The Dangerous Partisan Attacks on Robert Mueller

So far in his investigation Robert Mueller has found that crimes WERE in fact committed and has two guilty pleas and two indictments to show for his efforts to date.  Many expect more indictments and more disclosures of illegal activities by members of the Trump/Pence campaign and Trump transition team, the latter of which was headed up by Mike Pence.   Polls show that a majority of Americans view Mueller's investigation is (i) important, and (ii) being properly undertaken.  The exception is a growing chorus of Republicans and Trump self-prostituting news outlets which have begun to attack not only Mueller but the FBI.  Why?  I suspect that they know that crimes were committed and are very fearful that if Mueller persists in his investigation Trump, Pence and perhaps even other senior Republicans could see indictments and/or may see their political careers go down in flames.  The one thing certain about today's Republicans is that party is more important than country or the truth and the rule of law.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at this dangerous phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

If you’re not a regular consumer of pro-Trump media outlets, it could be easy to underestimate or overlook the recent onslaught of attacks on Special Counsel Robert Mueller. There are a couple reasons for that. One is that this discourse exists almost entirely within that media ecosystem (which is distinct from, though overlapping with, the broader world of conservative media). The other is that critics have been calling for Mueller’s dismissal and an end to his probe since it was announced. Nonetheless, the intensity of the recent spree is notable, as is the gradual shift from ostensibly politically neutral critiques to openly partisan ones. “Mueller is corrupt. The senior FBI is corrupt. The system is corrupt,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Fox News. The channel’s legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said Mueller was employing the FBI “just like the old KGB,” which Sean Hannity piously told viewers was “not hyperbole.” . . . . Fox host Jeanine Pirro said, “There is a cleansing needed at the FBI and Department of Justice. What all of these denunciations lack is any concrete instance of wrongdoing by a member of Mueller’s team, much less Mueller himself. They have seized on the case of FBI agent Peter Strzok, who apparently wrote some text messages critical of Trump to a girlfriend, but who, as I wrote last week, was immediately reassigned from Mueller’s team when Mueller learned of the texts, and about whom there is as yet no proof of wrongdoing. But the path from Mueller’s appointment to the current critiques bears close examination. When Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller in May, the announcement drew varied conservative reactions. . . . . . some Trump backers welcomed Mueller’s appointment, seeing the former FBI director as a man of integrity who would finally clear the president. Newt Gingrich was one notable example:  "Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down." Gingrich was right about Mueller’s reputation in Washington: He was a celebrated former FBI director, a longtime Republican, and an appointee of both Democratic and Republican presidents. And Rosenstein, who appointed him, was another example of a lifelong Republican, appointed by Trump, who had an impeccable reputation for fairness. In hindsight, this was hopelessly naive. Trump’s black-hole-like gravity is such that it overwhelms even reputations for probity and impartiality built up over decades. . . . . The opposition to Mueller is partisan, but not in that it pits Republicans against Democrats. Its partisans are loyal first and foremost to President Trump. And in the inexorable logic of fiercely loyal partisans, they can only interpret other people’s actions through the same lens. Hence they have decided that Mueller, despite no real evidence in favor of the proposition and plenty of circumstantial evidence against it, must also be entirely partisan. Back in May, when Mueller started his work, Trump partisans could still argue with a straight face that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, there was no evidence of collusion, and there would never be any evidence of collusion. . . . . it has become impossible to claim that the special counsel’s probe is purely a fishing expedition. The July revelation of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer established that if there was no collusion, it was not for want of trying. . . . . George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn have since both pleaded guilty to lying about their contacts with Russian officials—in the former case, contacts that occurred during the campaign. Carter Page testified to the House about extensive contacts with Russians. [S]ince Mueller’s extensive indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, accusing them of laundering $75 million in foreign income, it has been harder to sustain the claim that there might not be serious crimes outside the campaign. Trump, too, has thought better of publicly repeating that he’d fire Mueller for poking into the Trump Organization or his personal finances, though that doesn’t mean he’s abandoned the idea.

Trump’s defenders have regrouped around the argument that the probe is a partisan effort to get Trump. . . . . Now, they are willing to state the stakes more bluntly: “Mueller poses an existential threat to the Trump presidency,” Newsmax CEO and Trump friend Chris Ruddy contends.  They are also seeking to discredit Mueller.

