March 27, 2019

Napolitano is saying the Mueller report is 700 pages long. Reporters trying to get it confirmed

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1110992456584179712

I tried to see if I could confirm both the 700 page estimate of the length of the Mueller report and the 2 million page estimate of the volume of raw evidence that Judge Napolitano repeatedly offers in his comments here.

"We'll decline to comment, thanks," Peter Carr says.



Appearing on Fox Business Network’s Cavuto Coast to Coast Wednesday, Napolitano attempted to explain exactly where Schiff was coming from by getting inside his “head.”

“We saw on Sunday a four-page summary of a 700-page report,” the Fox analyst said. “The 700-page report is a summary of two million pages of documents, of raw evidence.

He continued: “In the 700-page summary of the two million pages of raw evidence, there is undoubtedly some evidence of a conspiracy and some evidence of obstruction of justice, just not enough evidence—I’m thinking the way I believe Congressman Schiff is thinking—according to Attorney General Barr, not enough evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard.”

Napolitano went on to note that if “there were no evidence of conspiracy and no evidence of obstruction, the attorney general would have told us so,” adding that Barr didn’t, so “there is something there” that Democrats and Trump opponents want to see. And they’ll have a “field day” with it.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/foxs-judge-napolitano-on-conspiracy-in-mueller-report-there-is-something-there?via=twitter_page



MSNBC has confirmed that the report is several hundred pages long. They had a chryon up a short time ago.

March 27, 2019

The Anti-Vaxx Movement Is More Organized and Powerful Than Ever (Thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr)

Experts say the anti-vaccine or vaccine choice groups, as they commonly refer to themselves, are becoming larger, better organized and funded in part because their prolific use of social media, as well as the rise of a group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. which has helped to coordinate their efforts to push back on new laws.

“Social media has given it a national presence. It’s no longer just a collection of different states, it’s now gone across the country,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician. “Right now you might call it a media empire—you have almost 500 anti-vaccine websites.”


The campaign has not just been online or in the statehouses, either. On Feb. 22, 2019, Kennedy’s group, Children’s Health Defense, posted a call to action on its site to get activists to show up on Capitol Hill for a set of vaccine-related hearings.“We absolutely must have representation at these hearings,” the post said. “It’s crucial that we have as many parents and advocates as possible in attendance at both.”

The call to action was co-signed by over 50 like-minded, mostly state-based groups. Activists who attended the Feb. 27 hearing on the recent measles outbreaks could be heard jeering loudly when both Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, stated the measles vaccine was safe and rarely caused complications like brain swelling.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-anti-vaxxer-movement-is-getting-more-organized-and-powerful-than-ever-before

March 27, 2019

Pompeo's being grilled on C-Span 3 right now

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1110979333236117505

Pompeo smugly tells @RepSusanWild he decided to exclude non-religious press from a recent briefing call just because he felt like it



He's a pompous s.o.b.

March 27, 2019

Barr won't be sending the actual report , he's writing another summary according to NYT.

https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1110720599826018304


This says Barr isn't even going to send a redacted version of the full Mueller report. He's going to write a summary of the Mueller report, and send that instead. We don't even know how long the Mueller report is.









Mueller's report has got to be bad. Why go to such lengths if it isn't? Unless the NYT just used bad wording.

March 26, 2019

You've got to be kidding me! The DOJ is fighting Trump not being allowed to block people on Twitter

https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1110634840632770567


The U.S. Department of Justice was in court today to defend the right of the president to block people on Twitter, arguing that while he tweets in an official capacity he blocks people in a personal capacity.







Imagine wasting time and taxpayer money on this petty shit. Will it go all the way to the Supreme Court?

March 26, 2019

U.S. Said to Have Tapes of Alleged 9/11 Mastermind Plotting With Co-Conspirators

By Carol Rosenberg
March 25, 2019

This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Military prosecutors say they have tapes of telephone calls between the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and three of his accused co-conspirators talking in code about the plot months before it took place, a defense lawyer disclosed on Monday.

The lawyer, Jay Connell, revealed the existence of the tapes as part of a protest over plans to use them as evidence at the death penalty trial of the alleged conspirators. More than 17 and a half years after the attacks — in which 19 hijackers commandeered four commercial airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people — there is still no date set for the trial in the proceedings at Guantánamo Bay.

Prosecutors gave defense lawyers the original audio and transcripts of their translation on Sept. 30, 2016, Mr. Connell said, and made clear they planned to use them at trial. Defense lawyers sought to investigate their origins and later discovered that the original trial judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, had issued a secret order preventing them from knowing about the phone call collection system or asking questions about it.

