There’s a Smell of Treason in the Air

I make no bones about it:  I despise Donald Trump and believe that he is unfit to occupy the White House.  I'd go even further and state that he is unfit for polite and decent society.  He is a crude, self-absorbed narcissist who cares nothing about anything but himself and own aggrandizement.  If the choice before him was satiating his own ego and throwing his children under the bus, his kids would merit less than a moments thought.  Add to this moral bankruptcy, Trump's long history of ignoring the law and connections with Mafia figures and sleazy Russian mafia characters, is there really a question as to whether or not he'd commit treason to benefit himself?  I think not.  The issue before America now is whether a true, independent investigation will be done to ferret out possible treason by Trump and his henchmen.  Re. Devin Nunes made it clear yesterday that he is doing all that he can to sabotage such and investigation by the House Intelligence Committee.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing situation and the need for Nunes' removal from his position on the investigating committee.  Here are highlights:

[T]he F.B.I. confirms that we have had an investigation underway for eight months into whether another presidential campaign colluded with a foreign power so as to win an election. To me, that, too, would amount to treason.

I’ve been speaking to intelligence experts, Americans and foreigners alike, and they mostly (but not entirely) believe there was Trump-Russia cooperation of some kind. But this is uncertain; it’s prudent to note that James Clapper, the intelligence director under Barack Obama, said that as of January he had seen no evidence of collusion but that he favors an investigation to get to the bottom of it.

I’m also told (not by a Democrat!) that there’s a persuasive piece of intelligence on ties between Russia and a member of the Trump team that isn’t yet public.

A bit of conjecture:  The Russians for years had influence over Donald Trump because of their investments with him, and he was by nature inclined to admire Vladimir Putin as a strongman ruler. Meanwhile, Trump had in his orbit a number of people with Moscow ties, including Paul Manafort, who practically bleeds borscht.

As The A.P. puts it, Manafort offered to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.” (Manafort told The A.P. that his work was being falsely portrayed as nefarious.)

This is guesswork, but it might have seemed natural for Trump aides to try to milk Russian contacts for useful information about the Clinton campaign. Likewise, the Russians despised Hillary Clinton and would have been interested in milking American contacts for information about how best to damage her chances.

At some point, I suspect, members of the Trump team gained knowledge of Russian hacking into Clinton emails, which would explain why Trump friend Roger Stone tweeted things like “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

This kind of soft collusion, evolving over the course of the campaign without a clear quid pro quo, might also explain why there weren’t greater efforts to hide the Trump team’s ties to Russia, or to camouflage its softening of the Republican Party platform position toward Moscow.

One crucial unknown: Did Russia try to funnel money into Trump’s campaign coffers? In European elections, Russia has regularly tried to influence results by providing secret funds. I’m sure the F.B.I. is looking into whether there were suspicious financial transfers.

The White House is already distancing itself from Manafort, claiming that he played only a “very limited role” in the campaign — even though he was Trump’s campaign chairman!

Treason isn’t necessarily spelled out as a quid pro quo, and it wasn’t when Nixon tried to sink the Vietnam peace initiative in 1968.

In the past, as when foreign funds made their way into Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, Republicans showed intense interest in foreign interference in the political process. So it’s sad to see some Republicans (I mean you, Devin Nunes!) trying to hijack today’s House investigation to make it about leaks.

Really? Our country was attacked by Russia, and you’re obsessed with leaks? Do you honestly think that the culprit in Watergate wasn’t Nixon but the famed leaker Deep Throat? Republicans should replace Nunes as head of the House Intelligence Committee; he can’t simultaneously be Trump’s advocate and his investigator.

[T]he crucial question is as monumental as it is simple: Was there treason? . . . the issue cries out for a careful, public and bipartisan investigation by an independent commission.

“There’s a smell of treason in the air,” Douglas Brinkley, the historian, told The Washington Post. He’s right, and we must dispel that stench.

Trump: Bonkers, Paranoid or Trapped?

