the 1980s. His record demonstrates he believes whatever the FBI tells him and he believed the "evidence" he was shown and the "respectable media" coverage in 2017. He was played as a sucker for years by the corrupt Boston FBI office in the 1980s and the same happened repeatedly during his stint as FBI Director. He was also probably starting to suffer from the mental deterioration that was evident during the 2019 Congressional hearings and thus easily manipulated to hire, and then be guided by, the partisan Democratic lawyers and Clinton supporters who staffed the investigation.
Happy birthday, Willie Mays! Here he is with San Francisco Giants catcher and future Hall of Fame member Buster Posey, who made his major league debut 36 years after Willie retired.
Willie Mays and Buster Posey pic.twitter.com/ldGh9JZAGT
— BaseballHistoryNut (@nut_history) December 21, 2023
Of the many legal proceedings that Donald Trump is being subjected to there is only one, or rather a portion of one, that I find has some surface plausibility - the obstruction of justice charges in the Mar-a-Largo documents case (whether he is actually guilty of the charges is another matter). I noted in Here We Go Again that the Mar-a-Lago case is another self-inflicted wound by Trump. The rest are politically motivated, with the New York cases the most egregious.
This article by Andrew McCarthy, no friend of Trump, explains how crazy the proceedings are in the current trial regarding the payments to Stormy Daniels, due to the deliberate malfeasance of the prosecutor and judge.
Understand, most criminal cases in the United States do not take two weeks to try. There are lots of long trials, too, but to get to this stage of the proceedings and still have the subject matter of the case unaddressed is . . . highly unusual.
That’s because the case is not about what the case is about. That’s why I’m not sure how effective Bove’s shrewd point was. Judge Merchan has helped prosecutors frame the trial as a “conspiracy” case – specifically, a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election by suppressing politically damaging information (allegations of extramarital affairs), supposedly in violation of federal campaign-finance law.
I don’t want to further belabor the record regarding how there is no conspiracy charge in the indictment, how there is no such conspiracy statute in New York law, how Bragg has no authority to enforce federal campaign law, how the statute actually charged in the indictment gives him no such authority under New York constitutional law, and how – even if Bragg arguably had jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign law – the so-called hush-money payments charged (based on lawful non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)) were not campaign expenditures for which that law mandated disclosure. These points may end up being more germane on appeal – which, if Trump gets convicted, could take a year or more to process.
Merchan is letting Bragg’s prosecutors present the case as if the charge were conspiracy to suppress politically damaging information, and he slaps down Trump’s lawyers when they try to object.
As McCarthy notes, any Trump conviction will be vulnerable on appeal due to the many procedural irregularities in this case. But since this is a political prosecution it doesn't matter, since the goal is to achieve a conviction which can be used in the presidential campaign. Whether it is overturned after the election is irrelevant.
The New York case is the clearest example of the political double standard at play in the various Trump prosecutions.
In 2016, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired FusionGPS, paying it more than $1 million to concoct the Steele Dossier, a fictitious set of allegations regarding a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin.(1) The conspiracy to steal the 2016 election was an effort to divert attention from Hillary's email woes and to damage Trump during the campaign. In inventing this allegation, the Clinton campaign utilized a series of agents who had contact with Russian intelligence and Kremlin-connected oligarchs.(2) After the election, the FEC found that the campaign and DNC attempted to hide the purpose for which the expenditures were made and fined both a total of about $140,000. There were no criminal charges filed regarding the conspiracy which after it failed to bring about Hillary's election was transformed into an effort to undermine the new administration of the duly elected president of the United States.
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(1) The DOJ Inspector General report on the dossier and the FISA warrants on Carter Page implicitly found no basis for the allegations. The Durham Report, issued in May 2023, explicitly found no support for the allegations.
"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated: not the salacious allegations of events at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, not the allegation of there being a 'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' between Trump and the Russians, not the allegations of a secret meeting involving Page and certain sanctioned Russians (namely, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin), and not the allegation of Page serving as Manafort's conduit for information between the Russians and the Trump campaign. This is true even after the FBI offered Steele $1 million or more for such corroboration and after Danchenko was signed up as an FBI CHS [Confidential Human Source] and paid more than $220,000 for information on other matters." (pages 236-7)
It was all a cleverly invented fiction.
(2) FusionGPS was, at the same time, working for a Kremlin oligarch, trying to get Congress to rescind sanctions. Christopher Steele, hired by FusionGPS, was working for Oleg Deripaska, another Kremlin oligarch, currently under indictment in the U.S. Steele's "major-sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, who had been subject to an unresolved U.S. counterintelligence investigation due to his connections with Russian intelligence, and one of Steele's other sources (and the source for the scandalous Moscow Ritz Carlton allegations), was Charles Dolan, a DC public relations guy who was working for the Russian Federation to improve its image in the U.S. in association with Putin's press secretary and the Kremlin's ambassador to the U.S. Dolan had also been the Virginia Chairman for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992 and 1996, executive director of the Democratic Governor's Association, a senior advisor to Hillary in the 2008 campaign and was supporting Clinton in 2016. Dolan also authored emails asserting Danchenko was an FSB agent (the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB). When FBI analysts identified Dolan as a source and recommended the Mueller team interview him, their request was denied and they were instructed to cease their investigation.
Reggie Miller hosts a talk with Larry Bird and Isiah Thomas. Larry, as always is reticent but Reggie draws him out. Isiah is always interesting. He talks about the moment when Larry held his career in his hands and how thankful he is for how Bird handled it. Isiah also takes Bird to task for firing him as coach when he took over as GM of the Indiana Pacers.
Why does John Wayne have more staying power in the American memory than Gary Cooper who, during his lifetime, was as popular as the Duke? An essay from Terry Teachout, the wonderful cultural critic and writer who passed away several years ago. One of my favorite writers and someone who seemed a fundamentally decent guy. I read everything by him though his subjects were often artists and genres I didn't care for, yet he could make me interested. And an incredible eloquent speaker.
Nevertheless, Cooper and Wayne are likely to strike the casual observer as having been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Tony Soprano described its pattern in the first episode of The Sopranos when he asked his psychotherapist, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings—he just did what he had to do.” Both men were not so much performers as presences, rugged-looking outdoor types who were capable of dominating the frame simply by striding into it, and when they got around to saying something, it was in craggy baritone voices that matched their weather-whacked faces.
Above all, Cooper and Wayne were leading men pur sang, the kind of personalities to whom your eyes reflexively shift whenever they’re in a shot. What a star is, they were. As Howard Hawks said, “If you don’t get a damn good actor with Wayne, he’s going to blow him right off the screen, not just by the fact that he’s good, but by his power, his strength.” Cooper was no less potently endowed with the same quality. When Niven Busch was wrestling with one of his scripts, Cooper told him, “Well, Niven, seems to me if you make me the hero it usually comes out right.” Nothing else worked for either man, which is why they were still playing leads long after their contemporaries had shifted into supporting parts.