What drove Gingrich’s flip? . . . . Though he presents his objections today as principled, Gingrich’s reversal, and current labeling of Mueller as “corrupt,” are probably best viewed in the context of his many comically opportunistic reversals over the years. The strongest argument against Mueller is his friendship with James Comey. The problem is that given Comey’s experience as both FBI director and deputy attorney general, there is practically no qualified lawyer with government experience who isn’t connected to Comey in some way. As I wrote last week, concurring with arch-conservative Andrew McCarthy, the U.S. governmental system is constructed on the idea that politically interested individuals can set aside their biases to serve in government roles, with sufficient guidelines and checks and balances. This resembles similar right-wing critiques of academia and the press, and it is essentially nihilistic, seeking to disqualify not only avowed partisans but also those like Mueller, whose reputation Gingrich could praise heartily in May, denigrate in June, and call corrupt by December. The very idea of a reputation for fairness is obsolete before this totalizing partisanship. It doesn’t matter that Rosenstein last week rated Mueller’s work so far highly; as another lifelong Republican with a reputation for fairness, he can just as easily be written off, as Trump’s attack on him demonstrated. Thus the cynicism of The Wall Street Journal editorial board’s conclusion that “Mr. Mueller is too conflicted to investigate the FBI and should step down in favor of someone more credible.” This, of course, was just who Robert Mueller was said to be a few short months ago. Even if Rosenstein could find a replacement with a reputation as strong as Mueller’s, it’s clear that the Trump partisans would just as quickly work to undermine it. Who would satisfy the Journal’s editors? It’s hard to imagine many names beyond, say, Pirro or her Fox colleague Andrew Napolitano, both of them unshakeable Trump partisans. Appointing such a person would finally satisfy those critics, but it would also effectively end the special counsel’s investigation—which is, of course, the point.

I fully expect that Mueller, if allowed to complete his investigation, will find a panoply of crimes, some reaching up to Trump.  Congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell know this - they may even be already aware of the crimes and/or implicated themselves.  It is critical that this investigation be allowed to run its course and the crimes and possible treason that took place exposed.  A review of Trump's history in business dealings shows that he constantly has skirted the law if not broken it.  Does anyone sane think anything about the man changed once he moved into the political realm?

Why We Should All Fear the Right Wing Rot Inside the FBI

If nothing else, FBI Director James Comey's effort to throw the presidential election to Donald Trump has revealed the rot and corruption within the FBI which has seemingly been taken over by rogue alt-right agents.  This development ought to worry anyone who believes in objective law enforcement and fact based criminal investigations - things that are the antithesis of what today's Republican Party stands for.  Indeed, the North Carolina GOP has bragged about who it has disenfranchised many African-American voters this election cycle.   A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the rot and right wing agenda within the FBI.  Here are excerpts:

When a black church burned in Greenville, Mississippi, leaving charred walls and roof and the words “vote Trump” scrawled on the side of the building, local authorities called in the FBI. Its offices in Jackson, the state capitol, and Washington D.C. were put on the case.
 The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been doing that kind of work for decades. It was the FBI, under pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, that sent scores of agents to Philadelphia, Mississippi in June of 1964 to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, who had themselves been investigating the firebombing of a black church that was to serve as a “freedom school,” in preparation for registering black Mississippians to vote. When the three men were found dead—lynched and discarded in an earthen dam—it was FBI agents who made the discovery, acting on an informant’s tip.
 Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn’t be counted on to deliver . . . The events of the past two weeks have made it all but impossible to have much faith in the FBI now. The agency has, through the actions of a minority cell of unknown size, been severely tainted, potentially dragging down the reputations of even the finest agents in its ranks.
 After all, how can we trust the nation’s foremost federal law enforcement agency now that it has become clear that a faction of its agents used a conspiracy theory-hawking political book to launch a partisan probe into a presidential candidate?
 That unprecedented prospect: that federal law enforcement could take it upon themselves to try and swing a national election using allegations gleaned from a partisan hatchet job financially linked to the target’s political opponent, is Third World stuff. It makes the already creepy chants of “lock her up!” at Trump rallies reminiscent of a spiraling coup d’etat in a banana republic, because clearly, some in the FBI want to make those chants come true. And it makes Rudy Giuliani’s assertion, two days before Comey’s vague oppo dump, that the campaign had “a couple of things up our sleeve to turn [the race] around,” an ominous tell indeed.
 Most Americans presume that members of law enforcement tend to be ideologically conservative. But many Americans have watched in alarm as police officers across the country pose with the Republican candidate, even donning red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps with their police uniforms. . . . These officers clearly don’t mind if those they police know that they concur with Trump’s divisive, racially abusive message . . .
 FBI agents are, presumably, drawn from much the same pool as law enforcement generally: mostly white, mostly male, mostly right of center. If the agency is indeed, “Trumpland,” as The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman reports, God help Hillary Clinton. But God help the rest of us well.
 We have entered an unprecedented new age when federal law enforcement demonstrates a willingness to go beyond each agent exercising his or her individual right to vote to massing its investigative powers against an individual for political purposes. That the FBI could become a tool in the arsenal of one party’s presidential candidate, perhaps even coordinating with that candidate through their mutual allies, is the most frightening development in a truly unnerving presidential cycle. It should be unnerving to their fellow FBI agents as well, and to anyone who cares about the agency’s reputation.
 Based on the reports from multiple journalists, including Wayne Barrett, some of Giuliani’s friends in the FBI hate her still. But should they be able to use the badges the public pins on them to try and prevent her from winning a presidential election?
 Whatever the cause, it’s clear that there is a cancer festering inside the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency, and it runs through New York.