My personal view is that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer on this blog, is mentally ill.  At best he suffers from narcissistic personality disorder.  At worst, he flaming insane.  Readers can decide where they place him on the range of insanity.  I suspect that even many Trump voters concede that we are not witnessing a normal presidency.  The other alternative, as suggested by conservative columnist, Jennifer Rubin, is that Trump is compromised by the Russians either due to blackmail information or he actually colluded with Russian operatives to swing the 2016 election in his favor. If this latter alternative is true, then Trump's seemingly crazy outbursts are aimed at changing the topic and/or distracting the media.  The reality is that no matter how hard Trump tries, the pall of the Russian connection is not going to be pushed away.  Here are highlights from Rubin's column:

In the course of less than a week we’ve gone from “Trump presidency on the rocks” to “What a normal speech!” to “How many Trump associates had contact with the Russians, and why did they lie about it?” to “Trump was bugged, really?!?”

There are several explanations — not necessarily mutually exclusive — for the latest outburst from the president.

First, he is increasingly out of touch with reality. Just as he obsessed over the crowd size at his inauguration and the fictional illegal voters upward of 3 million, Trump’s mammoth ego cannot take the daily drumbeat of attacks and accusations. When adversity strikes — as it did with new allegations concerning Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was forced to recuse himself from any campaign-related investigation — he becomes unhinged and paranoid. He can stick to a teleprompter speech for an hour, but soon reverts to form.

A variation on the first possibility would be that Trump correctly realizes the intelligence community has a good deal more information on what contacts his associates had with Russians than he does. A New York Times story last week confirmed that the intelligence community also has intercepts of Russian officials discussing their contacts with Trump associates. Trump, under this theory, is panicked. An exaggerated, unsupported claim from a right-wing provocateur and gadfly Mark Levin that Trump was directly wiretapped is enough to set him off into a Twitter frenzy. As they said about Richard Nixon, even paranoids have enemies.

Another explanation is that Trump, as he does when things go wrong (the Sessions recusal, disarray on tax and health-care legislation, accusations about his foreign holdings), deliberately creates distractions. He’d rather the media chatter about whether he is sane than focus on the need to obtain his taxes to determine what connections he and his family have to Russia. 

And finally, it is possible that he is right that Trump communications were under investigation — but only up to a point. . . . . . Apart from the server story, news reports have suggested, as a TIME story did, that “as major banks in America stopped lending him money following his many bankruptcies, the Trump organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. Several had direct ties to Russian financial interests in ways that have raised eyebrows.” (Trump denies he has any ties to Russia. “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia,” he said recently, leaving open the possibility that he and/or his sons have ties to Russians operating outside of Russia.)

After Trump’s Twitter outburst some lawmakers, like Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), chose to take him “seriously,” that is, to call for proof of his claims. Others argued that his accusations only underscored the need for a definitive, independent investigation conducted by either a commission with subpoena power or a special prosecutor named by the deputy attorney general.

Realizing their error in inviting more scrutiny, Sean Spicer tried to walk back the allegations Sunday morning. He called for Congress — which is already investigating Trump’s Russia connection — to look into improper surveillance during the campaign. He almost begged the press to drop it, saying that no further remarks on the topic would be forthcoming. Good luck with that.

Trump inadvertently emphasized that at the core this is about whether the intelligence community has discovered the president of the United States is compromised. That cannot very well be left solely to congressional partisans or to a Justice Department that reports to him.

After Bizarre Lack of Indictment Ferguson Prosecutor Gives Bizarre Press Conference

Many in the legal profession will say that a prosecutor dead set on an indictment could get a ham sandwich indicted.  Whether the prosecution will prevail at trial is another matter, but getting an indictment is rarely an issue.  Indeed, one Huffington Post article notes that U.S. Attorneys prosecuted 162,000 cases in 2012 and only 11 times did they fail to secure indictments.  Against this background, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch lashed out at the media, blaming the internet and "the 24-hour news cycle" for the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.  The situation is at best bizarre.  Here are highlights from an article that looks at how rare it is for a grand jury not to indict:

A St. Louis County grand jury on Monday decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police Officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown. The decision wasn’t a surprise — leaks from the grand jury had led most observers to conclude an indictment was unlikely — but it was unusual. Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.

Or at least, they nearly always do so in cases that don’t involve police officers.

Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

Wilson’s case was heard in state court, not federal, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable. Unlike in federal court, most states, including Missouri, allow prosecutors to bring charges via a preliminary hearing in front of a judge instead of through a grand jury indictment. That means many routine cases never go before a grand jury. Still, legal experts agree that, at any level, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to fail to win an indictment.

“If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get one, something has gone horribly wrong,” said Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law professor who has written critically about grand juries. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception.

There are at least three possible explanations as to why grand juries are so much less likely to indict police officers. The first is juror bias: Perhaps jurors tend to trust police officer and believe their decisions to use violence are justified, even when the evidence says otherwise. 

The second is prosecutorial bias: Perhaps prosecutors, who depend on police as they work on criminal cases, tend to present a less compelling case against officers, whether consciously or unconsciously.

The third possible explanation is more benign. Ordinarily, prosecutors only bring a case if they think they can get an indictment. But in high-profile cases such as police shootings, they may feel public pressure to bring charges even if they think they have a weak case.

I cannot help but feel that explanations 1 and 2 came to play in this case.  The reality is that an indictment followed by a trial in open court may not have secured the result that many residents of Ferguson wanted, but it would have been out in the open and less subject to criticism and claims of bias for evidence and testimony given behind closed doors.

Military Sexual Assault Scandal Grows, Second Sex-Assault Prevention Official Investigated

To listen to the Christofascists one would think that all sexual assaults and illicit sexual behavior is caused by us homos.   The U.S. military continues to underscore that the real problem is those nasty heterosexual males who seem to believe that they can behavior outrageously - and in a criminal manner - with impunity.  How else to explain the Army's investigation of a sergeant first class responsible for handling sexual-assault cases at Fort Hood, Texas, over allegations that he has engaged in abusive sexual contact and other related matters. Funny how we don't hear any outrage from professional gay haters like Elaine Donnelly or Tony Perkins when the sexual predators are straights.  The chart above highlights the magnitude of the problem.  The Washington Post looks at the growing scandal.  Here are highlights:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Tuesday evening ordered the armed services to immediately “re-train, re-credential and re-screen” tens of thousands of military recruiters and sexual-assault prevention officers as the revelation of another sex-crime scandal rocked the Pentagon.

Hagel’s order came in response to the Army’s disclosure Tuesday that a sergeant first class responsible for handling sexual-assault cases at Fort Hood, Tex., had been placed under criminal investigation over allegations of abusive sexual contact and other related matters.

Investigators are also scrutinizing allegations that the sergeant may have forced a subordinate into prostitution, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case. 

The Army investigation comes just 10 days after a lieutenant colonel who led the Air Force’s sexual-assault prevention programs was arrested in Arlington County on charges that he groped and battered a woman in a parking lot.

Officials said the noncommissioned officer had been suspended from duties as an “equal-opportunity adviser” and sexual-harassment and assault prevention officer at Fort Hood, one of the Army’s biggest installations. The Pentagon did not disclose when the allegations first came to light or how many victims may have been involved.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said she would introduce legislation Thursday to change military law so that independent prosecutors, not commanders, would be responsible for handling sex crimes and other serious offenses. Military leaders have strenuously resisted such proposals.  “It is time to get serious and get to work reforming the military justice system that clearly isn’t working,” Gillibrand said.

The Washington Post reported Monday that military recruiters across the country have been caught in a string of sexual-assault scandals over the past year. The Pentagon, however, does not have a grasp on the extent of the problem because it does not track sex crimes committed by its personnel against civilians before they enlist.

Military officials said most victims are reluctant to press charges because they fear retaliation from their superiors or ostracism from their units, or that investigators won’t take their cases seriously.  Lawmakers and victim advocates also blame an unwillingness among many commanders to deal with the problem forthrightly.

Frankly, allowing the military to police itself on sexual assault matters is like leaving the Catholic Church hierarchy to police the ranks of the clergy against sexual abuse.  It just does not happen and the problem goes on unabated.    Gillibrand is correct that independent prosecutors need to take over sex crimes committed in the military.  Meanwhile, the silence of the Christofascists is deafening.