Mr. Connell, who is representing Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, said that prosecutors secretly obtained a ruling in August 2018 from Colonel Pohl forbidding defense lawyers from learning how the phone calls were collected or investigating that question. The phone calls in at least two languages were made between April and October 2001.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/us/politics/9-11-khalid-shaikh-mohammed.html

March 26, 2019

The Trump administration is now calling for the entire Affordable Care Act to be thrown out.

The Trump administration on Monday said it supports a federal judge's ruling that the entire Affordable Care Act should be scrapped, signaling a shift in the Justice Department's position and alarming Democrats who vowed to oppose the move.

"The Department of Justice has determined that the district court's judgment should be affirmed," three Justice Department lawyers wrote to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is now considering the case. "[T]he United States is not urging that any portion of the district court's judgment be reversed."


The GOP-led states that initially brought the lawsuit, Texas v. United States, had called for the entire law to be invalidated because Congress eliminated its individual insurance mandate penalty — an argument that swayed U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee.

The Trump administration had previously argued that only elements of the ACA, like its protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, should be struck down but that other parts of the law could stand.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/25/trump-obamacare-justice-department-1236116


This is so cruel! Wasn't there a blue wave in 2018 because of healthcare? For people worried about the Mueller report, don't worry, Trump is going to sabotage himself.

March 25, 2019

The Trump campaign is sending this memo to TV producers

https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1110254539163291648



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March 25, 2019

The biggest lesson from the Mueller probe? It's about character. John Podesta

Beyond the president’s well-practiced braggadocio, what have we actually learned from Robert S. Mueller III’s 674-day investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the president’s conduct and approach to national security once in office?

Well, we know that Russia’s campaign to help elect Donald Trump was a multimillion-dollar sophisticated campaign directed by the Kremlin and carried out by, among others, senior members of Russian military intelligence. Mueller indicted 26 Russian nationals and three Russian entities in that effort.We know that the Trump campaign and transition team were in contact with Russia-linked operatives more than 100 times and had at least 28 meetings.

We know that in July 2016, candidate Trump called on the Russians to continue to break U.S. law and, as uncovered by Mueller, we now know that they promptly did. Notwithstanding those facts, Mueller concluded that he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Trump campaign and the Russians engaged in a criminal conspiracy. The public must await the release of the full report to understand Mueller’s reasoning on why the many contacts and the encouragement still fell short of criminal conspiracy.

Still, the biggest immediate lesson people can take away from this investigation is about the character of the two protagonists. Mueller conducted his service to the American public with the highest level of nonpartisan professionalism, integrity, respect for the rule of law and concern for our country’s national security. And then there is Trump. The American people would do well to remember the difference if Trump’s name is on the ballot in 2020.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/25/biggest-lesson-mueller-probe-its-about-character/?utm_term=.5fc427b67377

March 25, 2019

Gary Kasparov on why proving collusion with Russia is hard.

https://twitter.com/kasparov63/status/1109957146249187328?s=21

The private-state nature of corrupt criminal dictatorships like Putin's Russia confounds law enforcement the way hybrid war confounds traditional military response.

Putin uses his oligarchs as emissaries to corrupt, cultivate, and compromise foreign business people and politicians. But they aren't officially state actors. It's a mafia using a nation for cover.

So Trump's campaign manager sharing data with a Ukrainian loyal to the Kremlin or a billionaire crony of Putin isn't "conspiring with Russia" only in the most technical, least accurate sense.

This pattern has repeated all over. Loans to Western politicians & parties with Russian backing, millions in donations from private citizens. Technically very little of it is "Russia," but it's always Putin.

Defending will require transparency, unity, and a commitment to strengthening the institutions Putin exploits so easily. It will also require fighting back on terms a mafia responds to.

As with Trump's power grabs post-election, there is a lot of work to do so that the letter of the law matches the spirit of the law. If winning an election after asking for and receiving the aid of a hostile foreign power isn't illegal, it sure as hell should be.

Campaign finance reform, full financial disclosure, eliminating potential conflicts of interest. Running for office or running a country for personal gain must be proscribed if real democracy is to survive.

Putin and his imitators are good at finding the gray areas of public/private, legal/illegal, media/propaganda, and they exploit every gap. Legal systems & news orgs in the free world are bound by strict rules & traditions of fair play.

*************************************

There was an op ed in the NYT last year by exFBI agent Clint Watts on this subject. He wrote that Russia has decades of experience using influence campaigns and they always build in plausible deniability. They would never use an intelligence agent or state actor to approach a high profile person like Trump but businessmen, lawyers etc. This way if they’re discovered , it’s not the “Russian state “ that can be accused of doing the influencing.