The possibility that the director of the FBI is essentially at the mercy of a right-wing faction of his own agents, whose source of investigative material is an offshoot of Breitbart.com, which has direct connections to the Republican candidate, bodes ill for what the agency might do with its power, under either potential president. Would the Breitbart wing of the FBI continue to hunt the new Democratic commander in chief based on the thin gruel ladled out by fever swamp websites? Or would it become the investigative sword wielded by the Republican president against his political enemies, Democrat and Republican, any of whom could face investigation if they displeased him and his fans? Either way, the result would not be democracy. It would be authoritarian tyranny of a downright Putinesque kind.
 Something is rotten inside the FBI. Americans have good reason to be afraid, and angry.

There needs to be a thorough investigation by new, independent investigators and people need to be fired and, ideally, lose their retirement benefits as well - starting with the firing of James Comey.  The FBI must remain non-partisan and those who has worked to make it otherwise have to go. 

Today's GOP Benghazi Show Trial

Love her or hate her, today Hillary Clinton will testify before the House Benghazi Committee in hearings about as objective as Stalin's show trials of the 1930's that had no purpose other than to destroy Stalin's chief rivals.  Exposing the truth bore no role in the trials orchestrated by Stalin and the same holds true for the circus that Republicans will oversee today.  As the image above underscores, there have been many more embassy staff deaths under George W. Bush, yet there have been no comparable hearings or committees.  No, the Benghazi Committee has one real goal only: damage Hillary Clinton. Along the way, of course, Republican members of the committee will get to grandstand for the spittle flecked, knuckle dragging members of the GOP base that hate Clinton no matter what she does or doesn't do.  In some ways the hearings are the logical outcome of the GOP's descent into insanity and the alternate reality that it's base lives in daily.  A piece in Salon looks at the Committee and it's pure political agenda.  Here are highlights:

Today Hillary Clinton will appear before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in a likely futile attempt to rebut the fever dreams of cover-up and conspiracy that the committee’s Republican members have gleaned from the comments section at Breitbart. It will be a fantastic piece of theater so far removed from the terrible events that occurred at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012, that it might as well be occurring on the other side of a galactic wormhole. The hearing’s participants could speak gibberish for all we are really going to learn about the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Assuming there even is anything more to learn that seven prior congressional investigations have not turned up.

It is a truism of modern political horse-race coverage that reporters are not really interested in accurately explaining a candidate’s positions and policies to the audience. The reason the TV cameras are turned on the candidate every single second is in hopes of catching a gaffe, that race-altering goof that undermines the message he or she is trying to pitch to voters.

The hope of inducing that type of campaign-altering gaffe is really the reason why the select committee is dragging Hillary Clinton up to Capitol Hill today. No matter what the most rabid right-wingers think, these hearings are not about investigating a cover-up the way the Watergate or Iran-contra hearings were. They are not about figuring out what really happened in Benghazi, because we already have dozens of reports produced by other congressional committees, federal agencies, and the military to explain what happened and why.

No, what the Republicans want – what they need in order to justify the colossal effort they have put into building Benghazi up to be worse that Iran-contra plus Watergate and Teapot Dome times eleventy billion – is a Clinton gaffe along the lines of “What difference does it make.” Only worse. Something that will rip off the Democratic frontrunner’s carefully spit-polished image and reveal the shrill, corrupt, power-mad harridan underneath.
[T]his has been the Republican way with Hillary Clinton for 25 years now. No matter how many investigations clear her of any wrongdoing on an issue, the GOP just cannot accept it. There must always be one piece of information it did not turn up, one thread it failed to pull until the whole sweater unraveled. 

The only question is how they will go about it. Will they grill her like a salmon, coming at her from every angle, interrupting, badgering, trying to confuse her until the internal dam that has always successfully kept her bottomless evil at bay finally bursts? Or, as Brian Beutler argues, will they be polite and restrained while testing her memory of isolated details to try and trip her up? 

[A]t heart, this is all just one long political attack ad, a sequel to “Hillary: The Movie“ in the guise of a congressional investigation. It’s theater of the absurd for an audience of suckers.

As noted before, to be a Republican nowadays, one has to lack any integrity, and be either insane, a white supremacist, a religious fanatic, motivated solely by greed, or a combination of the foregoing.  It is a very ugly reality.