Daily Check-In 02/14/2019

Daily Check-In

Thursday, February 14, 2019

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

McCabe

Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director and former acting director of the FBI, told CBS’s 60 Minutes that meetings were held at the Department of Justice to discuss invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Donald Trump from office.

In the brief time period between former FBI Director James Comey’s firing and the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein considered wearing a wire in meetings with Trump, according to McCabe, in an interview with 60 Minutes. Upon Comey’s firing, McCabe became the acting FBI director. The New York Timesreported the same information in September 2018, which DOJ at the time said was a sarcastic suggestion.

Although the portion of the interview with McCabe has not yet been released, CBS’s Scott Pelley said McCabe told him the idea of removing Trump from office “came up more than once and it was so serious that he took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss it.” McCabe and others at DOJ were “counting noses” in an effort to predict who in the president’s Cabinet, including Vice President Mike Pence, would vote to force Trump from office, according to Pelley.

We all knew McCabe would take aim at Trump in his book, but his contempt for Sessions is staggering. Depicts him as addled, fixated on immigrants, racist. My review of the McCabe book in WaPo

FBI was better off “when you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe, acc to McCabe. “They were drunks but at least they could be trusted.”

The book has inevitable new gem on Trump-Putin. President refused to believe intel officials that North Korea had test fired ICBM. NK didn’t have that capability, he insisted, saying he knew this “because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”

McCabe goes much farther than Comey in acknowledging the FBI liked tipped 2016 election to Trump. “As matter of policy, FBI does everything possible not to influence elections,” he writes. “In 2016, it seems we did.”

One of my takeaways from the McCabe book: Trump administration’s reputation for baseness and dysfunction has, if anything, been understated and too narrowly attributed to the president.

One of the regularly scheduled meetings with the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and some of their staff came two days later, on Friday, May 12. After the meeting, I asked the deputy, Rod Rosenstein, if he could stay behind. In part I wanted to talk with him about ground rules governing the separate investigations of the Russia case by the FBI and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rosenstein had oversight because the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had had to recuse himself owing to his own interactions with Russians during the campaign. But my main message was this: I need you to protect the process.

After speaking to these points, Rod shifted his gaze. His eyes were focused on a point in space a few yards beyond and behind, toward the door. He started talking about the firing of Jim Comey. He was obviously upset. He said he was shocked that the White House was making it look as if Jim’s firing had been his idea. He was grasping for a way to describe the nature of his situation. One remark stands out. He said, There’s no one that I can talk to about this. There’s no one here that I can trust.

He asked for my thoughts about whether we needed a special counsel to oversee the Russia case. I said I thought it would help the investigation’s credibility. Later that day, I went to see Rosenstein again. This is the gist of what I said: I feel strongly that the investigation would be best served by having a special counsel. I’ve been thinking about the Clinton email case and how we got twisted in knots over how to announce a result that did not include bringing charges against anyone. Had we appointed a special counsel in the Clinton case, we might not be in the present situation. Unless or until you make the decision to appoint a special counsel, the FBI will be subjected to withering criticism that could destroy the credibility of both the Justice Department and the FBI.

Remember a while back when Andrew McCabe was fired?  I said something along the lines of “wait until the book comes out” to hear how much of a clusterfuck this really was.

Turns out, it was worse than we thought.  And if this accounting is true, Andrew McCabe may have saved the Republic.  After Comey was fired, there was little time for him to act, and there was a good chance that he would be fired soon as well.  His first act was to open an investigation into Donald Trump for Obstruction of Justice.  That way, he created a record of events and if someone tried and make this whole mess disappear.  His actions also gave Rod Rosenstein time to appoint Robert Mueller as the Special Counselor.

 

 

 

Good.  Let’s see what Kremlin Barbie knows.

 

SHUTDOWN & IMMIGRATION

Now we enter the “How much can he fuck this up” phase.

There’s two ways this whole “National Emergency” thing ends.

The most likely way is that this get shot down in the courts after everyone from California to Carlos Santana files a lawsuit against it.

The least likely way is that it is successful in starting the wall, but it ends there.  The project ends quickly, and the next person in office now has a precedent set to use the excuse of a national emergency to enact any and all actions that they couldn’t get passed through Congress.

 

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

 

Let’s Get Physical!

 

TRAITOR TOTS

Barr

 

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

CONGRESS

 

AIPAC & OMAR

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

SCOTUS & COURTS

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

#NEVERAGAIN

Spicy Mic: The Parkland Victims

 

  • Alyssa Alhadeff, 15
  • Martin Duque, 14
  • Nicholas Dworet, 17
  • Jaime Guttenburg, 14
  • Luke Hoyer, 15
  • Cara Loughran, 14
  • Gina Montalto, 14
  • Joaquin Oliver, 17
  • Alaina Petty, 14
  • Meadow Pollack, 18
  • Helena Ramsey, 17
  • Alex Schachter, 14
  • Carmen Schentrup, 16
  • Peter Wang, 15
  • Scott Beigel, 35
  • Aaron Feis, 37
  • Chris Hixon, 49

“… Comfort on difficult days, smiles when sadness intrudes, rainbows to follow the clouds, laughter to kiss your lips, sunsets to warm your heart, hugs when spirits sag…” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

The (Russian) Anti-Vaxxers

 

 

 

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

 

TRADE WAR, HEALTH CARE, AND ECONOMY

 

STUDENT ISSUES

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

VALENTINE’S DAY

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for Thursday.  Friday brings us a signing to avoid a shutdown, a botched emergency announcement, and a Republican challenging Trump in 2020.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Published by noneofthisisnormal

Published

One thought on “Daily Check-In 02/14/2019”

  1. Pingback: Daily Check-In 02/15/2019 – None of this is Normal

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s